NPC Schedules

[cyronarxes]

I pretty much have mastered npc scripting. the only problem which eludes me is scheduling. The 0-23 time schedule and duration limit confuseses me. I have worked for several days attempting to round it up to a organized schedule but i always fail. So i ask, does anyone know which I should set on a guard to make him do this in order. 1 AM-12AM wander, 1PM-2PM eat, 2PM-1Am sleep. If anyone could give me the translation for the schedule, my gratitude would be sincere.

[Vagrant0]

I pretty much have mastered npc scripting. the only problem which eludes me is scheduling. The 0-23 time schedule and duration limit confuseses me. I have worked for several days attempting to round it up to a organized schedule but i always fail. So i ask, does anyone know which I should set on a guard to make him do this in order. 1 AM-12AM wander, 1PM-2PM eat, 2PM-1Am sleep. If anyone could give me the translation for the schedule, my gratitude would be sincere.

The start time is when they begin doing that action, so for your needs, 1AM, 1PM, and 2PM would be the start times.

 

The duration is how long the NPC will continue that package unless it is superceded by another package, or the package gets completed. For this count as 1am to 2am = 1, 2 am to 3 am = 2, 3 am to 4 am = 3. and so on. You can have some overlap, but it in the case of overlap, it will always do the package which is higher on the list as soon as the conditions for that package are present. You can use this to create patrol routes and other neat things by creating multiple packages that overlap eachother, and having something to validate or invalidate a condition associated with that package. If you're using specific NPCs which are used as only one reference, faction ranks work well since they are constant to that specific NPC. If you are using a generic NPC that you want to make multiple copies of, which act independantly, Dispositions toward some persistant, non-reachable NPC (Not the player, just a dummy NPC with a persistant reference, that is out of the way somewhere, and won't come into actual contact with your NPCs) work better since each copy of that NPC would have a different disposition toward that persistant NPC (just make sure you take into account faction relations and personality).

 

My fightersguild mod shows how you can setup packages according to time and use factions to control them. Unfortunately I havn't managed to produce anything using the disposition method yet, but it worked well in testing.