[Req][Idea] Ideal npc immersion and PC/Npc survival

[Midicow]

-This suggestion is dedicated to deducing how best to improve the immersiveness of npcs in the Fo3 game and handle NPC and PC survival.

And as such.. my intention really isn't to look at making fallout3 more fpsish or whatnot but rather to make it more surrealistic and truer to the fallout name.

 

-If you have thoughts.. disagree or would like to correct me, feel free to add to this thread!

 

-First note, things I say in this thread will be heavily borrowed from the underground game URW "UnReal world" because its probably the best survival roguelike I've ever played.

 

-Also a few references (if I missed any say so):

These mods have something to do with the suggestions of pc/npc survival and npc immersion, and contain some pretty good stuff at that.

 

A fallout 3 version of the Oblivion "see you sleep" mod

Amputation (and lower down on the thread actual living (but bugged) amputations)

Backpack Mod

BOS Busywork

Collectible Junk

Dangerous Rivers and Lakes

Defecation mod

Living wasteland Triad

My NPC ai script suggestion and cooking (which is probably included in this thread's idea) part 2

Npcs react to your appearance

Realistic Behavior when on fire

Portable campsite kit

Survival Mod

Sumyungai's Hands and shouting suggestion initial suggestion | my reply | his reply

 

-My thoughts on survival:

Something I'd like to say initially is to reference a quote in the amputate! thread:

 

One idea I've had is to make a glove that basically consists of a missing finger "plug". That way, I could simply force the glove to be equipped after the finger has been taken. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether or not equipment can be flagged as "unplayable" in Fallout 3, so this method would probably have drawbacks of its own, but it's definitely preferable to destroying the arm entirely.

 

I assume the same method could be used for removing the ear. Although it would cause any glasses/gloves etc. to be removed, I suppose you'd remove them anyway before you took their ear/finger, so it makes sense.

 

Cipscis

 

Something that could be done there.. for npcs/the PC could be to figure out how to expand the # of slots available to equip things on characters, then how to "invisibly" equip an item on the pc/npc that wouldn't be included in leveled lists or corpse/player inventory.. only off a script.. Something like that could be used, plus a particle emitter and maybe a model spawner for gore and loose arms.

 

If these items replaced the parts of the model with say, a missing finger or an ear.. this would effectively create the illusion that they were missing.

 

The next part would be figuring out how to limit movement/actions or alter it based on which "blown off limbs" were equipped.. etc..

Then if you were to be able to replace these limbs with cybernetic or peg legs or such.. you'd have to have a way of accounting for that in armors and clothes and the such.

 

Then compiling it in a fashion that isn't laggy/cpu intensive/memory hoggish..

 

But seriously it can be done!

 

Anyways Onward~

 

-Another thought is to the general scarcity of food and drink in cities and towns..

 

You have radiated water yes.. but with the water purifier that Megaton has you'd be expecting them to be selling water to other towns/cities.

 

When you kill a deathclaw or a mole rat or a goat or whatever it seems to magically drop one piece of meat.. when logically they'd need to be skinned and have the carcass cut for meat..

 

Could estimate how much npcs weight, then add the ability to use an outdoorsman's skill to skin non-humanoids for pelts that you can later tan or cure.. and "cut them" (effectively goring them) and make the meat available (with poundage about to the estimate, ie 200lb brahmen would have xlbs amount of usable meat plus fat and other junk.

 

Cutting up mutated humanoids for meat would be considered pretty close to cannibalism..

And true cannibalism is probably culturally shunned.. Raiders do it though!

I suppose you could skin humanoids, but that may not be very popular here..

 

Really this is what the NPCs should be doing with their spare time instead of staring into lala-land..

 

-Npcs that really eat/drink and require this stuff to survive, and if they're low on "hunger and drink" scales might even resort to drastic things like violating cultural laws (like stealing/killing) or (like previously stated) cannibalism or such.

 

-In my opinion no NPCS should be essential, and just because you have some major date with the enclave or dad doesn't mean they'll just stand there frozen in time forever. If they were good survivalists they'd be fine even in dire situations and wouldn't need to be essential.

 

Dad can walk right across the wasteland and be unharmed.. you'd expect he has some experience under his belt.

 

-Npcs should also be effected by radiation and the such.. and actively try to avoid/alleviate obvious suicide with medicine and plain not walking into that junk.

