Freeport

A takeaway from RoachWorks Inc. was being too rigid in my implementation and not allowing for a system that scaled appropriately and required a lot of hand-tuning to make look right.

Coming into Freeport I wanted to alleviate this by storing my quest variables in a higher-level form.

I settled on using global variables to distinguish the form the level would take.

• If the player picked Quiet, killing guards or civilians will automatically fail the quest.
• In the event the player steals the waiter's uniform, there is a global variable tied to the outfit the player is wearing. All actors in the level can read this variable at any time and adapt their dialogue accordingly.
• This also applies to doors that lock and unlock during different stages of the quest depending on the path chosen.

This let me keep the majority of the script in a centralized place within the quest which helped with debugging and balancing.

I did run into a major issue with timing the start of the Opera. The player would only be allowed inside the Opera house after 6pm in game.

• Sometimes the player would start the quest after 6pm, so when they would "wait" for the opera, the script to read the in-game time would not fire.
• I learned a downside of storing variables globally is they can trigger at unintended times so to hinge the progression of the entire quest on them is dangerous.

However, seeing that the script was tied to a certain quest stage, I already had a gate in place.

I set up a simple while loop during this quest stage that would read game time stored as an integer.

• By circumventing the game's time-reading function using global variables, I was able to solve an issue that the global variable system caused.
• Additionally, I forced the mod itself to start at 11AM in-game as a failsafe.

Having multiple NPCs on screen to sell the idea of something larger was an important consideration from the beginning.

In conjunction with using a higher level framework, I decided on storing the actors and their desired behaviors into arrays that could be stepped through with minimal maintenance work.

I had to establish a main actor along with a main AI package that could be inherited by the other patrons.

The next step was to set up the array of objects (seating, idle positions, etc.).

After the initial test of this system, I had to adjust some actors spawn positions ( due to actors bumping into each other while crossing paths to their seats).

• The reactions of the NPCs to the raiders did not need adjustment (except to secretly nerf the patron's HP).
• I am happy with how organic this implementation looked in the final product and how it informed my approach to controlling large amounts of AI in a scalable fashion.