Hi all

I’ve been doing some experiments with the Oblivion AI to see how far it can be pushed… I have discovered however that some simple travel or find/ambush packages are failing in certain cells, Typically cells that are busy with a lot of NCPs. Instead of the NCP in question walking to where they are meant to go, or, ambushing the PC to start dialogue they remain still whilst other NCPs around the area continue to run through their own AI packages.

Is there a maximum number of packages that can run in any cell at any one time?
Is there a maximum number of packages a specific NCP can have?

Reloading the busy cell, by exiting it then returning seems to allow these stalled packages to start working.

Can anyone help shed some light on the situation?

I beleive how many AI packages you can have working at one time depends on your computer's RAM. Oblivion is also usually limited to 2GB of RAM without a patch or tweak. I would have expected the game to crash before stalling packages, but I've never pushed my computer to the limit like that.

Cheers...I did wonder if the PC could be a bottle neck...I'm running it on a laptop at the moment whilst building a new rig...hence modding and not playing! :brokencomputer:

Might keep the esp until the new machine is up and running..

Well I'm about to run Extended IC and Crowded Cities 30% at the same time and see what happens...

kool.. I had crowded cities and oblivion alive running.

I got 3 NCPs to stand next to eachother then I used a quest and find/ambush packages and greeting dialogue with the goodbye option ticked to mimic a 4 way conversation between the PC and the 3 NCPs. The 1st NCP says their bit, the quest stage updates, the goodbye option sends the PC back to game mode. As soon as this happens the next NCP cuts in, then the next and so on..

It was working for the first 2 NCPs, then fell over on the third ambush package...until the cell was reloaded as described in my first post.

That doesn't sound like the CPUs been overloaded. Sounds like a scripting or AI error. I can't imagine your game would fail to run 3 AI packages.

lol... No scripting involved, just the Oblivion AI..had prob about another 40 NCPs in the cell (anvil docks) going about thier business too, vanilla and mod added... There were other NCPs with AI inscructions for the same quest stages too...it may be a conflict in The AI... will have another look tonight.

So last night I moved the NCPs who are having the 'conversation' into an internal cell with no other NPCs around. I ran through the sequence and it worked...Each NCP Ambushed and talked to the player in turn...the delay times between the quest stage updating and the ambush packages kicking it ranged from 1 second to 25 seconds...I think I'll keep this esp and try it out on my much faster machine when its ready.

There's a game setting iAINumberActorsComplexScene which appears to define the maximum number of actors allowed to receive full AI processing; actors above this value (default 20) are not fully processed.
You can try increasing the value of the setting and see if you get different behavior, but I wouldn't recommend it as a general solution because 1) users with lower-end CPUs will likely experience poor frame rates and/or 2) the game may do some internal performance querying and ratchet down the AI processing anyway if it's using too much CPU time.

Interesting..

This was one of the purposes of running experiments on a low end laptop..

..this iAINumberActorsComplexScene, do you know how the game controls which NCPs receive their full package? It seemed that it was always the same NCPs in the busy Anvil Dock area that were processing their packages.

My assumption is that it depends on the order in which the NPCs are loaded into high process, which seems to be backed up by your observations. I haven't looked in the game code to confirm this.

The order in which NCPs are loaded into the higher processes...if you're theory is correct then I would assume this means Vanilla NCPs will overide Mod added ones if the 20 slots are filled...