Last feature is mostly done. Scout and combat patrols are implemented. Designate a series of way points and your NPC will bounce from one to the next. The scout mission can go into unknown territory to reveal new areas with a sight range of 3(?), the combat patrol cannot but still has a reveal range of 1(?) so that it’ll reveal some things regardless, both can bounce off hides sides which will kick your usable range back up to 75% of the last increase (90 tiles, 67, 50, 37, 27, 20, 15, 11, 8, 6, and 4 for a total of 335 tiles or 2.8 world maps). The game takes every overmap tile the NPC crosses and checks the 4 submaps for creatures. If a creature is encountered you make a survival roll against the monster’s difficulty to see who gets to determine combat. If the monster wins it always initiates combat. If the player wins it will avoid combat if on a scout mission but will engage if on a combat mission. This check is made for each monster in the submap (12x12 tiles) and then combined so even in urban environments you are going to see your NPC take on at most ~8 monsters at a time. Monsters killed in this form of combat are wiped from the map (too difficult to simulate all the death effects in a distant map) while NPCs that die during combat are dropped into the distant map, as can be seen above. Combat is just melee at the moment with your NPC fleeing if they feel they don’t stand a chance. Gear is accounted for in hit calculations and damaged so the optimum NPC build is probably going to be plate armor with a slow very powerful melee weapon… or if they have natural high dodge they might benefit from light armor. You’ll currently have to check your NPCs for bites when they get back because they won’t tell you… but based on the zombie movies I’ve seen I guess they shouldn’t mention if they got bit.
Major shortcomings so you know what to expect:
-Can’t generate monsters in areas that the player has never visited since those are stored differently and loaded based on player perspective when approached (unless someone knows a way)
-Opening all these maps and checking enemies is SLOW, sitting at about 6 seconds for a normal patrol to calculate
-As already mentioned, combat is melee based only
Good enough for me for now though. I know there are lots of changes some of the devs want me to do on the github so I’ll probably try and knock those out over the next few days and hopefully get a semi-final version up on Thursday. One of the changes is for companion mission save format. I’ll mention it again but to prevent losing NPCs don’t have them away on mission when updating to the next build if you are testing.
Thanks for all the support!
