Coming in PANPC 2.0.12: Real Time Response

One of PANPC's shortcomings has always been the lack of ability to immediately respond to combat events. There's almost always a delay of some kind.

This is mostly due to script lagging: in the Bethesda system, the game slows down script processing on a variable basis in order to keep FPS fairly solid. As script overhead increases, and more script activity is happening at once, all scripts increasingly lag. This in turn means that anything in PANPC that involves detecting a situation, figuring out a response, and then implementing the response, can potentially take a long time to execute (as long as 10 seconds or more).

In the past, I've mostly dealt with the problem by hiding it, adjusting the social mechanics to require less real time response on an individual basis.

So this weekend I found myself thinking about the Death Warning problem.

This is the situation where you are able to kill an enemy quickly, but the guy standing right next to him doesn't notice or care. It's a good example of a problem that requires a real time solution that isn't vulnerable to script lagging. I've tried to solve it in the past without any real success - the additional code only ever made the problem worse.

For some reason, though, this time a solution popped into my head. A simple, cheap, easy, event-based solution that meant not only that I could rip large chunks of old code out of the PANPC codebase, but I could very quickly implement real time responses for local deaths, combat starts, distractions, anything I wanted.

So that's coming in 2.0.12.  The first feature that I implemented with this solution was car explosion avoidance. You can see it at work in the video above.

Following that was a real time Death Warning mechanic. Starting in 2.0.12, there should be a lot less faction-ally indifference to nearby murders. I've also completely redesigned the Distraction system and am working to upgrade a number of other legacy systems to use this cleaner real time response option.

This all means that a significant amount of code is being removed from the PANPC codebase, turning 2.0.12 into an optimization release as well.

Stay tuned.

My best,

- G.