Once the testing shows this is something worth building one I will do some classes or videos on how to build these new entity models. I will likely port over all my existing characters from the bandits, traders and NPC modlets. Likely I will organize this into sub modlets like humanoids, animals, mechs, and fantasy characters. Then moders can just submit the .unity3d files and matching xpath xml for adding into each. These entities work great in pois as sleepers. You can add these to the sleeper gamestage so they appear randomly later in the game or directly add them to specific pois. I may add a sample xpath to add them to gamestages later.
I checked on the mod launcher and the current version is there.
All of this is good to hear.
But, regarding question 2 - I probably wasn't clear enough, even with the edit. My question was about creating "categories" of sleeper volumes, specifically for POI designers, so they can make a creature-dedicated POI that wouldn't have to be changed if another modder adds different creatures. (By "creature-dedicated" I mean things like a bandit camp, survivor-owned house, bunker guarded by mechs, etc.)
I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of people who don't, this is what you need to do to create a custom sleeper volume that spawns (certain kinds of) creatures:
- In gamestages.xml, a named group node, which includes a spawner node, referencing a spawner node (below) by name
- In gamestages.xml, a named spawner node (usually with "horde" in the name), which includes one or more gamestage nodes, referencing one or more entity groups (below) by name
- In entitygroups.xml, one or more entitygroup nodes, which includes one or more entity nodes, referencing an entity_class node by name (those are created by the creature designers)
Here is the issue. The POI designers will only see the names of the
group node in the UI. So, in order for POI designers to have consistent spawn groups, and for creature designers to add their NPCs to this group, the names of all those nodes should be standardized.
TFP do this by creating "categories" of each. For example, the
group nodes have names that describe their general "context" (purpose, or "kind" of POI): "abandoned house," "ghost town," "lab worker," and so forth.
If we all could come up with a standardized name for all of these XML nodes, then creature designers could simply add their creations to the related
entitygroup nodes - and they would automatically show up in sleeper volumes of POIs, without either modder even having known about the other.
But, to do this, we'd need input from POI designers, since they'd know best what "kind" of creature they'd want to add to their sleeper volumes. As only one example: if you're converting one of the existing "survivor" POIs to include friendly NPCs, you'd want at least one spawn group for the NPCs in the lookout towers, and a different spawn group for the NPCs hanging out in the tents.
That's probably not something that needs to happen until all these NPCs are stable. But if this is going to be the "semi-official" way to include NPCs (and if you can pull off what you want, I hope it will be), then it will be something we all should start thinking about.
