how to make npc contacts enemies

wuubb

sorry if this sounds like a stupid question, but im making my first foundry mission and im just trying to have 1 NPC contact (like a klingon ship for example) fight you. however, when i go into NPC contacts in the foundry database library, the only 2 behaviors for NPC contacts both say they wont enter combat. the NPC groups though, you can make fight you, but those are multiple ships, and im looking for just 1 ship for right now (keep things simple). how do i go about creating just 1 enemy NPC to fight?

thank you and any help is greatly appreiated

ashkrik23

Only way to do it is get an enemy group, put the costume of your contact on one of the enemies, put that enemy right over the spawn point of your contact. After that, set the contact to disappear when the enemy fighting objective starts, and set the enemy group to appear during that objective.

markhawkman

ashkrik23 wrote: »

Only way to do it is get an enemy group, put the costume of your contact on one of the enemies, put that enemy right over the spawn point of your contact. After that, set the contact to disappear when the enemy fighting objective starts, and set the enemy group to appear during that objective.

Yeah that works reasonably well, It's not perfect, but enh.....

zorbane

Yea the problem would be you see the enemies spawning aka beaming in.

Another way to do this is to have an invisible wall between the player and the enemies.

stoutes

There's one thing how you can let it "seem" as if you're fighting only one NPC.

Add an enemy group to the map, rename the contacts from #1 to #7 (or more, depending on the group). Then do a map-review; you should see two or three ships at most.

Take one of the ships which was visible (let's take #4). Place the rest (red dots; the enemy ships) in the other corner of the map.

An enemy group tends to get close to eachother before fighting, so the best thing you can do is put a couple of heavy friendly groups near the enemy ships to destroy them beforehand.

This way you can "fake" the player he only needs to fight one enemy.

thegreendragoon1

Yeah placing an enemy behind an invisible wall is my preferred method to have a pre-fight chat between a player and an enemy NPC. You just have a map dialog triggered by a reach marker when the player gets close. Once the dialog is complete, drop the wall and the npc will open fire.

As to separating groups, it can be done, but is very tricky. Groups don't like to separated and will try very hard to come back together, even poping through walls. Also, if members of the group are too far away, it can cause hiccups in the remaining NPC's behavior. Also things such as kill objectives won't trigger as the entire group isn't dead.

markhawkman

It is exploitable for enemy backup scenarios though.

Example:
place 4 mobs on a ground map.

take one ensign from each group and move it to a fifth location to create a "fifth" enemy group.

Set the objective so that the player needs to fight them. Not necessarily a "Kill" objective, but something where you can't simply walk past them.

When the player fights your "group" of ensigns they win easily, but this attracts the rest of the mobs that those ensigns were part of.

If you spaced them properly, each mob will arrive one at a time after you killed the first group.

On second thought I should test that sometime....

drogyn1701

Yeah that would need to be tested, I think there's possibly some variables that would mess it up. You're correct that if you engage one mob in a group, the rest will come running at you. I've used this to my advantage in a mission.

Question is, if you place the other mobs in the group too far away, will they fail to spawn?

markhawkman

That might also need tested. I'm not sure, but I think you can move one member quite a ways from the main group.

markhawkman

Well I did some... preliminary testing, far away enemies had issues finding me, but for enemies with no obstructions it worked fine. But that was preview mode. I haven't tested it in the live server yet.