Dear FD: How To Code Realistic Spawns, Sincerely: Another Game Developer.

[DaveB]

Hi there,

Works for cloudflare...

Aye it does, but now that's a hard call - cosmic background noise "because SPACE! It's ELITE!" or do you go with the lava lamps "because our '84 heritage, dammit!"

Whichever you pick, DON'T TELL THE FORUMS. We'd have a new Hotel California thread on the subject so fast it would make Einstein blink!

 

[mojonaut]

Unreal.

I bet the USA will prohibit the export of lava lamps at some time in the future

Good thing they're nearly all made in China then

 

[kofeyh]

So if I mentioned entropy through iteration at this point. How many will developers will I trigger? I mean, it’s not like you’re dealing with daylight savings, is it.

[video=youtube_share;-5wpm-gesOY]https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY[/video]

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Well apparently you are absolutely right, since this same behaviour can be observed at play in different zones and scenarios. Without fail, some gimboid is going to spawn to annoy you, and whence they die, another shall appear like magic to take its place. There shall always be just one gimboid, or a gimboid wing (by low chance). The gimboids shall always spawn near the player, and unlike other NPCs, these gimboids shall only ever be interested in the player. For ever and ever. Until you run out of chaff and patience.

I mean, for God's sake, at least Valve had the good grace to throw in some lightning particle effects whenever the player tripped over a trigger_once and it was time to plop a head crab on top them.

"The gimboid number shall be 1, thou number shall not be 2, but 1. 1 is the gimboid number, unless there is three, then that shall be counted as 1."

We've been telling FDev for YEARS that the appearance of a random gimboid (using that from now on btw!) in an asteroid field hundreds or thousands of LY away from the bubble is just ridiculous.

(also don't forget they can wake out and come back magically at 100%).

 

[wstephenson]

FD decided to go 'NPCs for the player' when it got big backslash over harder NPC combat AI. Granted, balancing everchanging player curve is hard. Overall it feels that after Master ED kinda takes off kid's wheels, and NPCs become more harder to predict and I have found myself running from them quite often - something I didn't do before reaching Master.

I suppose it was more practical to scale NPCs to the (player,ship) combination than provide the levels of environmental danger signalling to enable players to select their own level of challenge without causing outrage. As Kremmen and I have been bleating about for years, the security level in the System Map and, latterly, the popup on hyperspace are somewhat meagre. Reuse the Powerplay bubble visualisation for player Wanted and average security level in the galaxy map! Moore's Law is on the side of generating a cache of the values needed per player across the bubble .

 

[PiLhEaD]

I'd offer to change the code for you, but having checked with the development team this is apparently not something I should do. Probably for the best. If I touch code it'll likely result in all credits being wiped from the game. You probably don't want that, but maybe I'm wrong!

C'mon Dale, it can't be THAT hard, 'everyone knows' that!

Start with something easy, like a new spaceship - just knock it up over lunch. I've even got a prototype:

Spoiler

And wooh hoo - bobble-head lava lamps CONFIRMED!

Hi there,

Works for cloudflare...

...well, that's what I read...

 

[BDelacroix]

You know, everyone loves it when you tell them how to do their job. Especially when done in public.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

I agree that something needs to be done. The npc spawning in this game feels SO contrived it's like I am in a Hollywood movie! It feels so fake. I jump into an unpopulated system and immediately another ship jumps in, then they send me some message about how they have been tracking me for a while so they can claim the $400 bounty on my head and try to interdict me. Next system, same situation but they talk about how there have been rumors about me and all the tasty cargo I hold...

Like are there just armies and armies of loser npcs hanging around random no-name stars waiting or the off chance that I happen to drop by?

And don't even get me started on low waking when a npc is after you. Doesn't matter how far you run from the drop out point, it doesn't matter that the npc wasn't even on your contacts when you dropped (so therefor he shouldn't have been able to identify your low wake) or that you are low waking out of sc right after low waking into sc to escape the npc. No matter what, the npc will spawn right next to you. There's no logical way to avoid them.

NPC's are predictable, unconvincing, unengaging and don't feel like actual entities since they play by competently different rules than the player. Their dialog is also almost always inappropriate for the situation, or it feels so fake that it would make more sense for the npc's to be larping than to be seriously sending their target direct messages like "Target acquired, moving in" or "Starting attack run". NPCs in minecraft feel more immersive than the ones in E do.

According to FDev logic - wherever you go there are always NPC's around, even in the remotest reaches of space, whom have been tracking you (seemingly for days or even weeks dependign on how long it took YOU to get there), to collect your $400 bounty, or relieve you of the 2t of cargo you happened to collect from some wreck you found a week ago.

As far as the dialogue goes - we've been saying that too, pretty much from day 1 - they have ignored our feedback. There's no checks to see if you are ACTUALLY CARRYING any cargo or have any weapons with which to defend yourself, because you CANNOT DROP any cargo to fulfill that NPC request to leave you alone.

It's mindless and very very stupid.

But FDev clearly thinks it's fine - or don't know how to make it more situational - or just don't particularly care either way, because the mechanic hasn't changed in years.

Nosleepdemon - ty for the effort but you're wasting your time.

 

[Whitehair]

According to FDev logic - wherever you go there are always NPC's around, even in the remotest reaches of space

You obviously have never played the game.

 

[discocat]

There's no checks to see if you are ACTUALLY CARRYING any cargo or have any weapons with which to defend yourself, because you CANNOT DROP any cargo to fulfill that NPC request to leave you alone.

That's no more the case since i think 2.3.

Now, npc pirates may interdict you, but they'll always scan you and say exactly what they want. You will also always have a few seconds to start dropping the stuff. If you have no cargo they'll be disappointed and they'll leave.