 

-Npcs should be finding ways of cranking stuff out.. sure we've lost tons of knowledge but that doesn't mean people will just turn into some quasi-wax museum display.. they'd try to find better ways of surviving and as such would make things like bandages, medicine, find ways of removing radiation (rad-x and radaway run out eventually).. etc.

 

-Also have you noticed the scum on radiated water? That is evidence of living prokayrotic or bacterial life adapting to the radiation.. you'd expect agriculture to be possible in some fashion even there.. Fungus? Mutated wheat? etc

 

-You'd expect fresh non-cured or salted or smoked or canned meats/veggies to expire after a while.. so you'd have to attach scripts for spoiling food..

 

-Sleeping:

 

Generally, people sleep..

 

And fall into one of two categories:

Nocturnal,

and

Diurnal

 

Although for radiation-rich freaks and the general insomniac, there could be a third and fourth category:

misc

crazy

 

Nocturnal npcs/pc would tend to have a nightly schedule, for example: deathclaws, dogs, night shift guards, Bos/enclave night patrol, scavengers, molerats, etc.

Diurnal would be a daily schedule ie: Wasteland people, or other such things..

Misc would fall under the "doesn't sleep" category, ie: robots, people on psyco, bloatflies, feral ghouls.. etc..

Crazy would fall under a broken category, the npcs would probably have no pattern to when they slept and when they woke.

 

Being inside a vault all the time, you'd expect VaultTech to use some sort of automatic diurnal-type lighting system, that dimmed the lights in coincidence with an atomic clock synced to the local time before the war...

 

These npcs would react to the time in the world by finding places that meet their criteria of safety, and comfort.

 

Obviously humanoids would prefer roofs, but when out in the middle of nowhere, a few tires, a fire, a sheet of metal, and a bedroll might be all you have..

Animal type npcs would tend to use what exists already, niches and buildings and the such, and improve upon their surroundings with scavenged books or wood or clothing, etc something..

 

-And with this you'd expect npcs to be hunting for food and water, taking those sugar bombs or cram, etc and saving them in their houses or niches or whatnot.. and generally traveling the wasteland when they weren't living it up in a vault or city, where they'd probably be buying their meat/necessities from caravans and selling water/manufactured goods.

Sleeping, stealing, committing crimes, skinning and tanning hides, making things.. etc all part of a thriving "living wasteland" that doesn't revolve around the PC.

 

-Cooking, something humanoids do, can be done now with a few scripts I'm sure.. you'd have better luck with the GECK however..

You'd have ingredients, and containers... a script attached to those containers.

The script would check the contents.. and would have a timer..

You'd leave the ingredients in the container for a while.. and check on them occasionally.. After the amount of time required to cook the food the ingredients would be replaced with the item.. and if that was then left in there too long the item would turn to some unusable or tasteless burnt junk..

 

The "container" could be a stove, a campfire, etc..

 

Lets say you put some cram in a stove.. waited an amount of time and checked on it.. you'd have some form of Roasted meat..

 

Or put multiple ingredients together.. they could combine to make some sort of meal.. etc..

 

-- Could add a "Cookbook" or "journal" to the Pipboy that collected recipes from your experiments and books you read.. hah

 

--Now onto NPC immersion--

 

-- So great, now you've got NPCs that sleep, survive, eat, drink, make stuff, etc.. that's all great.. but they still seem like machinations.

 

I agree that the AI can't be overcomplicated, because A.we haven't found effective algorithms for true ai yet and B. Truly realistic AI as of yet EATS cpu and other resources..

 

But to some extent their actions can be improved via scripting.

 

Various suggestions have been made.. Give them patrols, make them hunt, raid cities and towns, or conversely raid raiders (hehe) or evil people encampments... for equipment and supplies, ad etc.

 

But there are a few simpleish script-based suggestions I'd like to make.

 

First.. I'll quote something I posted earlier.

 

[quote name='Midicow' date='Nov 30 2008, 11:03 PM' post='664306']
oops D:


Btw About

[quote]Sneaking. Ugh. Why is it that I can snipe one super mutie in a group causing his head to explode but none of his friends will give a hoot? Here's the way I feel that sneaking should work. When I snipe an enemy, all enemies in a certain radius (greater if the enemy in question was dismembered/beheaded maybe) should go into an alerted state and "CAUTION" appears atop my screen. In this state the AI should actively look for me (though I'd take a brave, brave soul to make some intelligent AI), but I should still be able to get sneak attack criticals. This way I can choose to keep firing and run the (high) risk of being found, or I can skulk away and let some of the heat die down before sniping again.[/quote]

[quote]I had an idea for "fixing" ai..

