repute.fac

Development of standard ALFA palettes (ABR)

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Ronan
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repute.fac

Post by Ronan »

FoamBats4All wrote:
  • The campaign folder now controls ALFA's repute.fac file, controlling faction data.
Why? The only reason I could think of to do this was to add a completely neutral faction (e.g. for animals) and a completely hostile one (e.g. for undead), but that did not seem like a good enough reason to override all of ALFA's factions when the necessary behaviors can be done in script.
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Re: repute.fac

Post by FoamBats4All »

To better factionize campaign folder mobs, and because servers aren't making much use of factions anyway. We went through each module to confirm that there'd be no conflicts before hand.

We see the problem of not doing this with campaign mobs on BG. Attacking a deer can aggravate a passing Flaming Fist soldier. By standardizing factions we can avoid these kinds of issues.
Ronan
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Re: repute.fac

Post by Ronan »

Yeah, though animal and undead OnPerception scripts can take care of those sorts of behaviors, probably better than custom factions (e.g. an undead script could specifically only aggro living creatures). Animals used to behave just fine with paazin's scripts, though something broke them and no one has had time to investigate.

ALFA2 doesn't make use of custom factions because up until recently the repute.fac was in the haks, and thus unchangeable like it would be if it was in the campaign folder. ALFA1 modules had many custom factions.
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Re: repute.fac

Post by FoamBats4All »

Yes, could do much similar with new AI scripts, but those are still a ways off.

Either way, modules aren't really using the repute.fac, and we can always add more as builders request. The campaign folder updates more frequently than ACR, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Unless there's some reason not to do this or something we're losing by implementing it?
paazin
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Re: repute.fac

Post by paazin »

Animals probably are the wrong faction. They should be 'merchant' and are likely set to 'commoner' or something.




Btw, I still hate the Campaign folder :P
People talk of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as man, so artistically cruel.
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Re: repute.fac

Post by FoamBats4All »

paazin wrote:Btw, I still hate the Campaign folder :P
Why?
t-ice
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Re: repute.fac

Post by t-ice »

Sorta related... Does this mean we could have a "totally passive bystander" faction, and the ability to assign creatures to that faction with the DM client? One of my biggest needs to make neutral civilians, wagons, and everything else explicitly DM contolled. A blueprint without scripts assigned does that, but ...
Zelknolf
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Re: repute.fac

Post by Zelknolf »

t-ice wrote:Sorta related... Does this mean we could have a "totally passive bystander" faction, and the ability to assign creatures to that faction with the DM client? One of my biggest needs to make neutral civilians, wagons, and everything else explicitly DM contolled. A blueprint without scripts assigned does that, but ...
The neutral faction would be this-- that would be reputation set to 50 vs. everyone, including themselves.

As to setting that via the DM client, non-standard factions are a fussy thing. I've made a tool that does that before, but it was a terrible jury rig (and involved a room full of no-event immortal immobile little girls in an OOC room, one for each faction, tagged by the index of the faction).
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Swift
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Re: repute.fac

Post by Swift »

Zelknolf wrote: As to setting that via the DM client, non-standard factions are a fussy thing. I've made a tool that does that before, but it was a terrible jury rig (and involved a room full of no-event immortal immobile little girls in an OOC room, one for each faction, tagged by the index of the faction).
That's not creepy at all
Zelknolf
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Re: repute.fac

Post by Zelknolf »

Swift wrote:
Zelknolf wrote: As to setting that via the DM client, non-standard factions are a fussy thing. I've made a tool that does that before, but it was a terrible jury rig (and involved a room full of no-event immortal immobile little girls in an OOC room, one for each faction, tagged by the index of the faction).
That's not creepy at all
They were also blind and kept in holding cells with no doors.

'tis the terrible price of granular control over custom factions, and will probably be the last fallback solution if ALFA wants that too (though it largely hasn't come up because custom factions spent so much time being broken, and we have like two across the whole community now).
Ronan
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Re: repute.fac

Post by Ronan »

FoamBats4All wrote:Unless there's some reason not to do this or something we're losing by implementing it?
We'd lose the ability for servers to make custom factions, and in the past we've had server-specific factions that definitely don't belong in the campaign folder. However I'd bet there are a very finite number of desired campaign folder factions, and its repute.fac will quickly be made and standardized. Once that is done we could move it from the campaign folder to individual servers?

Maybe prefix campaign factions with something, like "abr_"?

CLR tools could be made to spawn mobs with any desired faction, but changing them in-game requires a reference creature per faction (though they can be kept cutscene invisible and invulnerable).

paazin, pretty sure the factions were set to merchant.
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