RELEASED Better Crew and NPC Behavior 1.4.1

rl.starbound submitted a new mod:

Better Crew and NPC Behavior - This mod improves NPC behaviors, focusing on improved shipboard behavior of the crew.

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I know I've already mentioned this in my review for your mod, but I might as well re-iterate that some combat enhancements for NPCs would be greatly appreciated to have. All that's really needed to be done in my eyes is that npcs need to be taught how to use melee weapon combos, to aim properly with ranged weapons (or if making them aim better is too much, giving them aimbot instead), and having them fire ranged weapons for longer would all go a long way in making npcs more formidable in combat.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that NPCs (both friendly and hostile) need improved combat AI. As is, crew are relatively useless at combat, and hostile NPCs are pushovers. NPCs, in general, also need better survival AI, such as the common sense not to stand in a pool of lava. I literally never take NPCs to volcanic planets or planetary cores because the idiots always end up standing in a 1 block deep pool of lava until they die.

I also had plans to teach NPCs how to use additional weapons like boomerangs, whips, staves, and wands. But to be honest, the behavior "language" used by Starbound is awful to work with, and I got somewhat burned out just developing the fairly simple behavior fixes in this mod. I don't have any immediate plans to work on NPC combat, but for now, I'm going to look at Supper's Combat Overhaul and see what changes it makes to behaviors and whether I can implement anything similar.

 

the issue with pathing changes seems to be that it can break the scripted pathing the story npcs have in the missions (or at least in supper's case, break lana blake at the end of the apex mission), not to mention other wonkiness such as how npcs in his mod glitch out when passing by rail trams, practially teleporting from one point to another which is just really janky looking. for both reasons I've just straight up avoided his mod, especially since supper doesn't seem interested in fixing such bugs at all. Although I guess to be fair it's possible another mod was interfering and responsible for the funky behavior with npcs in general, but still.
In other words, you're better off just giving npcs immunity to lava and whatnot, there's already a mod over on steam I use that does just that in fact ("too dumb to live" is its name lol, although if I'll be honest npcs in most games I've played tend to be pretty dumb)

not sure if teaching npcs to use other weapons is really necessary either, mods just flat out avoid giving them such things anyways and I don't think they really need to use them anyways, just be a bit more proficient in what weapons they do know

but yeah, hopefully you can do something at least

 

Yeah, this is my biggest concern. I spent months play testing before I was confident that my changes hadn't broken anything, and they were fairly simple changes.

I, too, don't use Supper's mod, because in my opinion, it makes too many changes I don't like, plus as you pointed out, there are behavior bugs with it. But supper is the only modder I know of who has improved NPC combat. As I mentioned in the previous thread, it's really hard to reason about behaviors given the language we have, so I don't doubt that extensive changes like the kind supper made would cause bugs in unforeseen places, or that they would be hard to sort out. Frankly, I went back and forth in whether I should even release this mod, because if/when someone accuses it of causing some weird behavior bug, I'm not confident that I would be able to solve the issue. And that's just assuming this was the only behavior-altering mod they were using. When you start to think about the issues that could be caused by behavior-altering interacting ... things get intractable very quickly.

I hate that NPCs are immune to hazards. It really breaks immersion when an NPC is standing in a laser beam or a saw and taking no damage. I wrote a mod to remove that immunity, and boy, that did not go well. As far as I can tell, the game doesn't expose enough primitives to write proper hazard avoidance behaviors, so I guess there's no choice but to make them immune.

It wasn't "necessary" for this mod. It was just a thing I wanted to do for other mods, in general. NPC combat behaviors simply don't work with some types of weapons, like wands and staves, so you'd need to edit the combat behaviors if you wanted to create such an NPC.

 

As far as I can tell, I haven't noticed any adverse behaviors with npcs, although admittedly my current run doesn't involve crew at all and I've only done the erchius mining facility and shockhopper missions, my current run has basically just been me looking into manufacturer's touch for inspiration for a mod idea I've been having of an improved (imo) version of it

 

rl.starbound updated Better Crew and NPC Behavior with a new update entry:

Major improvements to crew and general NPC behavior

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rl.starbound updated Better Crew and NPC Behavior with a new update entry:

Added new crew anchor objects

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Hi sorry 'bout this if this was already been requested, but is it possible for crew-mates to follow player into boarding hostile ship? I feel like Chucklefish kinda forgot about it since it wasn't that hard to do especially when crew-mates could just.. you know.. teleport to player? in base game on planet for example if you move too fast for them to follow they basically teleport to you right? which is weird for not having that during boarding hostile ship.

 

rl.starbound updated Better Crew and NPC Behavior with a new update entry:

Improved mod compatibility

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Hello! Can I join a vanilla server while using this mod, or the server should also have this installed on the server? I play on a server me and my friends made. Just wondering before installing to avoid complications. Thank you

 

I believe this will need to be installed on the server. Actually, I'm not sure if any part of it would work client-side only, since it pretty much only changes now NPCs behave, which is all server-side.