First, make all non-quest ai friendly to the player, but attach a script to the ones that are supposed to be enemies.

When the player is within sight of the ai and relatively close, check if the ai is attached to an animal effected by the animal lover perk and do that.. or wait a few seconds.. and then turn hostile
Maybe also activate this script when they hear gunshots or see "friendly" ai dying or under attack.. as well as activating on sight.

This would eliminate companions randomly running off.. would feel more realistic.. and would eliminate the silly "WHO'S THERE" type shouts untill the npc (roleplay wise) would actually know there was a hostile nearby.

should also add a clause to the script that detected if you used a melee or silenced weapon.. if the npc wasn't killed in view of the other npcs then the script wouldn't turn them hostile.. silenced kill![/quote]

Would that work any? Wouldn't really need to modify ai.. simply attach a script.

 

 

-- With this script, we wouldn't need to modify AI packages or AI in general.. just take advantage of a "bug" (so to speak) in FO3 that would make NPC interaction with the player character feel much more realistic..

 

- if you go further.. you could have the script check companions to the player, and other npcs as well..

 

-- Even a deposition and karma/faction based part to it..

 

--If combined with something like Sumyungai's Hand gestures and shouting suggestion (check references).. you'd have quite the system there.

 

- What I would like to see in addition is NPCS reacting to the PC and NPCs upholstering guns in "non-combat" ish areas.. like when you pull out a grenade in a store for instance..

 

You'd expect security guards to get at least a little antsy if you walked into the middle of town and yanked out a gatling laser..

 

-Traveling:

You'd expect an NPC to go to a doctor if they were hurt.. or go to megaton for supplies.. or crawl the undergrounds/cities/towns/ruins/libraries/etc looking for a book, or a lost loved one.. etc

And conversely you'd expect npcs to come out of the undergrounds/buildings/etc looking for things outside.

 

-Information sharing:

Npcs that travel would bring news, deliver letters, and generally spread information.

 

 

<ebonrai> yeah, but, how much is there for roguelike?
<Midicow> plenty
<Midicow> plenty more than oblivion at least
<ebonrai> i'm not so sure.
<Midicow> ok
<Midicow> what do you think would be super complicated to do
<ebonrai> its a nice idea, i'm not sure it would be /sane/ to dop
<ebonrai> *do
<ebonrai> turn based movement <- in urw and roguelikes this is /super/ important
<ebonrai> gives you time to think about your actions
<Midicow> why would you need turn based movement
<Midicow> D:
<Midicow> we have vats
<ebonrai> that's the nature of a roguelike.
<ebonrai> that's turn-based shooting
<ebonrai> essentially.
<Midicow> thats not in my suggestion hehe, but we can use vats, a few scripts, and the geck
<Midicow> infact
<Midicow> I loaded a few mods that did that
<Midicow> accidentally
<Midicow> the combination had me staring in vats mode
<Midicow> after I had shot
<Midicow> and the npcs shot and there were camera effects and stuff
<Midicow> then vats jumped out
<Midicow> , just need a script to put back into vats
<Midicow> and refresh AP
<Midicow> for turnbased movement you'd have a script function to a keymap, press w to que up the "move forward" action
<Midicow> and use ap
<Midicow> script it so that during vats camera action your char moves forward
<Midicow> and does any other actions
<Midicow> etc
<ebonrai> personally, i'd rather do arcanum than do urw in f3
<Midicow> yeah
<Midicow> my post was based more on the survival aspect of urw
* ebonrai noddles
<Midicow> than the whole roguelike part of it
<Midicow> but thats some great stuff

 

By the extended vats I mean it was bugged so that vats lasted a much longer time then right after you finished shooting.

 

 

 

If I think of anything else I'll post it hehe..

 

Questions?.. comments?.. Retaliations?

[Midicow]

~

 

-What I'd also like to see is sorta.. a scripted actions/sound/animation/dialogue mod for npcs based on the time and what type of sleep cycle they followed.

 

Crazy people would do crazy things..

 

Robots would do what they do now probably..

 

Diurnal people/animals would be more active during the day, and yawn/stretch/etc or ask stupid questions during the "wee" hours.. and conversely nocturnal people/animals would follow an inverted type schedule similar to diurnal.

[SpeedyB64]

That sounds like a GIGANTIC project if it is ever done it would add a lot to the wasteland. Bethsoft games tend to be a little static. Hopefully in future games they make NPC behavior more dynamic.