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A19 NPCs DMT Mod


xyth

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I had a chance to have a good play session tonight,every things running really well,but i had one issue i just wanted to report..

 

Im not sure if its intentional,but i doubt it was supposed to be...NPC's are able to open doors the player makes and that the player locks.

Fairly sure it wasnt like that in previous iterations of the mod.

 

Tested in SP

 

Do you want your hired NPCs to smash the doors in your own base to get to the other side? I bet you don't.

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Do you want your hired NPCs to smash the doors in your own base to get to the other side? I bet you don't.

 

Well,you gota consider that there are too many varieties of "bases" people could have,the thought wouldnt apply across the board.But thats besides the point,since NPCs no longer actually smash blocks to get to their target any more.Correct me if i'm wrong about that Xyth.

 

Some of the NPCs are smashing(digging actually),when they are trying to follow player,or using the wander Behaviour,when getting "stuck" in the enviorment,i'l try grab a screenshot or two next time to show what i mean.

Edited by Redarmy45 (see edit history)
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Well,you gota consider that there are too many varieties of "bases" people could have,the thought wouldnt apply across the board.But thats besides the point,since NPCs no longer actually smash blocks to get to their target any more.Correct me if i'm wrong about that Xyth.

 

The way I see this is that this mod is still a work in progress. The way it works today may not necessarily be the way it will work tomorrow. I believe that in the end there should / will be a system which will tell the NPC which doors to open and which doors to smash open. Obviously you don't want your own NPCs to smash your own doors no matter where did you put them. Your hired NPCs should be able to open them to get to ther other side. Also NPCs of your real human allies shouldn't want to destroy anything owned by you, but that's probably something of such complexity we won't see this fully implemented any time soon, but I do believe and hope that we will see some kind of logic like this in the end.

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The way I see this is that this mod is still a work in progress. The way it works today may not necessarily be the way it will work tomorrow. I believe that in the end there should / will be a system which will tell the NPC which doors to open and which doors to smash open. Obviously you don't want your own NPCs to smash your own doors no matter where did you put them. Your hired NPCs should be able to open them to get to ther other side. Also NPCs of your real human allies shouldn't want to destroy anything owned by you, but that's probably something of such complexity we won't see this fully implemented any time soon, but I do believe and hope that we will see some kind of logic like this in the end.

 

Yeah its a WIP,thats why im giving feedback as i go. Im sure much will change,tweak and improve.

 

@xyth i can't upload a video of the digging issue,however i was watching NEEBs gaming playing 7 days to die and in this scene,the zombie digging animation is the same digging animation that the NPCs are doing when they get stuck,incase its relevant you can take a look what i mean...

 

 

Check out the video at 14:02 . there is a zombie,bottom right hand side of the picture doing the animation,its what the NPCs are doing when they cannot jump to get to a position.

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Delete the DLL thats causing the error from the SphereIICore Harmony folder and rebuild. That fixes it.

 

Thanks, Sphereii helped me in his thread, I know you don't like when NPCs get blamed for Core issues... :p So I didn't really want to ask for help here, I just thought I should warn anyone who might want to update that there is this issue.

 

So NPCs dig. Cool. I guess I need to change the animation to pulling out a shovel and digging instead

 

Oh, now you make it sound like this is an intentional feature, but at first you were surprised that NPCs dig lol. Well, I'm pretty sure that no one would mind if they were able to dig, but they should have a reason for that in the first place, they shouldn't do this due to some kind of bug, so it might be a good idea to check out what's causing this behavior and see what can be done about it in terms of fixing it so that they would only do it when it's appropriate. ?

Edited by mr.devolver (see edit history)
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It wasn't intentional, its an artifact of using the base zombiecontroller for humanoid like NPCs and bandits. Zombies dig if jumping, breaking a block or something else is blocking their path to their target. So so do NPCs unless we work to change that. Its not specifically a bug either; its working as TFP designed it and we reuse that code. We could stop it by a code edit or use it by replacing the animation with something humanlike. Perhaps Sphereii will consider this worth fixing, rather than adding something new to the NPCs. When we get farming NPCs working, I will likely add in a digging and planting animation but it wont be triggered by the approach and attack code so I wont be changing it now.

 

Oh, before I forget: Please assume anything I type here is either information about the mod or an attempt at humor. "So NPCs dig. Cool" was humor. Issues being the cores fault? Humor. (Spherell and I crack on each other all day long about mistakes) Perhaps I need to start adding little smileys after each line to telegraph that. But it would be easier if all concerned just assumed that if anything I type is other than simple information is an attempt at levity.

