How to go about scripting prisoners?

[DuskWulf]

I've been slowly chipping away at a non-lethal mod that has a bunch of non-lethal ammo types and melee weapons. The problem is the issues caused by unconscious NPCs waking up. If I set the time too long, it can cause issues with the game (and the player being potentially knocked out forever), but if it I set it too short... well, they're just a threat again.

 

So I was thinking of doing some kind of activation menu, similar to loot the unconscious. My first thought would be to have them use some AI package that would assign them as prisoners. But apparently they have to go to a marker for that, using a find package. That'd be all kinds of messy to handle dynamically, and way above my head, in truth. I mean, you'd have to create the marker through script, drop it at their feet, then tell them to find it. Can you even do all that?

 

So, moving on. I considered doing a deletion or kill upon them, but that seems kind of cheap. And slave collars have plenty of problems of their own (potential bad karma, NPCs following you around). End result: I'm not actually sure whether I can do this, which means that it may just be a lost cause.

 

I'm just a bit irritated at myself for having come all this way and then being defeated. I've got the ammo in loot lists, and it's craftable too, along with conversions in place for melee weapons. And some nifty formulas for rolling the player's skills into the equation of how much fatigue damage is done. But where I go from here... I have no idea.

 

Like I said, I'm just not sure whether New Vegas is actually designed to cater to this. But if it were? Well, it would allow one to do a non-lethal playthrough. I'd seen others asking for that, I wanted it myself, so...

 

Well, that's that. I'd appreciate any ideas, but I understand if this simply isn't feasible.

[ThatOtherUser]

Honestly, it should be possible. I can't really come up with a clean or easy way of doing it, but you could possibly add in prisoner variants of the typical combat NPCs. You could also look into how the marker way does its work. What actually instigates the change in AI package? There should be some kind of command there.

 

Not much of an expert myself, sorry, but you could study the marker variant and see what it actually does to the NPC. See if you could derive a dynamic method from that. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Sorry, mate.

 

 

Still, this is definitely a problem people could use a method for getting around, since like you said, it creates new methods of playing. I'd love to engineer this kind of thing.