NPC patrol behavior

[NQNStudios]

It would be cool if patrol routes could be defined in a town (and maybe outdoors, for special/wandering monster groups?) and assigned to creatures. (Maybe there could be a special node to do this dynamically, too: Monster Start/Stop Patrol, with flags for which monster and which patrol route).

(Food for thought: BoA let you fully script creature AIs. That extent of configurability is probably not attainable within the special node system. I'm not saying we should ever go that far, but I do think giving designers more ways to orchestrate NPC behavior would be cool.)

[CelticMinstrel]

BoA let you fully script creature AIs. That extent of configurability is probably not attainable within the special node system.

I think that extent of configurability is definitely possible in the special node system. I'm not really sure what it would look like. We do have some hooks for such things already, which I added at some point – monsters can call a special as an action on their turn or when an enemy hits them, and it may be possible to put some AI logic in those places. We probably lack some of the special nodes that would be required to script complex AI (for example, forcing a monster to use a specific ability), but I don't think there's any reason why we couldn't add those nodes.

I'm not saying we should ever go that far, but I do think giving designers more ways to orchestrate NPC behavior would be cool.

I agree.

When it comes to patrol routes, I think what we could do is give each monster a list of "movement commands" that they play through one at a time. The commands could be simple, like "move west", "move right", "turn to face south"; or they could be more complex, like "move towards player", "move away from player", "move towards this x,y". I think that would be more versatile than simply defining patrol points.

(Note: this is yet another idea taken from RPGMaker, which handles movement in a similar manner.)

Of course, if we have such a system, then it certainly makes sense to also have a special node to change a creature's patrol route. Although, it might be quite tricky to figure out how it fits into the special node framework.