Npc Towns

[Catfoodbob]

Npc towns having an array of buildings inside a area with a blue border signifying their walls and what they guard…
Specialized buildings where they make stuff and such

-like a Weapons Depot for where they build weapons from scratch and rearm ammo.
-Scrap Walls, the blue border walls that can repel most zombies and damage units for hitting them unarmed. blocks movement but can be shot over
-Fortified Buildings
-Survivor Warehouse
-perhaphs rarely a survivor lab
-Farmlands, they make farms for food
-Generator house, Such and such provides power at outlettes
most of the buildings would be jury rigged.
and there tends to be a large amount of survivors there.

[chimpdroid]

It would be so cool to see this, though it seems like it might be iffy to program, since the NPCs are already pretty buggy.
But you know what they always say:
The only thing better than a few, scattered, dangerous, suicidal fools, is a whole town of 'em.

Pretty confident “fool” isn’t a slur. If someone thinks it is, feel free to invoke Pittsburgh and call the NPCs jagoffs. -KA101

[Catfoodbob]

Pretty confident “fool” isn’t a slur. If someone thinks it is, feel free to invoke Pittsburgh and call the NPCs jagoffs. -KA101

Or mooks

[chimpdroid]

Oh jeez, please pardon my use of that word.
I’ve always said, forums should come equipped with a breathalyzer.

[wilson7755]

Fools

Gets banned

FUCK

[FrankyPlaysGames]

I really reallly really want this, if not something similar. I want NPC shops (that work other than just trading inv2inv) and some traveling merchants sorta thing, as in they have a vehicle.

[ramesesniblet]

Am I imagining it or were survivor towns a thing at some point in the past? I have a vague memory of them, through the drug induced haze.

[ArgusTheCat]

I like the idea of NPC towns because they can help clarify the player’s place in the world. Are you a rogue outlaw, sneaking in under cover of night and making off with some of their precious food? Are you a merchant scavenger that constantly supplies them with scrap in exchange for a safe place to sleep? Are you the bastard that spent six hours stockpiling rocket launchers and just found a target that can and will fight back?

The biggest problem with towns is that they’d need a lot of options to really feel like they WORK. The biggest perk of towns is that they could offer a LOT of options if they work. I think at this point, it’s pretty much a given that everyone wants to see them happen.

[Burnt_Earth]

I like the idea of NPC towns. What is a dungeon-crawl rougelike without a town to go and sell all your loot at anyways? Given how the game works, it seems really improbable that such intact towns would not exisit. An untrained methhead survivor with a rifle can easily wipe out an entire small town full of zombies with a mini-14 and some ammunition, consider entire towns full of paranoid right-wing survivalists milita types, which according to the lore, is everyone in murrikkka during the time. There should absolutely be swarms of NPCs and soldiers in and around certain places in rural New England.

That said, I don’t think townie NPCs should work like other survivors. Less willing to talk, less likely to be afraid of you, almost entirely unlikely to join you on your adventures, or even engage you in conversation. For game balance, otherwise your Car Salesman survivor would roll through town high on adderol and caffine pills and raise a world-reclaiming army like some kinda shitty post-apocalyptic peid piper.

NPCs in town should treat you like anybody treats anybody in a stressed out and strained society of strangers. Like nasty new yorkers. ‘Don’t fuckin talk to me.’ or ‘you mind, I’m fuckin busy?’

Also ‘scrap walls’ is too much like ‘fallout’ how about chainlink fences, wood walls, piles of car wreckage, barricades, ect, like normal people stuff.

[Litppunk]

yea seems like survivor towns is more of a “lets fix these buggy ass npcs and then remake an different version of them throw them in a town buggy and work with them untill we get the kinks out of the town npcs as well” than a do or don’t make npc towns. That said definately need some couch forts in the wall, and for town to have a chance of being “distrusting” of everyone but their own, yelling at you to go away and firing a warning shot or two to make you go away before actually attacking…unless you do something stupid like attack them first.

[FrankyPlaysGames]

Yeah, you might have to get them to trust you before they let you inside without shooting you.
Also missions to destroy such towns could exist.

[Litppunk]

Bandit leader: “Hey you! yeah you, you look a resourceful sort. that town over there (puts marker on your map) has been giving us trouble. I’ve lost to many men trying to storm it, They have good stuff inside and I want it. If you can drive the bastards off…or kill em, you can have first pick of everything inside the walls, and I’ll even throw something in that might be more valuable to you than it is to me if you manage to do it.”

kill town

approach bandit camp

Bandit leader: "Kill him men, and everything those snot nosed townies had is ours!"
OR
Bandit leader: "Ill be honest for once, I thought you and the town would duke it out real good and we could sweep in and grab everything that was left no problem… but heard some of what happened, and the last thing I want to do is fight you, so here take this as a ‘thank you’ " bandit gives you ____ (plutonium, CBM, mutagen, or other high value item to advanced for knuckle headed bandits to use well)

[JayJayForce]

I’m not sure how buggy NPC’s are at this point, but I’ll also add in my voice of support.

One thing I think should be discussed is: How long should it take for the Towns to be established? I mean having an entire working community 5 days after the Cataclysm should be fairly rare aside from some doomsday communities who might not take kindly to trespassers.

Another thing could be Military bases. It makes sense that remnants of the government would be the most stable and well equipped factions in the aftermath of the Cataclysm and they seem like they could be easier to program giving the strict discipline and routine one would expect from a soldier. That way a fairly “limited” town code could be implemented without seeming too unnatural.

