Cleaning Up Hommlet

Are you guys game for rewriting the entirety of Hommlet by any chance? I don't mean 'reinvent' to be sure, but rather just giving every NPC the once-over to add, expand, enliven, and diversify where appropriate.

Spending an evening or two tweaking any given NPC's dialogue can pay comparatively huge dividends. Going from utterly two dimensional to even marginally three dimensional is a huge improvement ... and it would be awfully cool to be able to say that we really cleaned house in Hommlet for the next modpack.

 

Re: Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

You mean like, "sorry, I don't sell in the middle of the night"? Please? :nervous:

 

Re: Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

@wizG, Brother Smyth's already in the process of getting a re-write.

Re: late night vendors, I'm not so sure about that anymore after some consideration. It seems we have to weigh the options of realism or 'attempted realism' vs. convenience. Would a player be pleased to discover that he has to click a few more buttons in order to pass time or rest until the merchant is willing to deal with him, particularly when there's no real RP payoff (aside from maybe patting yourself on the back afterwards because you RPed)?

In addition, the engine doesn't seem to be able to support utter realism, which would have all these people in their beds at night with their jammies on and their doors locked. If the only difference after we enter their residences at 3:00 a.m. is that they (standing there in their street clothes - or armor, as it were) refuse to deal with us, is that really that much more realistic or preferable? And again, is the payoff vs. irritation thing a winner? I'm doubtful about that.

I suspect more and more these days that the very purpose (and unavoidable nature) of the CRPG is to cut just these kinds of corners. Just as PCs don't need to eat or relieve themselves, so do NPCs have no standards about when they're open for business, and neither implementation slows the game down. :shrug:

 

Re: Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

Brother Smyth is going to change as far as that goes, incidentally. We can't have him go inside at night because that's been shown to break an NPCs connection with their shop inventory (a bad thing), but instead he will move back into the shadows near his forge and stop hammering.

 

Re: Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

Well, we can make Brother Smythe go inside, its just that much more work. But then we can also make folks who have upstairs lofts go up and use them (except the weavers - they can go in the back bedroom). Currently we have a day-night cycle in the game that does very little, and we have at least 4 upstairs areas that I can think of that are never used and never visited by players after the first time. I'd rather make use of what we have than lament what we don't.

 

Re: Let's Talk About Hickory Branch

I thought we were talking about vendors specifically, but yeah, we can move people into their bedrooms at night if you like. I've already done some of that sort of thing.

 

Relevant posts separated from the Hickory Branch thread ...

A few general Hommlet updates:

I've been working to alter NPC day/night standpoints as suggested above, which has of course led to bigger and better things. Among the changes are that I'm slowly adding .mobs for all the NPCs that it seems should actually be there but aren't, like Roddy (the manservant for Filliken's family) and Meleny's little brother and sisters. Also, Percy and Gwynneth are getting six children, as there's mention of an invisible "family" in their dialogue and there are six extra beds in the house. Also, Kent and the other seven grandchildren of Mathilde are going to be properly mobbed in instead of spawned (that caused all kinds of crazy problems - all other newly mobbed children wanted to immediately march toward the spawn children's waypoints in Mathilde's yard like some sort of creepy Lord of the Flies batallion). And the myseriously absent two sons of Mathilde will be added (working around the place by day), as well as wives for each of them since there's no mention of any motherly disasters befalling all those grandchildren. (Coincidentally, there are precisely the right number of beds in the house for all of these persons.) Each of the children will follow a fairly mundane set of waypoints by day and be up in their bedrooms by night. Likewise the adults will be in their bedrooms by night.

In addition ... new day/night standpoints for most of the Welcome Wench patrons, including Furnok hustling people outside by day, Turuko, Zert, and Kobort going upstairs by day, and Spugnoir going upstairs by night. Many generic citizens also added in various locations by day and night (including the WW, the grove, the Church of SC, outside the town hall, etc.). Hopefully this will help to make Hommlet seem like its actually alive and not a ghost town.

This all raises a question however: is there any known impact to system performance by having a lot of .mobs wandering around on any given map? I haven't seen any slowdowns on my system, but ToEE being ToEE I'm not too sure.

I'm slowly making my way through town ...

 

Thats good about the children - I tried adding a few to the labour camp (as per the module) but got CTDs essentially caused by what you described. I think adding a new proto or two for the new kids might be easier though, and just leave Mathilde's grandkids as they are.

There shouldn't be an impact since the game doesn't worry about mobs in far away sectors at any given moment. It won't be that different to any of the temple levels, some parts of which have a lot of bugbear mobs. I think

 

Too late - it's already done. :thumbsup:

I notice there seems to be a slight advantage to a .mob NPC over a spawned one, btw: that slight delay before the spawn appears (waiting a second for the heartbeat to fire or something?) goes away.

I've added a couple kids to the leatherworker's group as well ... the wife's dialogue mentions them. Soon there will be kids running all over the place.

[edit]

How many kids are there supposed to be in the labor camp?

 

The camp should be "10 peasant labourers and associated train - women, children, stray dogs etc". Also, Jayfie should be a second level fighter, Str 17, with a +1 dagger: I have no idea if he does or not