No, MCA NPCs don't have "schedules", they are randomly generated whenever you enter a cell and they just stand around like any other NPC. In some places, MCA can drop 10-20 FPS, which is pretty major for a console game that runs at 30 FPS.
However, to anyone who says it isn't "realistic" for generic NPCs not to have houses, I ask you this: does everyone who is walking down the streets of New York own a house there?

I got Morrowind 2011 mod compilation, and i can say for a fact that the generic NPCs that were brought in there had "schedules".

Link? I run MCA 6.1, and none of the NPCs added have schedules. Maybe you're referring to Living Cities of Vvardenfell?

Link to Morrowind 2011 : http://www.gamepron.com/file/944/Morrowind-2011-Mod-Compendium/

Includes MCA and an NPC schedule

Perhaps people weren't satisfied with MCA on it's own made an add-on mod for it to include schedules for the NPC's hence why it's in a Compilation Pack.

No, everyone just sleeps on the street. They don't have to own a house but they gotta have a place to sleep and in NYC that equals a massive number of hotels accommodate all the tourists and apartments for the residents.

Like I said you don't have to be able to talk to all of the NPC's but they need have a place to sleep, possessions and purpose whether that be a job or some other reason for being in town such as trade or personal business.

Even if they made simple generic "Travelling Merchant" who went from town to town, stayed in the Inns and what not, and just slap a random name in front "John the Travelling Merchant" and have like 10 of these guys (with different names, of course) wandering around the 5 main cities and the smaller villages.

This could also be done for other generic people who just add a sense of realism to the world

Mark the Dockworker
Steve the Lumberjack
Dan the Librarian

Generic people would still have jobs and a place to sleep. They wouldn't just wander around aimlessly with no point of origin and no destination and that is what many people here are asking for. Even the generic NPCs in FO3 had a place to sleep.

It's predicted, if processing power continues to increase the way it has been, that by 2050 a $1000 dollar computer will equal the processing power of every human being on earth (10 Billion Brains or 200000000000000000000000000 calculations a second) . Although an electronic circuit is different than the neuron's processes of the brain (most of our brain's effort goes toward maintaining the body instead of storing and calculating pure information), but it still gives us a good idea by comparing the two. We may not be able to represent the world in it's entire microscopic/atomic detail, but we should be able to create a fairly life like representation of it. Of course, there is a difference between having a computer capable of doing it and actually doing it with the proper software and development team which would probably take years more to do. Not saying that it will happen, but if our species really wanted to do it, it's entirely possible.

Thinking about destroying ourselves, I of course thought about Fallout. I wonder how much money it would cost to create an underground vault that looked like and operated like one from the game?

Giving someone something to do - a reason to exist - is really, really easy to do procedurally. In the simpliest case, you can just pick from a list of items, filtering out those which aren't applicable to that NPC:

* Looking for a job as [one of jobs available based on skill levels]
* Visiting [one of other NPCs marked as "friend" who owns a residence in town]
* Visiting own family [one of the residences marked as belonging to an NPC who is marked as "family"]
* Working at [one of the workplaces with skill requirements fitting the skill levels]
* Visiting [one of pilgrimage or tourist sites in town]
* Waiting for an audience with [one of the potentates in town]
* Looking to join [one of the guilds available based on skill levels]
* Shopping at [one of the speciality shops in town]
* Trying to sell [wares based on current job, if the job is a "producing" one]
* Spying for [one of other powers/towns]
* Planning a revolution
* Trying to get drunk, laid and entertained, not necessary in that order
* Passing through on the way to [one of the other places which this town is a possible passing point for]
* Looking for a spouse
* Looking for a missing [one other NPC marked as "friend" or "relative" to this NPC, which the story engine decided to set up as "missing"]
... and possibly quite a few more.

i know what's being asked for, i started this thread, though not the original discussion.

i was saying that having things like "Steve the Dockworker" would literally mean he would wake up, work at the docks and have a place to sleep, it's just he is a generic "background" worker and is not important to the PC, you'll still be able to walk up to him, but he might say something like "I am too busy to chat right now, if you wish to chat, go ask around the pubs, they always have something to say"

Yeah, i'm not arguing against that. I just told you twice, what I am against so why are you still at it?

sorry, i just assumed you didn't know.

My bad, as they say "Assumption is the mother of all F[censored]-ups"

Just glad we agree about the topic at hand :foodndrink:

Procedurally generated NPCs means that those individuals are not persistent in the game world and that is not what Bethesda is going for. Generic or not ALL NPCs need to be persistent and they will be thankfully.

No, why wouldn't they be persistent? They just aren't shipped with the game, but once they exist, they can happily exist forever.

