Guard Patrolling the Citywalls

Post » Mon Nov 09, 2009 5:01 pm

Ok, i posted about this yesterday in the quick questions thread. I heard it wasn't possible to let a guard patrol the citywalls. I've read about subspaces today and it seemed to me it should be possible when i use a subspace. And it works, though be it partially, making this probably a scripting error.

About the placing of the subspace:
I placed a citywall with a tower in a worldspace. The tower has two interiors. Inside on the first floor is a door connecting to the worldspace outside and a ladder connecting to the second floor. The second floor has a trapdoor back down and a door that exits to the top of the citywalls. The first Xmarker ("XMarkerTestBegin") is outside near the door to the tower on groundlevel. The second ("XMarkerTestEnd") is on top of the citywall not far from the door to the second floor. I've placed a rather large subspace to include both the entrance towards the citywalls AND the Xmarker "XmarkerTestEnd". This is important, both the door and xmarker must be within the same subspace, i've tried other configurations that didn't seem to work.

About the packages:
I've been experimenting for over 1 1/2 hour now with various packages, but i can't get it to work properly. (I must say that these are one of my first packages.)
When i use a "one way ticket" configuration the guard goes up and stays there bouncing between gridpoints. The config exists out of a travel package and a wander package and a startpatrolpackage. The travelpackage goes from XMarkerTestBegin to XMarkerTestEnd.

When i use a "return ticket" configuration he walks 2 times between XmarkerTestEnd and XmarkerTestBegin. The config exists out of the same as above only than i added a travelpackage back to XMarkerTestBegin. With this config it seems he just skips the wanderpackage.

For all packages i have set a schedule so i could easily check whether or not the package launches. The walk up starts at 18:00 (6 PM) and lasts for 2 hrs. The wander starts at 20:00 (8 PM) and lasts for 6 hrs. The way back starts at 2:00 (2 AM) and lasts 2 hrs. This schedule i haven't changed during the tests. Also i have noticed that the package often start around their scheduled time (up to 37 minutes earlier and 16 minutes later).

Help is much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Wouter

Edit: It was a scripting error. I put the BeginMarker as location in the package, so he went back every time to wander there.... sorry for the inconvenience.
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sexy zara
 
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Post » Mon Nov 09, 2009 12:22 pm

To clarify, the problem is not that you can't put guards on the walls, but rather that you really can't have them moving around much on the walls unless all portions of that wall can be reached without entering an interior or using a door that leads to the other side of the tower. The reason being that a patrolling NPC will either stop moving upon entering that interior (since they are no longer in a loaded cell), or will loop as soon as they try to use a teleport door linked to the same worldspace. Even if you only want a guard to watch one particular part of the wall that is all reachable, in most cases he won't react to anything on the ground, or will end up running to the nearest interior that leads to the ground, which often defeats the point of having a guard up there to begin with.

If you're determined to have a guard on the wall just for aesthetics, and acknowledge that by having that extra NPC(s) in the scene (thereby lowering performance or the number of people you can have wandering around), you're almost always best just having a non-guard class NPC on the wall in a guard uniform, with a wander package, and with low level processing disabled. You can still add them to the guard faction so that they might still shoot an arrow or two your way should you be fighting the guards, but you don't want them trying to arrest you and just getting stuck somewhere.
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Leonie Connor
 
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