One small thing that is starting to bug me more and more is how empty the streets are in towns. I have a mod that spawns enemies that works extremely well now, I have been wondering a lot lately about applying some of my tricks for that mod to a mod that would fill the streets in the main towns with "extras".

These NPC would NOT have any use except to just filling up the area around the player to create the atmosphere that I see missing for now.

So they would be spawned and deleted dynamically around the player and have extremely minimal code attached to them (no AI except for a wander package that would keep them just walking around near the player while in the town.

I welcome any modder to run with this idea as I am more interested in just having such a mod made and working well than making it a project for myself. However I may start on this idea once I get back to skyrim from my "Wolfenstein the new order" break from Skyrim.

I will need to look and see what SKSE and vanilla functions there are to remove AI form the actors and rename them as they will be spawned using local actors as "seeds" (as I do in my enemies spawn mod). Then add a wander package to stay close to the player while the player is in town but outdoors. I guess I will need a script on the player to handle the spawns and deletions.

Can anyone add to my plans any ideas on how to minimize the impact this will have on the game resources?

I can delete them if combat breaks out in the town (they will run for their lives or cower refusing to engage in combat) so this should have almost no impact on combat.

Have I thought of everything?

Hi there, Duke. Surely you're aware of the other "Populated" mods that do this, as well as mods like inconsequential NPCs, etc?

Not to say that another one wouldn't be worthwhile - it sounds like yours would be different because of the dynamic spawning/unspawning?

I am talking about making new kind of group of VOLATILE actors that are only hollow, empty headed space filler window dressing PROPS.

I think Spookyfx is not referring to placing persistent actors (like 'Interesting NPCs' and 'Inconsequential NPCs), but 'random spawns' that will be dynamically unloaded even without the player having to leave the cell or zone (which even 'Populated Cities' does not do), but just by merely walking around. Think in terms of game engines that are actually able to simulate a crowded urban environment without choking to death, like the 'Assassin's Creed' and the 'Grand Theft Auto' series.

This has been a wet dream for players dissatisfied the (aging) Gamebryo based engine used by Bethesda in Oblivion, FO3, and now Skyrim, which has been notoriously poor at handling massive loads of NPCs, such that every Bethesda sandbox has seemed like it just survived a plague that de-populated the land your character is supposed to be saving. I still recall walking through the Imperial City in Oblivion, the capital of the Empire, and seeing a handful of NPCs moping around in the streets. I guess the population of Cyrodil must have died trying to build the massive cities which barely house anyone. There were almost as many guards as there were civilians...what sort of militarized police state do these people live in? The idea here is that you don't actually need to load a massive number of NPCs, just enough as far as the player can see at any given time in the cities to create the appearance of it.

I'd certainly love to see such a mod. My only concern would be the inevitable performance hit, both on relatively modest modded setups (like mine) and more heavily modded load orders where players are using combinations of mods like 'Player Headtracking' and 'Wet n' Cold' that is already stressing their game when they are in populated areas.

um, Skyrim does not use Gamebryo it uses a new engine called Creation made specifically for Skyrim

Honestly, i cannot really think of any game where this is actually possible. Even then though, even cities did not have massive amounts of people to begin with up until modern times.

These people you see in the streets CAME to the city (from surrounding sources) to buy and sell and for other "business", You see this documented in many period paintings. I am not talking about populating the city I am talking about populating the streets during the day.

Yes it is, it just depends on how heavy the script is and what would be the gain compared to actually having tons of NPCs around the place.

Modder named Abot made a script for me few years ago that spawned NPCs around the city based on the player's camera angle, reference distance, time of the day and FPS count, in order to have as much NPCs as current player's PC can handle. It was done with vanilla scripting so I'm pretty sure Skyrim should be able to achieve something similar as well.