 

Oh, and the above "Oh, before I forget" was information, not a joke :smile-new:

Edited by xyth (see edit history)
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It wasn't intentional, its an artifact of using the base zombiecontroller for humanoid like NPCs and bandits. Zombies dig if jumping, breaking a block or something else is blocking their path to their target. So so do NPCs unless we work to change that. Its not specifically a bug either; its working as TFP designed it and we reuse that code. We could stop it by a code edit or use it by replacing the animation with something humanlike. Perhaps Sphereii will consider this worth fixing, rather than adding something new to the NPCs. When we get farming NPCs working, I will likely add in a digging and planting animation but it wont be triggered by the approach and attack code so I wont be changing it now.

 

Oh, before I forget: Please assume anything I type here is either information about the mod or an attempt at humor. "So NPCs dig. Cool" was humor. Issues being the cores fault? Humor. (Spherell and I crack on each other all day long about mistakes) Perhaps I need to start adding little smileys after each line to telegraph that. But it would be easier if all concerned just assumed that if anything I type is other than simple information is an attempt at levity.

 

Oh, and the above "Oh, before I forget" was information, not a joke :smile-new:

 

Xyth you know what would crack me up?Using the cast of Neebs gameing(Simon,Neebs,appsro etc) as voices for your NPCS.Not sure if you watch their content or not on 7days though its hilarious.

 

If i give feedback about the mod should i post on Sphereii's page or here?To be honest if i ever observe issues i wana report its hard to know which one of you guys department it is all the time lol.

 

So about the digging,in previous iterations of the mod,didnt the AI not jump at all? If i recall correctly that was indeed the case.Iv noticed lately with their decision to jump(resulting in digging)they are extremely difficult to pathfind around POI's.For instance,i tested lootng 3 POI's tonight,all small,simple main floor/top floor/basement POI's such as small log cabins..what i noticed all the time....

 

 

POI ISSUES

 

1)Ranged weapon NPCs were useless,and alot of the time trying to run to an enemy but being pulled backwards away from the POI,then teleporting to player when too far, as normal.

2)They always got stuck near stair cases,digging,and could not go upstairs/downstairs without serious pathing issues.

3)Alot of the time refuse to enter the POI and just run around when there was an open door and walkable surface.(this includes melee NPCs)

4)NPCs from these behaviours were hardly ever able to follow me room to room,floor to floor.

 

To sum up...the NPCs behaviours regarding POIs usually see's them running laps around the POI(Outside it) or getting stuck on geometry(inside it)

 

TRADER ISSUES

 

Sphereii posted he fixed an issue for the voice,today i went to trader Jen and as i walked around outside with 2 NPCs i heard a trader Joel dialogue(honestly dont know which NPC it came from)

 

1)NPCs dont enter traders(normal i guess?)

2)NPC's died when i exited traders - i think this may have something to do with game mechanics teleporting NPCs away,as it does with player after 10pm,but its teleporting them into the sky and they teleport and fall to their death beside me.(theory)

3)At the same time as number 2 happened,three wolves spawned,ran by me(didnt attack) and off into the distance.I mention this cuz i dont think the game is meant to spawn 3 wolves together,perhaps its some relation to the deaths of NPCs.

 

VOICE ISSUES

1) " i'm gona kill you" etc(aggro voices) of NPC continued after there was no longer a threat. Happened after i ran from a fight . NPC was no longer tracking an enemy but still voiced his displeasures lol. A game reload fixed it.

 

COMMANDS

1)NPC EVE club bat- Sometimes when being told to stay here,she runs full speed off into the distance until i catch here and tell here to follow.

(Happened 3 times while in my base,never saw it with other NPCs)

 

From my observations AI pathing around POI's in recent versions of the mod was spot on(probably when they were smashing blocks and not looking for obstacles to jump/dig over)

 

SP on 18.4 . not using your other mods in testing just the base NPC ones

Edited by Redarmy45 (see edit history)
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I probably should not have joked about an issue being Sphereiis fault as its caused confusion about where to post. If it involves Characters or NPCs (appearance or behavior) the feedback belongs here. His core modlet has lots of non-character functionality, like block behaviors, buffs, player effects etc, and those should go in his modlet thread. But everything you commented on is correctly placed here.

