Patrolling Enemies

[Honzo]

I don't know if this is possible in the games current state, but it seems like it MAY be easy. Have you ever considered scripting certain monsters to patrol back and forth in different routes? For instance, by doing this you could do WORLD BOSSES in certain locations but they can MOVE AROUND. Maybe once a week? Every few days? Or just use it for regular mobs and have them patrol around, potentially putting more people in danger. It sounds like it make the game feel more "dangerous" when not pvping. This seems like a pretty fucked up dire world, so shouldn't we feel it close to us? Just a suggestion! Loving everything so far and loving how transparent you have been about everything since forever now! haha. Hope to hear your thoughts. ^_^

[NiteHawk]

I don't know if this is possible in the games current state, but it seems like it MAY be easy. Have you ever considered scripting certain monsters to patrol back and forth in different routes? For instance, by doing this you could do WORLD BOSSES in certain locations but they can MOVE AROUND. Maybe once a week? Every few days? Or just use it for regular mobs and have them patrol around, potentially putting more people in danger. It sounds like it make the game feel more "dangerous" when not pvping. This seems like a pretty fucked up dire world, so shouldn't we feel it close to us? Just a suggestion! Loving everything so far and loving how transparent you have been about everything since forever now! haha. Hope to hear your thoughts. ^_^

The issue with this is latency of the server. In games its easier to have a radius and stop NPCs that don't need to be updated. I.E> if no enemies are around stop updating or update very slowly. In our game its a bit more difficult. NPCs can do this, but if there was 4000 npcs doing this it would cause havoc to the server.

Generally one day there might be a better way to do this, but I feel even if we had lets say, 'UPDATE if a player has been around in the last 5 minutes)' if there was 50 pepole online, almost all the npcs would again be doing this.

I'd need to make more of a separate thread that runs through a loop of NPCs to do this I think. Aka one thread, updates all the npcs at once, the more npcs there are, the slower it would probably take to update, but it wouldn't effect the server so hard. The issue still comes from NPCs moving though, because regardless an NPC moving will lock the rooms player/npc add/remove list cause of sync issues if they all tried to access the array all at once. Thus it will slow down overall movement and may generate lag. Though I guess a solution to that would be move X npcs per second maximum, blahblah.

Overall it's a neat idea, and I do plan at least on adding a few npcs moving around soon, but it's sort of on the back burner until some other stuff is sorted first. 8)