NPCs regenerate health

[StPatrick923]

In Skyrim, NPCs will regenerate health, slowly, outside of combat. This prevents them from suffering a "death of a thousand cuts" (take a few HP point hits there, a few more there, and after a while, dead) that we sometimes see in Fallout. I'd like to see a similar system implemented for New Vegas.

[iRonnie16]

For every NPC?

[StPatrick923]

Every NPC who's not a Companion. And assuming they're not in combat.

[iRonnie16]

Hmm, I could do it for a companion, not sure about regular NPC's unless I manually edit every single one individually. I'll have a look

[Ladez]

Editing every NPC is one sure way to make conflicts, it's also quite time consuming. There's a better way with NVSE.

 

It has some functions that allow you to loop through all nearby references and do stuff to them. You could use this to add a healing effect to them under certain conditions.

 

The functions in question are GetFirstRef and GetNextRef.

[devinpatterson]

There is a actor value HealRate, do we know that NPCs don't heal on their own (ie is there a game setting we can hook into to increase their speed)? I'm at work, maybe someone can check.

 

In Skyrim, NPCs will regenerate health, slowly, outside of combat. This prevents them from suffering a "death of a thousand cuts" (take a few HP point hits there, a few more there, and after a while, dead) that we sometimes see in Fallout. I'd like to see a similar system implemented for New Vegas.

How fast would you like to see them heal?

 

 

Editing every NPC is one sure way to make conflicts, it's also quite time consuming. There's a better way with NVSE.

 

It has some functions that allow you to loop through all nearby references and do stuff to them. You could use this to add a healing effect to them under certain conditions.

 

The functions in question are GetFirstRef and GetNextRef.

I wonder, though, if the Achilles heal in that strategy would be nearby cells. I wonder if the OP would want just actors that are near (8 adjacent cells or 25 adjacent cells, etc) the player to heal. I kind of got the impression s/he would want it for *all* actors.

 

If so there might be a better solution (all theoretical, I'v never done this in practice). Most functions will accept a formlist as a argument. You could make a formlist containing every actor. Then you can perform some comparison functions on them (AV health) and healing if they are less than 100%. It should apply to each actor in the formlist. If you make it a quest script you can also set it to fire off once a minute, hour etc.

 

The downside is all the actors under "creatures" and "NPC" categories are base forms, so to get actual refIDs you might have to go through each and every cell......which could be some grunt work.

[Ladez]

I wonder, though, if the Achilles heal in that strategy would be nearby cells. I wonder if the OP would want just actors that are near (8 adjacent cells or 25 adjacent cells, etc) the player to heal. I kind of got the impression s/he would want it for *all* actors.

 

If so there might be a better solution (all theoretical, I'v never done this in practice). Most functions will accept a formlist as a argument. You could make a formlist containing every actor. Then you can perform some comparison functions on them (AV health) and healing if they are less than 100%. It should apply to each actor in the formlist. If you make it a quest script you can also set it to fire off once a minute, hour etc.

 

The downside is all the actors under "creatures" and "NPC" categories are base forms, so to get actual refIDs you might have to go through each and every cell......which could be some grunt work.

 

 

Is it necessary to give the effect to actors that aren't nearby though? Can NPC's outside of the area currently loaded by the game actually engage in combat or lose HP in any other way?

Edited August 28, 2014 by Ladez

[devinpatterson]

Is it necessary to give the effect to actors that aren't nearby though? Can NPC's outside of the area currently loaded by the game actually engage in combat or lose HP in any other way?

Oh sure, say for instance you engage some fiends in the northern part of the world map, then enter into the strip mini world, an interior cell or fast travel south, etc. You leave behind wounded combatants that are not in adjacent cells. My impression is that the OP would like to see those actors have regenerated some health when s/he returns.

 

But that's going to be somewhat dependent on the rate and amount teh OP envisions the actors healing, and s/he may be fine with actors just healing that are in "high memory" or a certain number of adjacent cells from teh player.

 

Another possible feature to add could be some minor healing on sleep packages, so that humans that crash could get back some health.

[devinpatterson]

Can NPC's outside of the area currently loaded by the game actually engage in combat or lose HP in any other way?

Oh and in reference to the latter part of your question I think it can depend on several factors; if no low level processing is checked, scripts on the actors and what packages they have, probably others I'm not aware of....

[StPatrick923]

 

But that's going to be somewhat dependent on the rate and amount teh OP envisions the actors healing, and s/he may be fine with actors just healing that are in "high memory" or a certain number of adjacent cells from teh player.

 

It doesn't actually matter to me too much -- just so long as we don't have, for example, a travelling merchant who survives an attack from Legion assassins with only a few hit points, then dies much later in the game because he gets into a fight with a pack of coyotes and he never healed from the earlier atteck.

 

Or in general, ensuring that there's no "death of a thousand cuts" on non-combatant NPCs -- they lose 10 HP here, 15 there, but never heal from it and so ultimately die.