I’ve been looking for a good template of WPs or scripts to use for civi’s that stand around, talk, wander, and interact with others. Looking for suggestions for modules to look at for this or suggested systems to use. I’ve been playing with either a onspawn script that makes the NPC randomly fire off a interaction like talk, cheer, walk. But it’s all to plain and unrealistic.
I’m also trying the Advanced Walk Waypoints (AWW) by Meaglyn. Which I think is more doable but there’s a lot to do in terms of changing every NPC WP variables just to get some interaction working. I did load up a few modules to try to get some other examples, but didn’t come across many.
So again, looking for suggestions for modules that have somewhat realistic NPCs that wander and interact with NPCs and PCs.
I’ve something like this in Bloodfeud (Area: TII - Treecity). It seems to work. Don’t ask me where I found it …
I realized that it’s too much trouble, to populate cities with countless NPC’s. How much efford to use just to animate some NPC’s which are only ambiente?? Your decission! Today I’m just using Mobile or Immobile Animation.
However you should not mix the bio standard animations or behaviour with an individual heartbeat script.
I am working on a proper “jobs” system for TOUD that gives each NPC a schedule with different mini-scripts (the “jobs”) they do. Ie, they get up, they eat, they go to work, they eat again, they sleep. This is a bit of a ways off in its completion, though I do plan to open source it when it’s complete.
This system essentially keeps a table for each NPC with the schedule, and at given times, they go to a given Location, and do the given script. It’s not very difficult to wrangle this, but its kind of a facsimilie of doing anything than actually doing anything.
The difficult part, from experience, is if you try to make two different NPCs interact together. Speaking from my own experience, unless you’re really looking to have that, I might save yourself the headache. Retaining “memory” of whom they are interacting with is a performance hog and a half (though I might be able to optimise)
There are several large systems on the vault (if I have some more time maybe I can dig up the links).
These already do the job thing and lots of ambient behaviors.
There’s NPC activities which is pretty comprehensive and handles jobs to the point of allowing harversters to sell grain and make an economy etc. I don’t recall if that part is complete though.
There’s Nereng’s update of the x2 ambient system which is really cool to look at in the demo but also makes such heavy use of NPC hb that it can cause the game to crawl.
RE AWW: Really there’s no way to do this without some measure of configuration. I wrote this system to be a happy medium between the heavyweight things above and the built in waypoints walking. It will work with all of your already painted waypoints as is. And you can do most if not all of the things that you can in the above as well. You can configure as much or as little as you want. It will do basic schedules, have NPCs do activities at waypoints etc.
There is also a commoner package for spawning transient commoners that just help make the town look busier. This has a few bugs as posted on the vault but it does work. This combined with some people doing jobs via AWW and some people just walking waypoints etc does a pretty good job of making things look alive. Most people in cities and towns are not wandering aimlessly (as in mobile ambient) but heading from one point to another. The commoner package does that well.
For smaller internal areas there is ts_putter which is good for making an NPC in say a kitchen look busy.
Yeah, doing this kind of thing is not very difficult what is, IMO, is optimizing it. Properly looking like a busy town can actually be pretty intensive, even if it’s nowheres near a full simulation.
Still, Ultima VII was doing this years before NWN on much weaker hardware, so I remain fairly convinced it’s possible to do a fairly comphrehensive “appearance” of it being busier and more real without melting processors. It’s along term goal for TOUD right now though.
I never said it wasn’t possible. Just that the wheel you are inventing may already exist in one form or another
Also, you mention TOUD twice now in this thread. I assume that’s referring to the PW you’ve mentioned in other posts but I have no idea what it stands for …
Oh don’t get me wrong, I am sure its hardly not an original idea, plenty have done it before me. But while I’ve cut corners using others scripts where I absolutely feel like I’m bashing my head into the wall (looking at you, NUI), I do prefer to come up with my own scripts for my stuff, especially since nothing (that I’ve seen) really brings it together in the way I’m trying to.
As an aside, TOUD = Time of Unparalleled Darkness, its a Ravenloft PW that myself and a few others are working on, though I’m the chief script monkey
Yes, ness is great. It’s more of a spawning system, though you can do a lot with it. I use it to spawn many of the NPCs that use the other systems (aww mostly).
