NPC Meet Your Other Characters as NPCs

This is a great idea. Maybe you could edit what your characters will say when talked to or have them sell items that you don't need to people that visit your base?

 

Selling items like that would work quite well in a multiplayer server, yeah!

And I guess if you want to control what your character says, you'd have to create some sort of text file with your character's name on it, and then the game could read individual lines from it. I like it!

Edit: Though, I don't know about what your NPCs would say when you're offline. It would mean that the server would have to download your text files and store its own copy that it can draw from while you're offline. Necessary sacrifice?

 

I'm loving this idea.
As for servers, a line of text doesn't take much space at all, so a few lines per character could easily be stored. If the system is something like Minecraft (each player has a single file stored in a "players" folder that contains all their nessecary info), then the lines could simply be included in that file along with the details about the character.

 

This is really cool!

 

This is a great idea in every single way.
Maybe you could be able to hire your OP char to hunt people down, and when you rejoined as your OP char, you would have a new bounty hunting quest.

 

Hmm. Interesting. I suppose that's cool. I'm glad you specified that you would have to play as your other character in order to take the quest. At first, I thought you were saying "Why don't we get our better characters to do stuff for us", like have the AI do it or something. That would be slightly less fun though.

So yeah, if you're talking about being able to give yourself quests that you play through as different characters, then yeah I can see that being pretty neat.

 

Pretty good idea!

 

It's a good idea and all, but it probably wouldn't work. If your character is out fighting while you're on another character, there's a possibility that it could find stuff like bosses and such, but if it kills that boss and you're not on the planet how would you know it killed it AND took it's loot. Plus what about the possibility that after it kills the boss or whatever its inventory gets full and can't pickup all of the items therefor leaving you without that necessary quest item or something. This is just my opinion on it, others may think differently.

 

Well the idea is that you meet your other character as a "stays in one place, maybe talk with/interact with current player character" NPC, not a fully autonomous AI controlled bot character.

Although that's an interesting idea for another suggestion...

 

Like SpaceKGreen said above, that's not really the kind of thing I have in mind. In fact, SpaceKGreen summed it up quite nicely.
To have AI which could run around and do intelligent things like attack and even defeat bosses, as well as collect loot, you'd have to do a lot of coding. It would take coding that I'd be hesitant to ask for in a suggestion, because it reduces the likelihood of the dev team picking it.

If these NPCs do anything more than walk around a small area and talk to you, they'll do so because one of the devs was so interested that they wanted to add on to the idea. My suggestion is not that, though, and I'll be content just to see my original idea implemented.

 

This would be simply epic.

 

It would only be cool in single player and small private servers with groups of friends. I wouldn't want to find a bunch of lifeless players walking around in a huge mainstream server. It could work by maybe beaming them into your ship if you require their assistance. I do agree though that it would be awesome to find one of your players exploring a cave or something. Imagine if you made heaps of characters and formed an army. This makes m think, will you be able to recruit npcs to join your team.

 

interesting concept, it would be cool to see clones of myself throug hthe universe =D

 

They wouldn't be clones, they would be your other characters

 

I just realized why SpaceKGreen summed it up so well. In fact, I don't know how I missed this. SpaceKGreen was the guy who submitted the first suggestion for this idea.
And he's posted in this thread like 4 or 5 times and I've only noticed now. That's pretty funny.

1) I'd like there to be a limit on how many of your NPCs can be on a server. Specifically, I'd like to limit it to only your most recent character can be found wondering around a server, and only with the conditions that the character is allowed by both you and the server manager.
2) I've also considered the idea of making an army of yourself.
3) Dunno if they'd be found in a cave. I mean, yeah, I briefly imagined that, and I think it'd be kinda neat to find them in a cave, but I haven't considered what it'd take to do something like that.

 

I'll throw out this thought:

You could craft Hologram units. These'd be small carry-able boxes. Each one you have, you can set to simulate one of your characters or one of your friends' characters.
Practically, these holograms would be 'pet' NPCs that follow you around, attack what you attack, etc, but don't have any inventory, don't pick anything up and don't progress in stats. They just use the characters' current stats and equipped weapons etc.

Not sure how many would be possible at once.

This could be done in addition to some of the other ideas in this thread. eg: tradable offline NPCs, etc

 

That's really neat. I wish it were more applicable to the current direction this suggestion is heading in, but it would really only work in conjunction with the rest of your idea

Yeah, I like this quite a bit. I'd need to figure out how to incorporate it into the current ideas of this suggestion.

How about only one? I don't think it's a very good idea at all to have more than one companion.

That's sort of a weird example of another idea in the thread. But sure.

 

I probably wasn't clear.
Your original suggestion was that you could meet your "other selves" as NPCs, and could perhaps trade with them.
That could be incorporated into the hologram idea, by having a trading list (a list of items with prices in some kind of Shop form/interface), then your friends' hologram version of you can sell the stuff on your behalf. This could be in addition to any "physical" offline NPC version that might exist.

So, in theory, you could play multiplayer with your friend Tony and a holo-Tony. Tony then logs off, and you remember you wanted to buy some iron from him. No prob, just buy it from holo-Tony instead! And you could holo-trade with your other characters too, so it'd save having to log out then in again, etc.

 

Yeah, no, that's sorta what I thought you meant. I wasn't sure though, so I didn't really address it.

The two problems I have with this idea are technical and practical.
The technical problem is that you'd end up having the server forcing a change on your inventory whenever you log in after a trade has gone down between somebody and your holo-character. I don't like the sound of the server modifying your character's information. Perhaps it's a frivolous concern, because I'm not sure how servers work in the first place. If servers already save your character information, it wouldn't be a big deal. However, I don't want to push that idea. I just dislike the concept of servers storing other people's character information.
The practical problem is that it could inconvenience the player being represented by the hologram, particularly if they had changed their mind without telling the other person, or if another person wanted to buy from them something they hadn't actually wanted to sell. I feel like it's just too complicated a matter to really consider.

 

This would have to be carefully done or a shitstorm from the people that paid for NPC names would come.