That doesn't make any sense. With a system like that you'd find that many of the NPCs don't fit well in the environment much like random conversations between NPCs in OB. They don't need procedurally generated content in order to fill the cities. There will be as many NPCs as the 360 can handle and they will be handcrafted and make sense. If your on the PC you can mod in more, simple as that.

Have you ever followed one? They just walk to the end of the street, turn around and walk back again; which is a bit weird when they're carrying a box or have a pot on their head. They aren't actually taking it anywhere, they're just out for the exercise. They're also really low poly models with a horribly low LoD. Further than 5 feet away and they're walking cubes - you can see the LoD pop in as they get close. But NPC scenery is appropriate for Assassin's Creed because it's an action game. In a RPG I want to be able to talk to people.

A 'realistic' or 'acceptable' population for a capital city is subjective anyway. Go to Helsinki - especially at this time of year when everyone is away at their summer houses - and you'll probably get a "where is everybody?" feeling. But that's just comparing it to London or New York which are ridiculously overpopulated. In the medieval period/middle ages (which TES kind of emulates) the population was far far lower everywhere.

Actually, properly used procedurally generated assets (not just NPCs) fit better into the environment than manually generated ones. After all, the computer can easily do all the menial tasks (like ensuing the NPCs have clothing, food, place to sleep, own everything they are supposed to use, schedules which work, enough space to live, and a thousand parameters and constraints more) perfectly every single time, for nearly unlimited amount of times. People can't.



Nobody "needs" procedurally generated content. It just makes life easier for the game designers and creates a significantly more self-consistent game world if used properly.

Also, what the hell do those comments have to do with the persistence of those NPCs, or the lack thereof?



In the medieval times, towns and cities had way, way bigger population density than most modern cities, extreme cases like Singapore or Shanghai excluded.

London in the middle ages was particularly packed as it's city size didn't expand at a rate to match it's population growth. (Imperial City in Oblivion is the same lore wise).

it wasn't until AFTER the Black plague that officials realized the problems the city had been having but by that time 2/3rds of the population had been wiped out and there was little need for city growth.

The fact that most cities in the middle ages didn't expand the sizes of there cities at a rate which was acceptable to accommodate population increases further disproves this point.

Comparing it to Modern Day New York i agree with, As they aren't building Out so much as UP leading to much busier streets.

Are you kidding me? No randomly generated content can be more fitting than purposefully handcrafted content...ever.


Randomly generated content is not consistent by it's very nature.

Lets be honest here, your not looking for consistency. You want different persistent NPCs to populate the cities each time you play through the game. But it's not necessary when the lowest common denominator(360) can only handle a certain amount of NPC in that small area. In OB most NPCs stayed in their homes all day but that is not going to be the case in Skyrim. Most of the residents are going to have jobs so they will be going outside and doing those jobs and the cities will seem much more populated than OB's cites. What do you think random NPC's will do to the game when to many end up on screen at the same time? It wouldn't work on the consoles but it would make a great mod for the PC.

I didn't write about randomly generated content, though. I wrote about procedurally generated content.

In the programming context, "procedural" is to "random" like "a painting" is to "some buckets of colour thrown on a canvas by a blind monkey".

:facepalm: Whatever dude, I think I'm done here. Carry on.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1111179-why-do-people-hate-procedurally-generated-content.

One of my favorite things to do after completing Oblivion was to follow characters in the game and see where they worked, where they went, what they did and where they lived. I'd snoop among their belongings in their home to see what they liked. It was a bit of getting to know the NPCs and I enjoyed it. We couldn't do that with the stagnant characters in Morrowind. I loved those schedules. I also enjoyed how you'd be out in the wilds and along would come someone from the nearest town hunting for food. Those schedules and wanderings and jobs made the NPCs seem much more alive and interesting. I hope this is improved upon.

I also liked the first line a new NPC would give us when we first met them in Oblivion. It was always fun and interesting. I did hate that once they said that introductory line, they would never say it again. I worry a bit about how the NPCs in FO:3 had little to offer in the way of conversation unless they were related to a quest. I do hope they don't bring that to TES.

The curse of fully voice acted dialogs has bought us many problems, one of which is what you are pointing at.

It has also quite limited how an AI character can talk to us, and how versatile the quests can ultimately become.

If we had acceptable quality procedurally generated voices for any character, a role in the quests could be filled by any character that would fulfill the role's other perquisites, and the race, age and gender of that character would not matter any more.

You could add lots and lots of different replies for any situation and any character could voice them out and there would be no restriction and time constraints on what could be added to the dialogs and situational remarks, or changed in the last moments.

I hope we soon migrate to the next stage and embrace http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1108155-xzzz.

Synthesized voice overs? I think you need to lay off the Skooma.