mr.devolver

Sphereii, I have something for you regarding the problem with random health loss... Watch his health bar: [video=youtube_share;NAyqMCswTC4] Watch his health bar + random console NRE I unintentionally caught on video while recording his health! [video=youtube_share;70bdk54_KNU] LOG: https://pastebin.com/yVXsP04W

But was it tested if they can only have zombie animations? I thought UMA NPCs could have the same animations like player characters.

I had issues with localizations too, so I created a script that should help. Try it, maybe it will help you. The thing is that Mod Launcher (or perhaps SDX itself) keeps rewriting the localization files when it runs, so no matter what you add there, it will be reverted, BUT not when you run the game without Mod Launcher, then you can use your modded localizations just fine.

Sounds promising. Sorry, I wasn't able to test much lately. Did you release that update or it's still in testing stage? I opened Mod Launcher and I can't see any update button. I thought those UMA characters could use the same animations like NPCs? I guess I was wrong. But there are also non-zombie UMA characters in the pack. Maybe those could be still used. And who knows, if they ever add the official bandits, maybe they will make it easier for this mod?

Looks good, the more survivors, the better. The game looks much better with all kinds of different people roaming through the game world, trying to survive. Yesterday I just started new game, singleplayer, and I heard shooting, saw BanditBoss in distance, shooting at zombies around me. I knew that if I stayed there for too long, he would shoot them all and then he would go after me, so I had get out of there asap. I had a pistol and couple of bullets, so when I got far enough, I tried to shoot BanditBoss while he was fighting. In the meantime, a trader and NPCBaker showed up and they both attacked him. NPCBaker actually also attacked that trader (probably because the trader accidentally shot him while he tried to shoot BanditBoss), but before that happened, they actually caused him a major damage, so I could finish him easily, but I ran out of ammo so I had to finish him with a torch lol. Pretty messed up, but yeah, that's one of the interesting situations you could never experience in vanilla.

Speaking of cows, I've never seen a single animal I could tame with Animal husbandry installed. If it works, they are probably very rare to spawn.

Testing before going to bed, thank you for the update! Teleport seems to work pretty well and believe it or not, it actually starts to feel like Skyrim or Fallout companions and I do mean that in very positive way! I haven't noticed anything wrong about the teleport, it feels natural. I mean, you can give him freedom to go wherever he wants, because he will eventually get to you once you get far away and that's pretty cool. You know, he wandered off into a hill and I kept moving the opposite way on the road. Soon I met a snow zombie, but I had no weapons, just a torch and of course that zombie started to move towards me wanting to attack me and then... out of sudden Mickey D, my old friend, the baker guy showed up from behind me and went straight ahead to that zombie and attacked him even before he reached me, so overall now they actually seem to care about their leader lol, that's more like it! Of course, there are still some small funny issues here and there, but they are surely nothing you couldn't handle. This is probably unrelated to the update, but I just noticed NPCBaker was trying to break the door into a POI I wanted him to help me loot and when I came close behind him, I noticed the door was unlocked lol it was funny. But I do believe they used to be able to open unlocked doors?

But how would you experiment if you don't know how to tell the game "do this", "do that". I mean, C# seems close enough to what I used to work with, but even if I was good at C#, I still have zero knowledge of the internal functionality of the game, so even if I knew the language, there are still some magic words that I have no idea about and the game just wouldn't understand me.

Yes, that sounds very nice, but we both know that reality is harder than that. I mean, how many of those things I mentioned earlier could be done with just xml modding alone? I bet that most of what I described would have to be done by using scripts and while there's very limited information about xml modding, there is even less for scripts and there's a quite obvious reason behind that, because those who created SDX, they worked on it in their free time and we all appreciate that, but no one can really expect them to make some kind of exhaustive documentation presenting and describing each and every little function that is available for modders to do this or that and learn how things work behind the scenes and you know well that one thing is to learn how to code, another is to understand how to apply that knowledge here in order to code some scripts for a mod, because even when you learn how to code in C#, you're still missing the knowledge on how to communicate with the game through scripts to make the game do exactly what you want it to do. Without documentation, you're missing exactly that one piece of knowledge you really need to make this or that happen in this game and therefore it becomes out of reach for regular people.

