Addressing multiple characters and builds

[willcrutchley]

Ah, indeed, that’s a good point

[Heureka]

@willcrutchley

which isn’t animated etc

Still he moves.

[willcrutchley]

Oops, fixed xD was meant to say ‘is’

@willcrutchley

There is already somewhat of a system for NPC’s, just like the one in the sanctum, which is (autocorrect!!!) animated etc… All that would need to be added is the message bit.

[Stretchious]

@Heureka

I like the idea, but my first thought is how it will affect the server loading, will it be necessary to scale down player per world?

I wouldn’t have thought that it would cost as much in server resources as say … creatures. Creatures have AI behind them and are affected by terrain and player actions - a character ‘shell’ need not have anything like that. Being able to choose from a list of various selectable parked animations would be very cool.

I don’t think any automated speech would be a good idea though… all I see is that being abused by coin sellers constantly spamming people for real-money purchases If it were to happen, It’d say that it would have to be done only when you try and interact with the parked character, and there would have to be some clear way to identify whether that character was a parked one or someone actually online.

@the-moebius

i was thinking they be more like furniture in game not a full npc

This is how I’d see it working too … a character with no driver, is essentially just a mesh, which would be similar to your machines. Animations can run on them and you could potentially interact with them for an automated reply.

[Heureka]

@Stretchious

I don’t think any automated speech would be a good idea though

Maybe a list with predefined sentence to chose from.

[the-moebius]

my idea was when you interact with them they speak
edit lol guilty off not full reading posts lol sorry :)

[Jiivita]

@Stretchious

The difference there being that the sanctum is offline and won’t affect bandwidth etc.

wouldn’t all this be able to run client side? just need to download position… emote list and or messages… no need to sync animations for everyone?

Edit: this assumes that they would be stationary… I guess this would work even if they can wonder… just would run into ppl seeing the same npc in different places

[willcrutchley]

Yes, it would work, but if we wanted other players to be able to see these then no…

[SpinGatherer]

I know this thread is quite old…

How about a craftable chair that you place. If it is placed on an unclaimed plot it will de-spawn; like any other block.

There would then be the possibility of tiered chairs; basic ones allow you to “place” your idle characters higher level chair could provide boosts or allow a simple message dialogue (as mentioned by previous responses).

Pressing action on an empty chair would seat the active character and send you to the sanctum. Clicking on a chair occupied by one of your characters would switch characters <-- obviously, only for chairs you own or have builder access to. Clicking on any other occupied chair would trigger the character message if there is one

For a shared build if somebody else destroys an occupied chair, any seated character would have to be accessed through the sanctum again.