[Burnt_Earth]

Could be the Cataclysm just happened to bypass certain towns or places by chance and the locals or military/ police were oddly successful in keeping their town safe. I’d think only really small or isolated settlements could qualify. Maybe code small towns that exist at the long dead-end highways that usually terminate in mansions or labs and those would be potential NPC towns.

[Litppunk]

One thing I think should be discussed is: How long should it take for the Towns to be established? I mean having an entire working community 5 days after the Cataclysm should be fairly rare aside from some doomsday communities who might not take kindly to trespassers.

Well are we actually starting on day 1 of the cataclysm, or are we starting on the day we decided to leave the bunker or (insert other scenario here) because radiation died down enough, or we just got tired of being cramped in bunker/whatever? does cataclysm actually say anything in detail about this?

[KA101]

[quote=“JayJayForce, post:13, topic:8846”]One thing I think should be discussed is: How long should it take for the Towns to be established? I mean having an entire working community 5 days after the Cataclysm should be fairly rare aside from some doomsday communities who might not take kindly to trespassers.

Well are we actually starting on day 1 of the cataclysm, or are we starting on the day we decided to leave the bunker or (insert other scenario here) because radiation died down enough, or we just got tired of being cramped in bunker/whatever? does cataclysm actually say anything in detail about this?[/quote]

In-game, no; the newspapers are a good start but don’t specify dates. (They probably should.)

Zero hour for the Cataclysm was five days before Spring Day 1, the default start time. FWIW it was a Saturday. Game starts on a Thursday (because we never could get the hang of Thursdays) and that puts DDA as taking place in either 2042 or 2048. (It continues to be at that point if you start at some other season, because we hang a LOT of calendar/timing on that presumption, and would likely be sorting out downstream changes for months on end were we to try decoupling 'em.)

One serious weak point in our mapgen (there are more than I’d like) is that we don’t have time-contingencies: a given place can’t be spawned differently depending on when you first find it. We could potentially emulate settlements taking a while by preventing them from spawning on the initial overmap–but that’ll eventually Fail when someone spawns near an edge and the adjacent overmap spawns a settlement close enough to the corresponding edge to show up in your initial revealed-area.

[Burnt_Earth]

Is it possible for established, discovered areas to change over time? I’m thinking terrain changes are possible from what I understand from the missile silo feature. Could a formerly vacant plot of forest or field generate a survivor’s compound off screen at the turn of a new season or something?

It sounds like it’d be a really glitchy awful thing, say you abandoned a car or built some summer cabin on that field and it turns summer and there is suddenly an encampment there. Probably a bad idea.

Another thought, maybe if you manage to wipe out a whole town of zombies, NPC squatters start spawning there and maybe boarding up windows and squatting in the houses and idk.

My work-around is to have NPC towns established from day one, like the refugee center or bandit forts are already. Some little cluster of houses and liquor stores type cow-town just happened to have made it through the cataclysm relatively unscathed and all the fortifications and all were built in the last 5 days by the military or deputized civilians or something. Got really lucky and organized quickly. It’s rural New England in ultra-patriotic libertarian Americans prepared for foreign invasion, it stands to reason some isolated podunk here and there would manage to stay safe through luck or overwhelming firepower or some combination of that.

[Litppunk]

hmm yea I had thought about that a little but its always nice to hear it from the creator/admin perspective. Is there any (easy) way to make it so that they only spawn in suitable places like they normally would, but only when certain conditions have been met? If conditions aren’t met it never ends up existing? Unlike say minecrft, cata isn’t seed based and seems to be generated completely at random. (I only know this because my comp crashed and when I reloaded save and reread a map I had read after save/before crash it was completely different.) Is there any way you could make these things in that “still black” zone? If not you could make it so the NPC’s actually “build” the town in stages/quickly when your back is turned. Although this runs much the same reality bubble problem as anything in cata. In my opinion the way the bubble interacts with the world is THE biggest hitch to the way cata runs, with no real solution.

But then that brings me back to I am not a coder, or even a modder and I don’t REALLY know what i am even talking about and this is all as much theory to me as relativity or advanced electromagnetics is. I can only hope that my bumbling idiocracy helps you come up with a new perspective/ new idea on how to solve the problems you face.

[KA101]

Hmm. The nuke is notorious for not actually killing its targets, but apart from that it’s not a bad idea for how to handle the initial construction: have the NPC base get built off-bubble as a result of quests or something. Not sure whether that’s practical, but in rough how-it-would-work mechanics, good starting point.

KA101 launches an Intraovermap Linear Colonization Missile (ILBM)

Fact I might not publicize enough: when I arrived in DDA, I wasn’t a coder of any ability. Took a lot of looking at the stuff and a lot of chutzpah/guts/indignation/HowDifficultCanThisBe/wev to even get in and tinker with some JSON. Well over a year later…I’m still not a trained programmer. But I can read the code enough to handle a fair amount of things and work the merging.

You don’t have to have formal training to contribute.

You do have to put in time and effort. AllisonW has logged some nice contributions recently; Aenye’s keg o’ RDX and road-roller are both lots of fun. Rivet’s responsible for enough that I’m willing to give a 25% chance that the next item you encounter is one of hers, without any knowledge whatever of where you are in the game. So far as I know, none of them have formal training in programming, nor significant previous experience in the field.

(I’m not sure whether Coolthulhu knew C++ or not coming in. Xe’s done a LOT too.)

You bring the time, energy, and some level of compatible aim–we’ll help you with the details.

[Litppunk]

awesome ^.^

Edit: Ima work on being a decent player before I attempt to do anything code wise. Well… I pick this stuff up fast so… Ima say I am going to wait till I have a “successful” character.