 

[zombieapocalypse]

I genuinely cant tell whether the OP is trolling or being deadly earnest. I love the internet!

 

[Rafe Zetter]

And often rightfully so. I especially love when people start pulling rank right in the subject and the tooltip preview is just a meme. Makes me skip right to derision.


Part of me wants to see that just for the sheer forum entertainment value

If you mean that the OP mentions he is a game developer - surely that is the WHOLE POINT? That what he is saying is based on professional knowledge - that he presumably gets paid for, regularly, and therefore he must have decent knowledge of what he is talking about?

but sure - dismiss it, "coz reasons".

Do you ask for plumbing help from a paper delivery person? - Or maybe you aren't at the stage in your life where those important decisions are made by you.

Or be cynical and think he isn't a game dev at all and is lying "for effect" - because everyone know EVERYONE on the internet is a liar.......

 

[Rafe Zetter]

You obviously have never played the game.

Answer this - how far do you have to go out the bubble before NPC's no longer spawn?

Genuinley interested in your answer.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Do you ask for plumbing help from a paper delivery person? - Or maybe you aren't at the stage in your life where those important decisions are made by you.

I see what you're trying to do for your argument there.

 

[wstephenson]

That's no more the case since i think 2.3.

Now, npc pirates may interdict you, but they'll always scan you and say exactly what they want. You will also always have a few seconds to start dropping the stuff. If you have no cargo they'll be disappointed and they'll leave.

This is much better than it used to be, but the predictable spawn on arrival, or the ability of a 'mission hunter' pirate combat-rigged NPC to implausibly tail your long-legged engineered ship over 35LY jumps, could still be improved.

The feeling I'd like to incept is being pursued by a pirate sail on the horizon. I had a great time one evening roleplaying a pirate trying to thwart a friend running Fujin Tea to whatsisname the engineer. Because I was able to see my target on the galaxy map, I was able to track him from systems away, despite being in a shorter ranged CobraMk4 to his AspE.

Your tea clipper can jump further, but you will have to stop to scoop fuel at some point, at which point they will catch you up (albeit running on fumes). The question is, how would they track you? The wake scanner mechanism inherited from FE2 only works believably in a very small subset of cases. I think there could be some kind of McGuffin of ships leaving stations being sprayed with a variety of 'cookies', tracker bugs that call home with cargo scan results when passing near nav beacons. This information would be available to pirates/criminal networks and used to intercept or pursue passing traders. To the pirate, the galaxy map would be speckled with ship details, manifests and destinations, giving them a range of targets. Lawful stations would 'wipe cookies' for a fee, reducing your chance of being targetted (leaving their authorities' cookies intact of course). Travelling via unpopulated systems would mean you were untrackable until reentering populated space, giving the old-fashioned wake scanner a role to pick up the trail.

This inter-system tracking mechanism would of course require changes to the galaxy map, as well as extensions to NPC trader behaviour and new pirate spawning/tracking simulations

 

[GreyAreaUK]

Answer this - how far do you have to go out the bubble before NPC's no longer spawn?

Genuinley interested in your answer.

You need to be a few thousand Ly from a populated system as I recall. Can't recall what the actual distance is...more than 2,000 but less than 8,000 i think.

Edit: actually, for NPCs it may well be less. You'll still get POIs and things like downed nav beacons for a while but even they fade away. I've been out of Colonia heading up-and-east-ish and I stopped seeing POIs a while ago. Can't remember when I last saw an NPC.

 

[nosleepdemon]

I don't really have any hypotheses as to what leads a programmer into one group or the other.

Passion!

 

[nosleepdemon]

"The gimboid number shall be 1, thou number shall not be 2, but 1. 1 is the gimboid number, unless there is three, then that shall be counted as 1."

We've been telling FDev for YEARS that the appearance of a random gimboid (using that from now on btw!) in an asteroid field hundreds or thousands of LY away from the bubble is just ridiculous.

(also don't forget they can wake out and come back magically at 100%).

Yet inspite of this revelation, it is nevertheless difficult to spawn more than one gimboid at a time, or perhaps, sometimes... None at all! The One Gimboid Rule shall stand!

I think I too shall begin calling these types of spawns Gimboids. Who knows, perhaps they're not even supposed to be there and are produced by persistent rounding errors?

 

[nosleepdemon]

That's no more the case since i think 2.3.

Now, npc pirates may interdict you, but they'll always scan you and say exactly what they want. You will also always have a few seconds to start dropping the stuff. If you have no cargo they'll be disappointed and they'll leave.

Now you say that, but I was winged up with some mates in my SR DBS Scout a few nights ago, and I kid you not, I got a "foreign body attached" warning all of a sudden. Yep. An aspiring Gimboid had attached a hatch breaker limpet to my ship. My cargo at the time consisted of various types of explosive plasma death. I obliged his request to give him some.

If you mean that the OP mentions he is a game developer - surely that is the WHOLE POINT? That what he is saying is based on professional knowledge - that he presumably gets paid for, regularly, and therefore he must have decent knowledge of what he is talking about?

but sure - dismiss it, "coz reasons".

Do you ask for plumbing help from a paper delivery person? - Or maybe you aren't at the stage in your life where those important decisions are made by you.

Or be cynical and think he isn't a game dev at all and is lying "for effect" - because everyone know EVERYONE on the internet is a liar.......

I once tried to do some plumbing with my washing machine after I took it apart for a clean. After I flooded my boiler room I figured out what gaskets were.

 

[Lightspeed]

I feel the whole game is based too much around RNG ....... nothing seems purposeful, with an intent that leads to something else.

That's the problem with RNG .... it's too random