Skorak's Systems/NPC Development Blog - !Picture heavy!

[Skorak]

Skorak's Dev Blog

This time without EVERGREEN's Ever Given blocking all of Manchester.

---

I figured in the means of transparency(where it's not a spoiler) and to show off what and maybe how I'm doing things I should try making one of these Blogs.

While I might come back to explain past things I made like Pennsylvania or the Cortez PvP Zone I'll focus on things I'm working on right now. Purpose is of course to give you insight but also to collect feedback on in progress works.

---

Large NPC Ships

---

The first thing I'd like to talk about is my basic npc restoration. I've been weirdly obsessed with the old large ship names and designators for over ten years for no reason I truly understand. And now I can finally bring it back.

In the last patch we already saw the return of capital ship names, designators and symbols for at least Liberty:

Now for an upcoming update(not the next one) I restored the basic civilian transports to be proper transports again:

Goals of this:
• Part of step 1 of a bigger revolution of npcs coming back in a more meaningful way.
• Immersion restoration from vanilla. All large ships had ship names as they are having multiple people on the ship.
• Easier marking of npcs in the list(transports show up with the transport symbol, battleships have a battleships symbol etc. (looking into if we can have that for the cruisers as well)
• Making more encounters with hand made npcs that just happen in the world. Some might reward something, some might just be events that you can see happen to make the world feel more alive. Lets be honest the pathetic npcs we have right now are just kinda weird.

As you need to make a copy of every single large_ship in the game to restore this, it's not something I want to do in one wave to avoid issues.
So I picked the generic civilian ships as almost all sirian corporations use these.

If you have further feedback in regards to npcs, I'd love to hear it. @Val Also did a great rework for the next patch that will hopefully make ambient npcs less of a bother for capital craft and large transports. So look forward to that.

This concludes my first post for this and I hope to talk about systems edits and the thought process behind them in the next post.

---