Give settlers a brain

[romalight]

Having been involved with the game for years, I honestly am tired of the behavior of settlers, as they can't manage simple situations, like finding a way up a ladder, being stuck in a wall because they can't find the door, not stepping aside to get through and you have to start running to make room for you. The worst thing is to use the workshop, trying to build things, and besides blocking your way through, showing a surprising indifference, most of the time one has the idea that they refuse to use everything you make to make their life more comfortable.

Yes there are mods for combat AI and some other choices but nothing for Settlers AI. Perhaps bad logic and lack of brain activity is hidden in the main code of the game, where none Modder can discover and correct.

I have said several times that this game lacks verisimilitude and if Settlers are real people, they would never take orders to do anything, such as keep watch, cultivate the soil, or take up a post.

 

So please, give settlers a brain. is this too much ?

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Well, the thing about settlements and settlers "moving around" is navmeshing.

Navmeshing is basically what tells NPCs where they can walk.

Imagine it like an invisible carpet on the floor that tells NPCs "this is a surface that you can walk on".

 

Since settllements are player built, there is no proper navmeshing for settlements.

(Yes, some settlement objects have some navmesh data attached to them but it doesn't always work properly)

 

Pre-built places like diamond city have properly made navmeshing, that's why NPCs are less likely to "get stuck" there when moving around.

 

 

Things like "not blocking the door" would require scripts that always run in the background to check if the settler is standing in a doorway, and if the player gets close, the settler would move a few meters away.

And they would have to somehow know that "this is a doorway".

So there would have to be an invisible marker that lets the script "recognize" the space as a doorway.

A mod like that would need patches for every mod that adds new settlement objects (doors, walls with doorways).

Technically possible, but it would decrease performance even more (because a script that keeps running in the background all the time takes up "processing power")

 

 

So it is always a tradeoff between "optimization" and "editing the world while playing".

You can't have both.

If your game world is static, you can have great optimization for NPC movement and performance.

If your game world can be changed (objects can be built, moved, scrapped) then optimizing isn't really possible because everything can be changed.

 

 

But I know nothing about how this game actually handles "AI" (or the lack there of) and "NPC behaviour".

[romalight]

Thanks for your time and the answer.