City Watch to fight Quest Foes

For all talk about quest development - creation, testing, and quest system.
Post Reply
User avatar
Kamer
Posts: 583
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:26 pm

City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Kamer »

I asked a similar question a few months ago on here you can find below and it was discussed to an extent. Basically I touched on giving quest flags to spawn friendly foes or to have a flag to disable the "quest protection" thing on foes spawned by a quest where they will not be targeted by natural spawning enemies.
Interkarma wrote: Tue Mar 12, 2019 10:11 pm Pacify (spell effect) and "restrain foe" (quest action) both operate the same way in back-end by setting enemyMotor.IsHostile=false. This just prevents them from attacking player, it doesn't place them on player's "team" as far as the enemy infighting system works.
I would like to touch on the issue of City Guards not attacking quest foes? They certainly did in vanilla despite how brain dead they were by doing it. In vanilla they would sort of walk in the foes direction and attack instantly killing the foe. I havn't seen many people bring it up and was wondering if this would be fixed? I'm not sure if its even an issue you guys know about cause it seems not many people know that guards did attack enemies. (Enemies would ignore the guards however) They'd attack both enemies from the wilderness and quest related foes.

The easiest solution I'd see is to have at least city watch ignore the quest safety of foes.

User avatar
Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Interkarma »

Quest foes are currently ignored by the infighting so that quest targets are not slain by other nearby monsters.

It's certainly possible to change this behaviour using a custom quest action or flag, or just exclude for guards. At this time, Allofich/R.D. maintains all enemy AI. He'd be the best one to respond on this. Otherwise I'm happy to help once out of pre-alpha and my time allows for it.

User avatar
Kamer
Posts: 583
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:26 pm

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Kamer »

It's just something that irks me that was in vanilla. I'd also rather see DFU go into alpha first before minor things like this are looked on. You could put in quest actions but imo it wouldn't affect many quests. Only guard foes are quest important at least in vanilla. Send foe or create foe's were always used to trouble the player. Regardless, City Watch would attack them. If anything I think the others should change to be targeted and guard foes should be left a lone as they are, from what I recall, always the quest important objective. A custom quest command could be implemented as well to give the option to quest maker to decide if the send or create foe enemies should be ignored by the infighting/city guards.

User avatar
Jay_H
Posts: 4061
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2015 1:54 am
Contact:

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Jay_H »

Kamer wrote: Tue Jul 09, 2019 3:42 amOnly guard foes are quest important at least in vanilla. Send foe or create foe's were always used to trouble the player.
That's partially true. The zombie for "Soul of a Lich" arrives via Send Foe and should be killed by the player alone.

User avatar
Kamer
Posts: 583
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:26 pm

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Kamer »

Jay_H wrote: Tue Jul 09, 2019 5:36 am
Kamer wrote: Tue Jul 09, 2019 3:42 amOnly guard foes are quest important at least in vanilla. Send foe or create foe's were always used to trouble the player.
That's partially true. The zombie for "Soul of a Lich" arrives via Send Foe and should be killed by the player alone.
Which is why for the few that you can probably count on your hand, we can give a quest command to make any send/create foe quest important.

User avatar
Orbarth
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Aug 07, 2019 10:37 pm

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Orbarth »

Hello,

Please, can we have an option (so people not wanting it or being concerned with killing quests target themselves could keep it off) to have quests generated monsters not being protected from the infighting system anymore ?

I mean by example as i play with the most excellent Warm Ashes, i often run into wilderness situation when i sleep in which monsters that are both spawned by the mod internal quests and by normal gameplay are of type that shouldn't be neutral to each other and seeing them going along break a bit the immersion.

There's also the situation that happen in cities with guards not being interested in defending their city from a monster invasion (i got one situation when the orcs of a castle siege from which i escaped tracked me down to town)

User avatar
Jay_H
Posts: 4061
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2015 1:54 am
Contact:

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Jay_H »

I doubt that's going to be possible. Most quests place a monster down in a dungeon who you have to seek out and kill. The problem with making that monster fight others is that players will enter a dungeon and, passing through an empty hallway, will see something like "You slay the nightblade and take the document he was carrying." for no reason. It's a big conflict in the quest system.

Theoretically it could be implemented on a per-monster basis in the quest file, but that's a deviation that's not yet planned for. It wouldn't be in 1.0 or prior. If Interkarma or someone else disposes of the time to put it in, that'd be an individual decision.

User avatar
Orbarth
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Aug 07, 2019 10:37 pm

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Orbarth »

I don't think there's a problem of immersion when the action is in a dungeon, after all it's easy to imagine on a mission where there's a mad wizard to target that everything you see in his lair has been somehow enslaved to serve him or fear the target power enough to leave him alone, so the quest target being protected from infighting makes sense.

It's more for wilderness/town encounters that it's a noticable problem that guards or other active npc being passive to monsters generated by quests and vice versa, as it makes the world feel less alive.

User avatar
Jay_H
Posts: 4061
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2015 1:54 am
Contact:

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Jay_H »

Orbarth wrote: Sat Aug 10, 2019 10:47 pm I don't think there's a problem of immersion when the action is in a dungeon, after all it's easy to imagine on a mission where there's a mad wizard to target that everything you see in his lair has been somehow enslaved to serve him or fear the target power enough to leave him alone, so the quest target being protected from infighting makes sense.
That's the reason quest NPCs are protected from infighting. To remove that protection would make them potential casualties without the player's involvement. Until there's a way to selectively make NPCs protected and unprotected, a blanket system won't work.

User avatar
Kamer
Posts: 583
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:26 pm

Re: City Watch to fight Quest Foes

Post by Kamer »

The team system isn't finished and is still experimental right? We'd also have to wait on that being "Finished" before you could ad a tag on a monster to have a specific team besides the quest.

Post Reply