Reputation - Faction and Personal

[Legacy_henesua]

               

meaglyn wrote...

henesua wrote...

Hmmm.... this from Bioware's documentation. It looks like I should do some tests to see if creating new parent factions will cause any unforeseen problems.

This from the Facion System documentation:

FactionParentID       DWORD

• Index into the Top Level Struct's  FactionList specifying the Faction from which this Faction was derived.
• The first four standard factions (PC, Hostile,  Commoner, and Merchant) have no parents, and use 0xFFFFFFFF as their FactionParentID. No other Factions can use this value.

Did you do these tests? I'm curious to see if new parent factions actually work given the documentation. 

If 2da changes don't do anything maybe those 4 parents are hardcoded in the toolkit, which would help explain the comments in the Bioware doc.

I did test it, although not extensively. I found that you can create new parent factions by editing the faction file with a GFF editor. After making new parent factions, I was able to establish them as parents of new factions I created in the toolset and all the relationships were inherited properly.

I did not however test this beyond that. I don't know if other bugs will show up.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_meaglyn]

               Thanks!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

While I made new parent factions in Arnheim, I did not do so in the Llyra/Vives project. Yesterday after leaving the module fallow for months I decided to tinker with it and ran across faction bugs.

 

Background:

I use the core parent factions for people NPCs. Commoners, Defenders, Merchants. And I added a new one as a child of Defender called Leader.

For animals I created four factions, and they derived from Commoner and Hostile depending.

 

Situation:

In Nocthairy forest I set up a camp of woodsmen that NPCs can interact with. It has "commoner" woodsmen which are the low level mooks around the campfire. There is a "merchant" faction NPC who sells stuff, and a "leader" fction NPC who does not yet have a full conversation so is primarily there for DMs. I also flag all of these NPCs as belonging to their own group - "Nocthairen_Woodsmen" - which I use in my custom AI so that these guys know that they are affiliated with one another.

 

Since all of these woodsmen have ranged weapons they are a good safe area if you get overwhelmed by a herd of mountain goats, cave slimes, or goblins. Yesterday while testing with a level 1 PC I ran to their camp with a mountain goat chasing me. They killed the mountain goat. Then when the goat died the merchant and the commoners fought each other.

 

And not only did they kill each other, but the bluejays in the woods went hostile too even though they belong to a different animal faction than the goats. Thankfully bluejays fly away when they are hostile rather than flock to the attack.

 

Anyway... turns out that the bluejays and mountain goats have factions with "commoner" as a parent.

 

I have not had time to test my solutions to this problem but here is what I did:

I edited the faction file in the module repute.fac or some such. Its the only file ending in .fac

No custom factions have commoner as a parent faction anymore. I changed all the custom factions to derive from hostile.

 

Another solution I am thinking of is creating new parent factions. Perhaps all animals should derive from a "neutral" parent faction.