Beginning my next mission, already stumbling at the first hurdle

meraxa

Well, the first part of the Vinalms Dispute seems to have gone alright, so I'm interested into getting into the second part going. However I am struck by a question I didn't realise I needed to ask, since well, the bulk of the interaction with NPCs was through dialogue pop-ups, or someone who was just standing around.

Now however I want an NPC to walk into the scene after his initial entry - ie, going up to the player character and another NPC they're conversing with, or at least winding up in the general area. But I'm not sure if that's actually possible to do deliberately, instead of relying on pure luck from wander paths. Any suggestions, or am I just going to have to rework this so the NPC's already in the room?

spiritborn

there's a certainly a way to kind of fake this using a well timed patrol group, but it's a lot of work and has huge limits to what you can accomplish. Though "off-screen" transitions are much easier and flexible to do.

duncanidaho11

Here's what I do when I want to give the sense that contact NPC's are moving around between dialog.

1. Spawn the NPC in one place
2. Despawn that NPC
3. Spawn a duplicate NPC (possibly with a different animation) in another place

You can also state in text that the NPC [Looks up from console, approaches you]. This is my go-to for fine actions.

Visible stage directions like "walk to location X, do thing Y" are virtually impossible to setup as smoothly as you see in a standard video game cut scene. So the approach to take is to embrace the Foundry for what it is, virtual puppet theater. There'll be plenty of ways in which our string-bound characters won't be able to pass for living, breathing humans but so long as we can tell a good story it doesn't matter (because it's audience imagination that's giving life to the words and objects they see before them.)

meraxa

Duly noted, and thanks for the suggestions. Will see what I can do once I've finished with work for the day.