Actors and Sandboxing Synths

[Rorax]

Alrighty I'm delving into the world of NPCs. And it seems as clumsy as some as the creation kit can be. Nothing compares to Actors.

What I want to achieve is a Gen 2 synth who can do one job, guard as part of a settlement.

Heres the steps I have taken so far.

1. Copied EncWorkshopNPCFarmer01Template by renaming it to my NPC Synth
2. changed the race, skin and voice of the copy to gen 2 synth
3. copied WorkshopNPC and changed its template to the above template
4. reduced the factions down to SynthFaction (for dialogue?) and WorkshopNPCFaction

this was enough for my first test. So I jump in game, spawn one in and tell it to go stand at a guard post. Nada. Rather they are assigned but they won't do.. guard.. stuff. they don't start patrolling or standing at posts. defense goes up. its says its assigned but. It just stands there forever.

The worst part about it? I have no clue where to look next. I couldn't even begin to understand why my gen 2 synth won't react.

My only thought is it has to do with the fact that its Gen2Synth race instead of Human or Ghoul, but. thats not turning up anything either.

Progress! I got the synth to stand at the guard post.

The bad news is that it seems that you have to tag each piece of furniture you want the synth to be able to use with the keyword AnimSynthCanUse

when I look at the use info of the keyword it only brings up furniture that the synth can use. But not apparently what ever is at the root of why you need that distinction.

Does anyone know what the root of AnimSynthCanUse is? and why do synths need it and not ghouls?

 

 

[MasterMagnus]

My guess would be, they use that keyword to mark only furniture that the synth race has animations for.

 

You may assign the keyword to something, but if the synth doesn't have animations for that item it can't do anything (but fall back to sandboxing behavior).

 

There are likely things hard coded about synths, and/or particular to synths.

 

You should make your 'synth' a Human race, and give it a skin to look like a synth. Use a copied settler and keep everything the way it is.

 

This way you have all the animations that humans can do, and normal 'settler' behavior, it just looks like a synth (you can assign a synth voice type too).

[Rorax]

My guess would be, they use that keyword to mark only furniture that the synth race has animations for.

 

You may assign the keyword to something, but if the synth doesn't have animations for that item it can't do anything (but fall back to sandboxing behavior).

 

There are likely things hard coded about synths, and/or particular to synths.

 

You should make your 'synth' a Human race, and give it a skin to look like a synth. Use a copied settler and keep everything the way it is.

 

This way you have all the animations that humans can do, and normal 'settler' behavior, it just looks like a synth (you can assign a synth voice type too).

It seems like a strange thing to hard code though considering as you say you can literally just copy the synthgen2 race and suddenly its not beholden to it *shrug*

[speedynl]

check the race see if it has synt keyword if so remove it and it will act like any human

 

should be something like this

human

npc

synt

[Rorax]

I have done it! \o/

It required an edit to the base behavior graphs however. I don't know if that will really have any sort of conflict as I can't think of any situation where Bethesda were trying to stop Gen 1 and 2 synths from interacting with furniture?

Anyhoo its a matter of going to Gameplay > Animations... > and finding the animations that match the use info of the keyword (in this case the keyword was AnimSynthCanUse, and one of the uses was in the animation FurnitureInteractionEnter) And changing the conditions there to allow synths to use the furniture.

Result
http://i.imgur.com/BQ0oSqg.png


By the way. Removing the RaceSynth Keyword from the Race object wasn't going to work since RaceSynth was intertwined with a lot of other stuff that I would of had to create rolling duplicates of and even then that doesn't help with the scripts who's properties are intertwined with the whole thing.

Edited November 20, 2016 by Rorax

[MasterMagnus]

Interesting, thanks for the research insights there.

 

My current guess would be, they use the keyword to restrict synths from sandboxing on furniture that a synth would 'have no interest in' like sitting at a table and drinking or eating.

 

As you note, they CAN animate that way, but perhaps devs didn't want them eating or working a scrap bench etc.