NPC Astronauts idea (make statinons / ships look alive)

Mollar shared this feedback 3 years ago
Submitted

Hello and thank you for this spectacular game!

It's not that long ago I found your replay tool tutorial and suddenly I got an idea of how to realize the lack of neutral NPCs (Astronauts) on large ships and stations.

In replay tool you record your moves and let the game replay the sequence in the next reload of the "world". My general idea was to utilize this mechanism and let the player have the possibility to create dummy NPC Astronaut and "program" his moves to walk around the station, use decorative blocks (sit on the couch, at the table, use the toilet etc.), do emotes or even let him use his hand tools (but only for decorative purposes, eg. there will be an engineer with the sparkling welder turned on so it would look like he is welding something).

At the beginning would be enough just to create an NPC Astronaut, tell him where to go (what local position) and what actions he should do and then he would just go and do it repeatedly forever. Something like drones are following list of waypoints in remote control block.

I know, there is a lot of problems and open questions of how the character would behave or react to unexpected scenarios from block being grinded under him or hitting him by a rifle fire (would it be even possible to hit that NPC?), how to solve collisions with real players and other NPCs, how to solve the situation when NPC occupies decorative/functional block real player wants to use (e.g. cockpit) and so on, and so on.

NPC Astronaut could be created for reasonable cost in terms of components in a new decorative block (e.g. similar to Cryo Chamber) so creation of NPC Astronauts could be, since the whole thing is a decorative thing, a nice addition in some DLC. NPC Astronaut would be bonded to the ship / station he was created on (i.e. he will be permanent inhabitant). Maybe limit of his reach could be even safe zone to give him ability to walk outside on bases / habitats.

This is the general idea I have, there is certainly a lot of other opened questions, but those are just the matter of discussions, balance and optimization (either gameplay influencing issues or computational load)

But what I know for sure is that just the presence of "randomly" walking and acting guys on stations and ships would rapidly increase the sense that the world is alive, that there is some place where we dont feel alone anymore although we are surrounded by neverending empty space.

Thank you for concideration of my idea.

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