Weird, I don't remember this happening in Fallout 3, but if you kill an enemy with a sneak attack, all other enemies in the area will respond when they perceive the dead body, entering infinite alarm mode, which makes it impossible to sneak attack anybody. They see the corpse, enter alarm mode, then calm down, but then perception triggers again, they kind of re-perceive the dead body and re-enter alarm mode immediately. It breaks the stealthy approach to the game entirely. Problem is, dead bodies are never flagged as done, so they are always considered fresh corpses. This isn't right. I mean, if you walk the street in real life and stumble over a dead body, you become alarmed, call the police etc., but at some point you'll come down, but these damn enemies will still be alarmed in a million years if you leave the pc on that long. I now changed the game settings so that the game instant-despawns all dead enemies, otherwise I can't sneak attack anybody. and because enemies despawn complete with all their inventory, I am instant-moving their inventory to the player's inventory before despawning (kind of like in Mass Effect). However, this approach is problematic, because if the entire inventory is moved automatically to the player, enemies will never be able to pick up a weapon from the ground in case you destroy theirs. Obsidian, could you please look into this issue?

Is this a glitch? Never happend to me... Move it to hardware and software issues. Also if they insta-despawn how will you loot 'em? O.o

It's happened in my games and it's a lot more sensible than killing someone in a group and no one else noticing. It would be even more sensible if they went into alert mode for longer but it's better than nothing.

Weird, never happened to me either, sneak-attack-exploit-ery is alive and well in my game, it's quite possible with a high sneak skill to decimate an area one oblivous foe by one. I once sneak-punched Hanlon off his balcony onto a couple of chatting ranger vets below and they didn't flinch, so always assumed that enemies don't react to corpses.

Seems to make sense actualy. Also the bodies should disappear in a few days. I haven't made any sort of sneak or sniper character yet so I wouldn't know ifyour facing a bug or that's how it's set.

To me the enemies noticing the bodies is the best thing. Gives me more targets. What I do is set up my sniping position and kill one in an area that I have a clear field of view on. Then when the others come around to see what's up, take them out. Some of those I get sneaks on too. The deal is, the HUD tells you caution when any enemy is thinking it is in danger, however not all the enemies are in that state, even though they noticed the body. They may have looked around, not seen me, then go back to idle mode. It is really good for getting Raiders or Fiends out of a building.

no, you see, the point is they NEVER leave CAUTION mode, they constantly stay alerted as long as the dead body is there. If you leave the cell, AI evaluation for the enemies in the cell stops, you come back, they go into alert mode again, it's really ridiculous, like I sneak-killed one of the powder gangers in Goodsprings and his friends are running around the dead body in CONSTANT INFINITE ALERT mode, constantly mumbling such crap like "must be jumpy again", they calm down eventually, but then, here goes, they see the dead body again and BAMM! immediately enter ALERT mode again, I can't even hit the VATS key quickly enough. And obviously, I can't sneak attack anybody who's alerted, cause no increased damage this way. So it totally breaks the game. I checked what particular enemies the AI considers and it turns out it will only consider enemies killed by the player. Once an enemy of the player faction detects a corpse flagged as "killed by player faction" (ActionRef.IsKiller player), it will enter alert mode. It doesn't matter to the game if the killed creature is (or rather was) a member of their faction or not, if it's player-killed, it means player is close, means "enter alert mode". That's the game logic here.

Ok, so I tried different approaches, there are a couple of settings in the game that reduce the amount of corpses in the area before the game starts despawning them. I set all values to 1 and now the game engine heartbeat despawns all enemies after a short while, which means the damn AI finally shuts its f... up and calms down so I an sneak attack again. This crap never happened in Fallout 3, don't know why Obsidian would add something that totally breaks the sneak approach to the game. So this fixes the damn problem, but this causes all kinds of other problems, like looting the bodies, obviously. Well, as I said, I am adding scripts to enemies that automatically move their entire inventory to the player upon death. But really, most enemies are just carrying worthless crap, I wouldn't cry if it despawned along with enemies before I can loot it.

The real problem here is that humanoid enemies cannot pick up weapons, when the game transfers inventory to me upon enemy death, for some reason, their crap weapons are not transferred, hell knows why, don't really care, is actually a good thing, I want the weapons to stay on the dead enemies so their allies can pick them up, but the obviousl problem is that the engine despawns them too quickly along with their weapons, so AI controlled NPCs don't have enough time to loot their bodies. Like at Goodsprings, I changed the Goodsprings settler faction to be neutral with the Powder gang, I wanted to kill all enemies myself. So I sneak up on them, drug myself to the brim, sneak shoot 4 enemies to the head, then run out of action points. So there are 2 melee attackers left, I chew a turbo and run away to regen some APs for final shots. Usually, the two remaining enemies would now run to their dead allies to pick up some dynamite and ranged weapons, but BAMM! right after the enemies' inventory is auto-transferred to me, they despawn along with their primary weapons (which, as I said, are not transferred to me for some technical reason). So the idiots run to their allies, try to pick up their weapons, but too late! Funny, actually, but not what I want. This crap is hard-coded and only Obsidian can fix this. Come on, Obsidian, it's not normal if enemies stay alerted forever! In vanilla game, the dead bodies will never despawn until the amount of corpses reaches a critical number, so that means constant alert mode.

There are also probs with enemies that have the plot flag set on them, don't despawn properly, against, constant CAUTION mode on their allies, I'd have to rewrite every single script in the toolset to properly fix all this mess, damn, Obsidian, fix this!

