People and monsters appearing out of thin air

One of the larger annoyances I've experienced lately is enemies spawning out of thin air in areas that have already been cleared, and promptly killing me in a pincer . For undead this is fine, they claw themselves out of the ground, that makes sense and it makes them different. For cultists though, if there are players about, can we have the spawn from tents or buildings and the run over to their patrol points? Instead of dragons spawning on a mountaintop, couldn't we have a cloud in the sky that they drop through? Not only would this improve the suspension of disbelief, but you could add mechanics for temporarily disabling spawns by destroying tents or purifying the ground to let parties push back a tide of enemies to reach a goal.

 

Totally agree! Respawn in sight of players is one of the things I hate in MMOs.

 

Maybe the use of some of the rocks or other out of sight spawning places, then having them move to there proper places? or maybe just the edges of the instances?

Sounds like a programing thing which I don't know how difficult that may be.

~Time Lord~

 

Depends on how they programmed in spawns. Based on what I've seen, spawn points exist independent of spawns which means that it should be possible for Port to add a new parameter "fallback spawn point" to them. Then they'd have to create non-spawn points and place them on the map. Finally, they'd have to add the logic to the spawn action to detect players nearby, redirect the spawn to the fallback and and then create the spawn with orders to move to the original spawn point (I'm not sure how the AI director works).

 

It would be a declaration of another coordinate for the creature to navigate to post-spawn. "Spawn here" but then "walk there." That part probably isn't all that hard. The hard part would be going back through all the bad guys and specifying an "out of the way" place for them to pop at and then another for the first destination.

I'm just guessing, but there is likely an invisible spawner object at the actual location they bad guy pops at, and that object would have to be moved within the Unity editor. In short, it's a great idea, but it's a ton of work at this point.

 

it is almost like playing a game of chess, what ever move the game allows the game going to do, to prevent you from, what every your doing, it seems to translate into town npc's as well. animals and people walk in front of your path, npc's not engaging, staring you down like they might ' cop a feel ' or something.

 

It mostly depends on how smart the AI director is. If the AI director can handle "move while engaging to position x, y and then assume behavior z" then most of the work would be adding a dozen or so fallback spawn points per map and assigning spawn points to them. Even with 50 or so scenes, that's only a few days work that can be spread out over several months.

The immediate effect of hiding spawns is nice, but the ability for such a system to make scenes more dynamic is the real win. In such a system, sieges would be real battles with the mercs being able to follow behind the player(s) and help allow for a more epic conclusion than as currently happens.