 

As we have moved to add new functionality like Maslow (basic needs), controlled pathing, ranged maintaining distance, and factions we are breaking previously working functions. For example, the new pathing caused lots of jumping. The jumping fix cause other navigation errors, and new digging etc. The code involved is very interconnected and complex, which is likely why TFP isn't doing Bandits anytime soon. It would need a lot of housekeeping to make it scalable like we are discovering.

 

So we will likely need to decide to keep trying to fix things as we move forward, or revert many of the changes back to more simpler NPC behaviors.

 

Thanks for the great feedback.

 

Oh, if you start seeing red "cast errors" in the log in the most recent build , we are aware of this issue.

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Yeah i can understand,the more added,the more sometimes gets broken.Hard to find a balance the more complex something becomes.Its still amazing to use this mod i actually bought the game based off of hearing about an NPC mod for 7days to die.Hopefully Alpha 19 wont make too many changes that makes things more difficult for what you guys are tweaking and adding.

 

@Darkstardragon Thanks for that tip i wasn't aware.

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It wasn't intentional, its an artifact of using the base zombiecontroller for humanoid like NPCs and bandits. Zombies dig if jumping, breaking a block or something else is blocking their path to their target. So so do NPCs unless we work to change that. Its not specifically a bug either; its working as TFP designed it and we reuse that code. We could stop it by a code edit or use it by replacing the animation with something humanlike. Perhaps Sphereii will consider this worth fixing, rather than adding something new to the NPCs. When we get farming NPCs working, I will likely add in a digging and planting animation but it wont be triggered by the approach and attack code so I wont be changing it now.

 

Oh, before I forget: Please assume anything I type here is either information about the mod or an attempt at humor. "So NPCs dig. Cool" was humor. Issues being the cores fault? Humor. (Spherell and I crack on each other all day long about mistakes) Perhaps I need to start adding little smileys after each line to telegraph that. But it would be easier if all concerned just assumed that if anything I type is other than simple information is an attempt at levity.

 

Oh, and the above "Oh, before I forget" was information, not a joke :smile-new:

 

I knew "So NPCs dig. Cool" was a joke, I was just playing along. Perhaps that was a bad idea lol

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Pushed a fix for the casting error, and added NPCMechs for placeholder/testing. The NPCMechs are enemys by default until you get good faction with them so they will KOS you on sight right now. I didnt push the faction code yet, just needs some dialog or quests to change faction and im not done with that yet. So for now they are just like CPMechs.

Edited by xyth (see edit history)
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Pushed a fix for the casting error, and added NPCMechs for placeholder/testing. The NPCMechs are enemys by default until you get good faction with them so they will KOS you on sight right now. I didnt push the faction code yet, just needs some dialog or quests to change faction and im not done with that yet. So for now they are just like CPMechs.

 

Thanks for fixing the casting error, I had issues with that earlier.

 

About the mechs. So... we already know they have lightsabers. Do you also plan to give them lightshovels for digging? :p

 

It would be cool if the player was able to obtain lightsaber or lightshovel from them as a quest reward, as a part of getting on their good side. ?

Edited by mr.devolver (see edit history)
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Added faction support for NPCs. Zombies, humanoids and mechs all will target and attack (or not) based on factions. Animals were not changed, and use class based targeting like vanilla.

 

There is a new file 2-NPCFactions that assigns some NPCs to faction groups and edits zombies to respect "whispers faction when players align with that". This file loads after the NPC modlets as it changes the changes made in those 1- modlets. Note the Whispers are not in yet, but will be soon. For now only NPC Ghost is a Whisperer.

 

Characters that begin with the following prefixes are assigned to factions (no balance attempted yet) by this new mod:

 

NPCRaiders are bandit faction

NPCGhost is whisperers faction

NPCGupSoldiers are redteam

NPCDelta are blueteam

NPCRangers) are blueteam

NPCNational are greenteam

NPCArmy are greenteam

 

There are schematics you can read to swap your unique faction for one of the factions added. Be very careful using those for anything other than testing as once you say join the Mech faction, then read books to raise your relationship with Bandits, then all mechs will like bandits. It is strongly suggested that for gameplay you only use the schematics that add or subtract relationship points, allowing you to keep your unique faction but adjust your alignment with all others.

 

it is possible to replace these schematics with quest rewards, dialog options, or buffs. You can even now create faction based stories and quests. Those are planned for the future but this base configuration is good enough for testing. Let us know your feedback.

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Cool. I see this will require us to thoroughly test this to see where this goes in terms of real gameplay. ?

By the way, I have two technical questions.

 

1. I see you're changing the behavior of zombies in factions mod. Will this include any extra zombies added to the game (not necessarily through creature zombie pack), such as uma zombies, Snufkin's zombies and other zombie additions from various different authors?