They'll leave caution mode for 1-2 seconds. Their animation will change slightly when this change happens. That's the time to send the next round downrange for another sneak attack kill.


Even better, it takes 1-2 seconds for enemies to enter caution mode after a buddy is sniped dead. With the kill cam set to player view it's possible to speed snipe several enemies before the survivors go on alert. My best is four with the trail carbine doing this.

yep, noticed that as well, as I said, I changed the faction relation in Goodsprings so that Cobbs and his thugs are only hostile toward the player and nobody else. So these morons are just standing there, weapons drawn. I sneak up on them, queue two varmint rifle shots, BAMM! BAMM! two morons drop dead, quickly queue another two, BAMM! BAMM! two more drop dead before they go alert, I quickly hide behind a rock or something and they are none the wiser. Fun! But you see, here's EXACTLY where the problem I described begins - now the enemies see the damn bodies and go alert. Now there's nothing wrong with that, it's the infinite duration that annoys me, because corpses are never marked as done, so remaining enemies will go into instant alarm mode and try to find the player. What's worse, they will always get closer and closer to the player, as if they know where the player is, even IF the player changes position after shooting and despite the silencing weapon! Like I shot them, moved behind the rock to the right, the enemies move to the right as well! I move to the left side of the rock, they move there as well, like they are following me! Yes, Obsidian, I know that the game engine knows where I am, but the damn thugs are not supposed to know since they haven't found me.

Ok, since waiting for Obsidian fixing anything is pointless, something I learnt while fixing at least 5000 bugs on all three NWN2 campaigns, I went ahead and fixed everything myself. 7 hours of extremely boring work. Attached a script to every NPC/creature template in the game and altered the existing scripts. Damn boring, but had to be done. Everything now works thru scripting - when a creature object is killed, the game counts down 15 seconds. After that the corpse inventory is reset (to fix problems with dropped weapons) and the entire inventory is moved to my bag of holding (a little mod I created for myself, basically like the bag of holding in NWN2, there are similar mods on Nexus if you are interested). The 15 sec delay is there to ensure enemies have enough time to go berserk and search for the player a little or pick up the weapon from the ground if they need it. When the delay is up, they are out of luck, after the inventory is moved, the corpse is disabled and marked for deletion. No more damn alerts! Alert time is 5 sec, so 15+5=20 sec aggro time, which corresponds to the vanilla setting of 20 seconds for corpse despawn.

I never really gave this much thought as i like to use silenced weapons alot, so i speed snipe from way the hell away most times. I have noticed things like how they are facing determines the activation of alert status. For example if i have 2 enemies pathing like on patrol if i shoot one while the other is looking the live one gets jumpy, and seems to be able to see where the shot came from even if i took care to make my self difficult to locate like firing from a building or behind something. If i however wait until they turn thier backs on each other i still get alert animation when the live one notices the body but they seem to be confused as the where i took the shot from, which is the whole point of setting up shots from concealment. I find that to be somewhat realistic, so i am not really sure what the OP complaint is. A dead body will cause people to stop doing what they are doing, like all herd beasts and humans are not much different the sight of one of our own dead makes us jumpy, if it is because someone had a heart attack that is one thing but a bullert from nowhere will be disturbing. I mean seriously you and you buddy are sitting down having an overpriced Starbucks and your buddy's head explodes all ofer you and ruins your coffee you would be a bit disturbed, it is only logical. I am not sure what the complaint is other than i can se that bodies i have killed in the beginning of the game are still present on the map if i go back and check just before i do the dam so maybe and easier fix is to change or add a despawn timer to corpses. This should not however be a quick time frame it should be a few days in game so the live NPC will be alert for a few days while the body is there to remind them. Seriously in the Starbucks event how much therapy would be required before you could drink coffee again with out the memory of of the event ruining your coffee?

not to be contrary just a thought
Asai

I kind of like it when an enemy notices when someones head explodes right next to him. ED E makes it possible to snipe at extreme long distances so i do alot of that. The ememies act what i think is pretty realistic most of the time. Even with no silencer it still takes them a long time to figure out where im at if at all before they die. Im so far vats wont pick them up so i really dont know what kind of hits im scoring until i zoom out then it flashes all the hits right in a row. It really doesnt matter to me if they are sneaks or no or even criticals or not because they are all dead before they really have a fix on my position. The few that do figure it out then pull out a machete or spay 200 yards away with an smg or a pistol DEAD. The human enemies r cake enough in this game they dont need to be underequiped and oblivious do they????? Legion all about bringing a knife to a 308 armor pierceing sniper rifle fight. lol

I'm playing FO3 at the mo and have just sniped a Talon patrol (who are looking for me), they were walking in a column about 2yds apart and I sniped the front two from about 25yds without the two following noticing.

wr fan you really only want them to be worried for 20 sec after someone gets killed next to them????? so me and u r in the legion and we re standing there and my head just explodes r u telling me your only going to be worried for 20 sec????? try the rest of your short life. even silencers make noise too it just sounds different on a big rifle then a shot. if bullets hit walls it makes noise. bullet hits skull noise. if people around you start to get sniped you will be worried until you can get to saftey. for the few that would look for a sniper they would not stop for hours. 20 secs lol these people will have ptsd for the rest of their lives if i don t kill them. i bet if you got sniped in that game you would be looking until u found him not 20 secs then just pretend it didn t happen.

Good info. :goodjob: