Actors for NPC Groups

stalwartodst

Hey,
For the NPC groups how do the actors work? Are they possible ships that could be used for that role? I've been wondering because I hate the look of the ships they substitute such as the Excalibur and stuff like that.

markhawkman

Ship groups? well, those are complicated, certain ones get used based on the number of players in the mission.

duncanidaho11

You can specify a particular unit of a mob to use a particular costume. This works for both space and ground. Just select the individual actor and click the large "default costume" button. Then you have the complete list of both stock and custom ship/character costumes.

There is however one problem in that you generally can't tell which red dot will correspond to what NPC rank. In all but the lowest tier ground mob there's going to be higher ranked NPC's included and if you want some visual indication of who's who (ex. the main villain being the highest ranked captain unit rather than a cannon-fodder ensign) you will have to do one of two things. Ditto for space mobs, but for that and a slightly different reason too (only some of those units will spawn on solo play, you only get the full mob with multiple players.)

1. Trial and error (which is annoying and requires a good memory while switching between editor and testing.)
2. Label the NPC units in the mob (which you can also do by changing their individual names) one through however many you have. Then take a couple notes on which numbers correspond to which NPC's you see in game. Then you can quickly assign appropriate costumes and change the names back to whatever you need the mission to have.

drogyn1701

A long time ago (not in a galaxy far, far away) an author named Nagorak created this chart showing what space NPCs will have a chance to spawn from each group type, depending on how many players are in the party. Unfortunately, since then the formatting seems to have broken a little bit. But you can still suss it out.

http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/trailers/essential-viewing/ship-scaling-for-npcs/