Add patrol paths to monsters

[zhazz]

In an effort to make areas come alive, and be more dynamic, I'd like to suggest adding patrol paths to enemies. Similar to how the NPCs of various towns patrol on a pre-determined route.

With the server split coming soon, there should (hopefully!) be enough resources to add this feature.

Not only will it make areas feel more alive, rather than how static they currently are now; it will also allow for an entirely new playstyle. One similar to Roguelike games, where avoiding (some) enemies is the goal.

See a patrol of five Fire Giants coming your way? Step back to let them pass, and then slip by, without needing to use Hide/Move Silently/Invisibility. Of course the patrol can return at any moment, so scouting their path might be worth it.

In my opinion such will be better than simply having enemies respawn on top of the character/group out of nowhere. It will also allow for bigger groups of enemies in most areas, if some of them can simply be skipped by careful movement.

[Blame The Rogue]

while this sort of thing does add immersion, it also taxes the server causing lag and crashes, when too many movements or actions occur at once

[Thaelis]

Would be nice to have creatures occasionally spawn further from the road. I know it's meant to be a dangerous land, but it's pretty crazy that you will get in a fight on 100% of walks between towns. It's like getting mugged every single day on your commute to work.

[Kitunenotsume]

Would be nice to have creatures occasionally spawn further from the road. I know it's meant to be a dangerous land, but it's pretty crazy that you will get in a fight on 100% of walks between towns. It's like getting mugged every single day on your commute to work.

Most people don't have a 100 mile commute a dozen times a day.


Regarding the OP, I agree with Rogue. Short of making the NPCs into uninteractable animated projectiles (which I've seen done on a different server), ambient movement of NPCs is only halfway process economical if you set up dungeons with countless trigger zones that queue movement actions, which is heavily uneconomical in the mapping and scripting department.

Either way, giving things movement orders requires a destination, which is either randomized (which won't accomplish the goal of intelligent strategy), or it needs to be planned out in every dungeon (which is a exhausting undertaking requiring every spawn point and map to have many implemented waypoints).

Basically it would likely be a massive investment of time and affort ... for a mechanic that a substantial portion of PCs wouldn't notice because they are barreling through a dungeon in a buffed murderball.

[Tanlaus]

Bone Golems in the Ruins of Oghrann patrol. They’ll walk up and down stairs, turn corners and go the length of the map. Seem to have different routes as well.

Definitely brings the area alive and can liven up some otherwise easy fights. I’d be curious to see if that area is significantly more resource intensive than other areas. If not I think patrolling would be a great addition to other areas.

[Blame The Rogue]

the effects are cumulative. aimless wander = running script using processing. patrol path = running script using a higher amount of processing than the aforementioned. processing is finite. the more scripts running, and the more scripts running that are more process intensive, the more likely we hit the wall of "too many process at once > LAG > CRASH". sadly these are just the mechanics of the game, as the engine only utilizes a single processor, requiring us to pick and choose. a script here, a script there. the balance of adding scripting to add immersion, without making the server crashy. bearing in mind that of what total processing is available, a large chunk of which has to be left free, for pc and dm actions, which is why you'll notice the server gets laggy and crashy when dm events are going on and/or many players are online at once. it's sad really, as if it were mechanically possible, ever npc could get a full script treatment

[Tanlaus]

I don’t think you need to give every NPC the treatment. In RoO it’s just a few bone golems. And it’s random. Especially after the server split there may be places to add these in a more surgical way. A few fire giants. Some yuan ti... something. It’s worth looking into.

[Thaelis]

Most people don't have a 100 mile commute a dozen times a day.

Ok good point *shuts up*

[Blame The Rogue]

as long as it's done moderately, and with forethought to everything mentioned above. i'm just twitchy when it comes to adding any kind of extra load to an already heavily scripted server

[gedweyignasia]

There shouldn't be an extra load on the server to have creatures patrol along nearby waypoints when they spawn versus random walks, the issue is hooking up a set of waypoints in dozens of dungeons and overland maps to the random spawns and figuring out an efficient way to have spawns choose an appropriate set of waypoints. It's not a trivial task.