I've been trying to find ways to do something semi-dynamically with a cumulative effect. . . I've been working on a module based on Shadowrun and one of the systems revolves around a security tally whilst hacking (among other things). Now when you raise the tally to a certain level, you could trigger an alarm which makes all the security countermeasures in the system more aggressive and dangerous to the person (or people) not authorized to be in the system.
The way I've set up my system's defenses, when the countermeasures are spawned (as in when the level loads), the NPC gets it's health points, stats and stuff like that. What I want to do is set it up so when an alarm is triggered, the NPC's will effectively 'level up' depending on the severity of the alarm. An active alarm will raise their stats and such a couple fold.
So I guess I was thinking about doing a heartbeat for the NPC but then I hear about how bad they are for server performance and I don't know how another HB might actually be needed at some future point in time. I was thinking, perhaps I'd just do a check to get the alarm status and upgrade the countermeasures and that sort of thing.
I suppose my question is this; what is the best way for handling something of that nature? Sorry for the relatively newbile question but I'm still learning and such.
