Mods affecting NPCS

[cero90]

warning: dumb, half awake post. 

 

Just curious, if anyone has more know-how about this sort of thing to give me a little closure...

There are a lot of mods which affect the status of the player character- SexLab, of course, Frostfall and iNeed, et cetera.

 

Something that always bothered me is how it never really seemed to affect NPCs at the level it should (ie;RL)

I'd like to clarify that I understand why that might not be, but anyway.

In Frostfall, I never see NPCs or followers reacting to the cold beyond equipping cloaks etc. It would be interesting if they could die from exposure.

 

Same for SexLab and Devious Devices, I can equip things to NPCs and they can get aroused, but I was disappointed to learn that there wasn't a ton of functionality on NPCS especially for things like the plugs.

One of the hunger mods would track your follower's hunger, which was interesting but didn't really do anything other than spam a stomach-growling noise when they were out of food.

 

I just always thought it would be nice to be able to give clothes or food to an orphan, beggar or other npc without needing to adopt them or make them into a follower.

 

I mean, I'm pretty sure that has to do with it being too much work and needing special behavior files, but it's something that has always been kind of detrimental to the immersiveness of my game.

 

Maybe I'm just weird.

Basically I'm asking if anyone knows why this isnt a more common thing- is it just not practical to code something that tracks that many NPCs? Or do people just not really care about that kind of detail?

Thanks
C

 

[FauxFurry]

Have you tried Wet and Cold? It is fairly system resource intensive so I wouldn't recommend using it in a script heavy load order unless you have a powerful PC precisely because it affects NPC behavior as well as that of the player character.

[cero90]

On 10/29/2018 at 10:30 PM, FauxFurry said:

Have you tried Wet and Cold? It is fairly system resource intensive so I wouldn't recommend using it in a script heavy load order unless you have a powerful PC precisely because it affects NPC behavior as well as that of the player character.

Hmm, yeah I've used Wet and Cold before along with Frostfall and Campfire. I'm using Realistic Needs+ rather than ineed at the moment though.
It's not even so much the animations I guess? but that it would be interesting if the NPCs were actually affected in a more than cosmetic way. Especially for any npc in a follower type system i;e that you're somewhat responsible for. 

Obviously it would be incredibly heavy if it tracked every NPC, but maybe a system like Fertility Mode has that only tracks marked NPCs would be better. Just think it would be a really interesting addition to 'immersive' gameplay, although I'm aware the kind of things I'm after border on a 'just go make your own game!' level at this point  I mean, this is skyrim, not nintendogs... 

[Seijin8]

The basic reasons these mods don't usually affect NPCs are because:

1) It would be a lot of background processing to handle all of this and ...

2) NPC AI is fucking tragic.  Ever seen the courier walking toward a bear, bear gives warning, courier comments on the weather and is then killed?  NPCs don't have the ability to notice many of the things happening in the world, and trying to mod new behaviors almost always makes the AI just look worse for trying.

 

(In the case of the stupid courier, it is because all warning/aggro events are for the player's consumption only.  There is literally no "warning signal" that the game can send or receive in these events.  The aggro behavior is window-dressing and cannot be perceived by the NPCs.)

 

To use Frostfall as an example:  If I wanted to make NPCs behave as though Frostfall were a thing for them too, they would have to

1) Detect weather

2) Monitor their own status in an intuitive way (have some kind of system for measuring severity of cold versus distance to get to an existing shelter/town)

3) Make decisions in accordance with predicted outcomes

4) Make fires and shelter (which means AI for placing both things)

5) Go about gathering materials (where you just fade to black and hack away, they would actually have to do live foraging and generate animated events when resources were found).

6) Transport those materials to the camp site (your 300lb base inventory is invisible, but it will look like shit if the NPCs just store a log pile in their pockets)

7) Deploy materials and set times for new behaviors based on temperature, predicted weather and some level of intuition about the game world.

 

Hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of coding, testing, performance management, working out edge cases for mod compatibility, likely having to lay down thousands of preset camp markers throughout Skyrim (and some kind of AI for working with new worldspace mods where new markers aren't available). All of this for something you will only see once or twice in a Skyrim week.

 

tl;dr: not worth the effort to make it.