Well, I would like to test, but I'm not really good at modding. Perhaps a more experienced person could take a look at what can be done in that part. The more NPCs, the better. I have lots of ideas for cool mods and quests, but unfortunately I have no idea how I could create them. I was thinking about Xyth's bandits and traders using UMA set of characters and various quests which could be random encounters that would perfectly fit to different overhauls because they are generic. For example, you find random airdrop supply crates that contain better loot, but they are guarded by bandits who attack you as soon as you come close. You may encounter injured NPCs running away from zombies or bandits where you can decide who you want to help - will you help the NPC by killing bandits / zombies, will you help the bandits by killing the NPC? Or will you just ignore the event and leave them to their fate or perhaps kill them all? Each decision could have different consequences. Helping NPCs may unlock better stuff in trader's inventory, grant better prices or bonus of extra first aid kits you would receive for free in form of a supply crate, helping bandits may unlock special supply crates with powerful drugs and potions, you could receive casino tokens as reward for helping them and maybe bandits could offer help during the horde nights, because they have better gear, can take more damage and given their courage boosted by drugs, they just like some extra action anyway and don't care that much who they help and you wouldn't feel bad for losing them at horde nights either.

Oh, so we can still "take them" if we destroy them? Ok, I didn't try that. It's not as intuitive as it would have been if we could just pick them up with "E" key, but hey I appreciate that you did what you could to get as close as possible, thanks!

Ok, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions too quickly here, so what's the plan with the NPCs that don't have guard or stay options? Because right now, once hired, the only way to get rid of them is to let them die and I imagine that's not really the goal lol Also, I would love to know something. I installed UMA zombies mod (Khelldon - Bad Company UMA Zombies) which I believe creates a set of zombies using the game character system and that's very cool, but naturally as a fan of your NPC mod, it made me wonder - would it be possible to throw in some of these UMA characters to the sets of wandering traders / bandits and NPCs?

I understand that guard command may not be appropriate for all types of NPCs, but stay? No stay means they will always follow you. You can't prevent them from being eaten by cannibal Joel, you can't leave them at the base while you drive to pick up some loot and let's be honest, this is annoying because they can't keep up with a vehicle and they get lost fighting zombies very often, so they won't really follow you that far and you always have to go back and try to find them if you don't want to lose them. Right now, it's not convenient to take them on missions that are far away. I would love to, but they can't get into a vehicle with us and they can't keep up with the vehicle either. That means you are very likely to lose some NPCs and the tokens you invested into them, one way or another, simply because you can't babysit them all the time. Couple of suggestions: 1. Right now, NPCs have no collision with vehicles. What if they just kept teleporting to their leader when he drives and would strictly follow him without trying to attack enemies until the leader gets out of vehicle? That way at least they wouldn't get lost. 2. NPCs always seem to put their own priorities higher than the priorities of the leader. This is perfectly visible when you run through the city thinking that your NPC is right behind you, but then you stop at the end of the city and look behind and your NPC is gone. When you check your map, he's far away, trying to break into one of the houses in the city, because there's a zombie he wants to kill and he takes no prisoners and cuts everything and everyone with his sickle. Not that it would be a bad thing, especially in crowded situations, but I think that he shouldn't run that far away from his leader just to test his awesome sickle on a poor zombie behind barricades. I think that if they attacked only enemies that get close, that would be another way to prevent them from getting lost. Basically when they are following their leader, they would only attack enemies that get close and when they guard or stay, they would be allowed to run as far as needed to kill the enemies, so that they could cover bigger area. Right now it's kinda funny, because while they often run far away to kill a zombie somewhere in the barricaded house, they aren't smart enough to react early when a zombie slowly creeps upon them directly from behind and hits them. I mean, they should be able to hear the creepy sounds of a zombie behind them and smell him, even before he gets close, so they could react early enough, turn around and bam.

Is this intended?

Guppy, I installed this mod. The description in Mod Launcher says "What? You can't pick up those flashlights and lanterns? Why the hell not!?? Oh wait, now you can." but you can't really do that, can you? I thought I ran into some conflict between different mods I have installed, because I was unable to actually pick the lights. Turns out you can craft them, but still not pick them up. Do you think you could make them pickable one day? I would love that!

I remember modders had to fix companions in Skyrim for the same reason. One mod added a dialogue option to tell the companions to move. Some other mod solved this in such way that NPC stepped away from you automatically when you pushed against him for a while.

But then I respawn.

Um, sure Mickey didn't die, but I did! This is mutiny! You should tell them to be nicer to their leaders! No friendly fire, no killing their leader, because trader Joel is still pretty hungry!

