Hello everyone, I'm doing a little bit of an early update post this week, because I'm going to try to do a topic poll on Saturday (but possibly Friday night, we'll see).
Old Business:
Before I get started, I wanted to say sorry to everyone who commented on my last post "Stretch" a couple days ago. (Those people are: Blottscrunk, Originel, Secondarian, & Ver Greeneyes.) I decided to check Patreon real quick before writing this post, and saw a bunch of "new" posts. Then I noticed the time stamps... and had a What the shit? moment. I normally check my email to see if there have been any comments--I try to reply to comments within 24 hours when I can--but apparently those emails didn't happen this time, or perhaps the spam filter got angry. It's probably my fault somehow, so sorry about that. I'll reply after I'm done with this :D
New Business:
Well, after getting the schools chock full of content, it was time to move on to some NPC human resource management. Before that, I did end up making ROBOTHROAT (available at a Cum & Go near you!). It's some more material for the omni system, but it mostly happened because it was rather late at night...
I was coding the NPC scheduling, which is basically saying when NPCs show up where based on their own schedules. This has the bonus effect of naturally changing the amount of NPCs roaming around, because most of them work during the day. Today as I was working on it, I realized something:
If there are 200 roaming random NPCs (ignoring the 100 NPC performance setting), but well over 100 map locations excluding homes (with another 100+ planned), world NPCs are going to be pretty underwhelming.
I did realize earlier during planning that with the limit on full NPCs running around, the town would appear rather empty. My plan for dealing with that was a) having some "fake" NPCs that give the appearance of more people, and just generally act in a simple scripted way, and b) using some randomized mini-event descriptions to help describe things going on around you that's "off the screen".
However, that doesn't do any good if they aren't all ready yet. (We do have some mini-descriptions lined up, but the quantity is limited.) So I was talking on discord about a possible interim solution. (for example, clustering NPCs in an area and 'recycling' them). But then thanks to some good ideas & collaboration there, we found a solution that is actually pretty cool:
Increase the amount of murder.
Well, in this case, increase the rate that the game kills off NPCs so that they can be replaced. This was planned to happen during the sleep screen, with new NPCs being generated, as part of the NPC Cycling System. However, the new idea is to generate several NPCs with really basic information, which we can then use to populate the world. If you interact with them, the Semi-Random procedural generator is used to turn them into a "real" NPC, and the surplus can be murdered.
In addition to filling up the world better, it also has the effect of speeding up the NPC cycling, meaning that you'll get more opportunities to see NPCs. (This is good if you're looking for one with specific features.)
The downside to this neat plan is that it requires a little more up-front work, but it's actually surprisingly straight-forward to implement, at least in a rudimentary form. A lot of the necessary work would have been necessary anyways, so I think the benefit is worth the slight schedule rearranging (probably about 2 days, so nothing huge).
I believe that Uncle Jimbo may have been the one to spawn this particular nugget, so hats off to him :D
That's it for tonight, I'll be back in a couple days with that poll topic post.
o/
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