Citizens aware of the surrounding world

from Elemental Forums

Lately, Frogboy presented 'Gullivers' to us. As we all saw, citizens were plowing fields, constructing buildings or keeping an eye for enemies, who could attack the town. A nice addition to the game would be a system, where citizens are aware of what's happening around them. For instance, if the enemy sieges the town, no farmers should be visible on their fields, instead they should be waiting inside their houses (bonus would be still applied, according to game mechanics). I don't know how much work it would require, but I am sure it would be a nice thing to have in the game.

elemental
4,965 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

It would add some flavor.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

It would certainly add to the game to have dynamic activities for the townfolk to perform.   It may even make it easier to mod, since they would just move  around and do whatever within the 'free-space' of the town. So in the 'tile editor' they would walk or stand on open ground or places appropriate, and  if the townfolk AI can't find a place they could stand or perform actions, then they would just skirt the outsides of the tile.

Players would have to assign   in the tile editor things like "doors" so that the AI will path to the door and walk into it.  Or perhaps places where they could perform special actions such as fishing or reading.   It wwould be a fairly large step above what they were showing at PAX.

 

At the same time, it could be an aweful lot of work to make it mod-friendly.  (I, of course, have little insight into what their limits for coding hold, so it may not take that much for them to do at all)  And it can see how it might make the tile editor very bogged down with features and hard to use, or make the AI really complex to examine what players created to the point that it could seriously hurt system performance if players zoom in to watch  them. I'm not sure what the full plans are for the tile editor, but odiously it needs work from the PAX version to create the "building phases" so you can watch custom  created buildings be constructed.  We'll just have to see I suppose.  

Ashes of the Singularity II