Houston, we have a problem! [video=youtube_share;8N_Hon2LCSs] Now we know for sure that you could play 7 days to die with NPC, but you can't play hide and seek with them! How about a dialogue option: "Move back a little bit, or I'll take you to cannib.. trader Joel"

Um, I'm not sure. Perhaps you could take a look at the version numbers on the screenshot and see which ones need to be updated? I think only 2 mods were updated, but not sure which ones. EDIT: I manually updated all the mods you mentioned and tried again. It looks like it works now. Weird, because the version numbers didn't even change lol Ok, so the basic functionality of working with the NPCs seems to be working correctly in this version. Only thing I'm not quite sure about is the command "Wander around here". When I click this command, he stays on his place and doesn't move at all. Am I doing something wrong?

Inventory seems to work normally, but they still ignore commands. Also, I explored very large area of Navezgane on foot as well as motorcycle and I haven't seen a single NPC in the world. When I wanted to test it, I had to spawn one manually. Did something happen to automatic spawning?

Does this mean that there will be different types of NPCs, each one for different purpose? I think it would be nice if modders could have NPCs that are involved in certain hard-coded quests in which case they might want the NPCs to act strictly according to the quest, without a chance for players to control them. However, there should also be NPCs that you can freely control through various commands in dialogue, basically what we have now, for more flexibility for both mod creators and players. For clarification: It's really easy to reproduce the bug with vehicles: Spawn 4x4 truck and spawn NPCAmmo next to it. Get in the vehicle and get out, you don't even need to drive just get in and out and you don't really need to hire the NPC before doing this. I figured this out later, but didn't clarify in the edit part of the post, sorry. As for the NPCs disappearing in trader's base, it's even easier to reproduce. Just go to the trader area, stand close to trader and spawn NPCAmmo in front of the trader. As soon as I did that, NPC showed up for like half a second and instantly disappeared. The problem I talked about there was with Patch_Entity enabled though. Either way, if you want to investigate the health issue, it really helps to have that Unlock Health Bar mod enabled so that you can watch their health in real time. I wasn't lucky to reproduce it yet. You're welcome. Do you plan to have that "Help me loot this place" option back? It was disabled before release, I was really looking forward to that option when I watched the teaser. Also, it would be awesome if we could use shift + left click to transfer stuff into the inventory of our NPCs.

Here's the reference video I promised: [video=youtube_share;OLg2tehC_JA]

Last update - my observations so far (uploading reference video, takes forever (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻): Shown in the video: - Sometimes your hired NPCs get lost fighting zombies. - NPCs now follow all the time, no way to give them any different command. The only difference seems to be their movement animation: Follow me - walk animation (video 1:35) Stay here - run animation (video 1:53) Guard here - run animation (video 2:25) Wander around here - run animation (video 2:37) Follow me for your patrol route - walk animation (video 2:51) Patrol your route - run animation (video 3:18) - NPCs are now traders - they don't have their own empty inventory like before, but instead they are selling stuff. (video 3:56) - When you ask your NPC about jobs, you get console spam of "NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object" (video 4:27). I believe this was fixed in one of the older versions. - Dialogue option "Nevermind" is gone - There is a rare glitch with vehicles - when you drive in a vehicle and then get out, sometimes your hands seem misplaced and blurry when you move (video 7:55). I added this here because so far I was unable to reproduce this glitch before hiring an NPC. The only way to fix this is to close the game and load it again. EDIT: Actually it's pretty easy to reproduce: spawn both 4x4 and NPCAmmo near you. Get in vehicle and get out. - NPCs seem to like getting hurt by the traps (video 10:50) - Bringing NPCs to trader base may cause your NPC to disappear and since they ignore all the commands like "stay here", "guard here", etc. this is likely to happen often (video 12:12). EDIT: I just checked through console command "le", NPCAmmo was really gone. I suspect trader Joel is a cannibal, how can we protect our NPCs from him? Not shown in the video: - If you hire two NPCs, they can fight each other to death in case that one hits the other by accident - Not in the video, but when you place hired NPCAmmo, next to a bunch of zombies and a hired NPCFarmer between them, NPCAmmo is likely to shoot NPCFarmer when actually trying to shoot the zombies behind him. Once that happens, NPCFarmer and NPCAmmo don't like each other anymore... - In one case NPC was losing health for no apparent reason and he wasn't healing like he should. Unfortunately, I was unable to reproduce this yet.

Thank you again, this time the update showed up correctly and I will try it now.