Lone Survivor

41.69

First, 41.69 (nice) build is still in progress, we’re testing a bunch of changes at the moment and are eager to get it out there, but are still weighing up the cost of disrupting the MP servers with the benefit of the goodies within, and making the call on when we’ll push to unstable and start the release process. We’ll let you know when we know more.

Here’s the changelist of 41.69 thus far! https://pastebin.com/ZhRhKVZi

NPC Narratives

For the blog, we figured a good way to give people something real tasty to sink their teeth into regardless of the lack of fancy vids or pics, would be to show off the text results of our future Narrative NPC system that we discussed a few weeks back planned for Build 43. As we detailed in our first NPC ‘meta’ system explanation, we have a powerful narrative event system that can be used to add context-driven ‘storylets’ together into a somewhat convincing narrative for NPCs when they are away from the streamed-in world. These would define the goals of the NPCs, as well as evolve their situation so that when the player runs into them they have a convincing backstory, or events can transpire to affect those groups when they are not around for the player to witness. They will also drive events with npcs while the player IS present, leading to interesting generated story events for the player to interact with. These events set flags on characters, move their virtual presence along road networks and between houses of which all the rooms on the entire map are accessible even when the tiles themselves have not been streamed in. We can add extra data and tags that change the NPCs states and allow them to experience simplified narrative events that will branch and trigger randomly, and each of these events can have numerous outcomes of which we can attach a line of dialogue recounting the event later, so the characters will be able to sit around a campfire and let the rest know their story, or group members can recount the events of an eventful trip the player wasn’t part of, or what transpired at the safehouse while the player was away. Context-sensitive text scripting is used to modify these lines of dialogue to fit the situation. For example, a tag for a character’s name in the dialogue can be substituted with ‘my mother-in-law, X’ or ‘my nephew, Y’ tracking the relationship between the two characters, or even between the character being spoken about and a third character (‘X’s brother, Y’). Other things such as a town location can be substituted where necessary, and there can be variant lines that are picked based on the characters, their flags, or other environmental conditions. Or just raw RNG, to mix things up a bit. Pat_Bren has been busy coming up with a whole metric ton of varied events and mini-narratives,