 

2. I have my own little mod that changes some values of Core, NPCs and humans from creature pack, so that I don't have to change these settings every time I download new versions of these mods. For convenience I placed it in prefix number 2 so that it's always on the tail of the mods it changes. However after installing Factions add-on which also has prefix 2, my mod is no longer the last one as Factions took its place there. Should I move my mod on the tail again for better compatibility, or it's fine as it is?

Edited by mr.devolver (see edit history)
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The zombie edit "should not" change zombie behavior unless those other mods edit the zombietemplate in a similar fashion.

 

To be safe you could move yours to 3 but the faction pack really only sets up the factions so unlikely your messing with that but if say you wanted to add factions id move your to 3

 

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The zombie edit "should not" change zombie behavior unless those other mods edit the zombietemplate in a similar fashion.

 

To be safe you could move yours to 3 but the faction pack really only sets up the factions so unlikely your messing with that but if say you wanted to add factions id move your to 3

 

Well, what I was trying to find out is if your faction mod is / should be compatible with zombies added by various mods, so hopefully it is granted the other mods don't mess with zombie templates as you say? Well, honestly I don't know what exactly those other mods do in order to provide those extra zombies, unfortunately my current knowledge does not allow me to analyse those mods to such extent, so I guess I will just have to try and see if everything runs fine or not...

 

As for my little mod, I kept it in prefix number 2, but I moved it a bit lower in the load order by renaming the mod to some more user friendly name instead of a stupid long abbreviation that even I couldn't always recall what does it actually mean lol

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Thanks for the updates Xyth,

 

I had two questions.

1) I dont use creature pack mechs,only using the human NPCs,so with the new update there are two additional folders.. "1-NPC pack mechs" and "2-NPC pack factions". Do i need the 1-NPC pack mechs if i dont use your modlet which adds mechs to the game? Reading the description i cant tell if this is a total new mech NPC type standalone from the CP mechs or not.

and

 

2) When updating the mod,do currently hired NPCs in my current save game inherit the changes or should i typically dismiss and rehire them/find new ones,for the updates to apply and avoid issues?

 

Also found an issue with "NPC Pest" (all weapon versions) this NPCs when approached T-poses into the ground.

Edited by Redarmy45 (see edit history)
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Thanks for the updates Xyth,

 

I had two questions.

1) I dont use creature pack mechs,only using the human NPCs,so with the new update there are two additional folders.. "1-NPC pack mechs" and "2-NPC pack factions". Do i need the 1-NPC pack mechs if i dont use your modlet which adds mechs to the game? Reading the description i cant tell if this is a total new mech NPC type standalone from the CP mechs or not.

and

 

2) When updating the mod,do currently hired NPCs in my current save game inherit the changes or should i typically dismiss and rehire them/find new ones,for the updates to apply and avoid issues?

 

Also found an issue with "NPC Pest" (all weapon versions) this NPCs when approached T-poses into the ground.

 

Hey Redarmy45, I know I am not Xyth (although I wish I had his modding knowledge, because I have tons of cool ideas for mods ?), but I can actually give you the answers from my own experience and here is why:

 

1) I spent several last hours playing with the latest update WITHOUT realizing there is such thing as NPC Mechs mod, I usually grab all of the new versions of these mods when they come out and for some reason I didn't realize that this time this is a separate mod, so NPC Factions was actually the only extra mod that I downloaded and it worked as before, just without the extra NPC Mechs which come separately. I still have the original creature pack mechs installed and now that you mentioned this new NPC Mechs mod, I checked it out on Github and I found out that it does not come with any resource files, just config files, which means it will most likely rely on creature pack mechs mod just like in case of standard human NPCs.

 

So my conclusion here is that if you don't want any mechs in your game, it's fine, but you should still download NPC Factions, as that is for NPCs in general. However, if you ever decide to play with mechs, you should either use creature pack mechs alone or together with NPC Mechs (but NPC Mechs can't be used alone as they need creature pack mechs to pull resource files from).

 

2) Usually all the changes done to NPCs take effect immediately and next time you load your last save you should be able to see these changes.

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What Mr. Devolver said is likely accurate, and hes done 100 times more testing on this than I have. The NPCMechs modlet dletes all the CPMechs xml and replaces it with its own, only using the Mechs models. I also do this in the NPCHumans, deleting out many CPHuman duplicates.

 

I will test the NPCPest, not sure why hes being such a pest. :grumpy:

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