NPC disappearing

[Legacy_meaglyn]

               

HI folks, i hit something I have not seen before last night.  I have an NPC barmaid who simply vanishes after about 5 minutes of work.  No fade out, no despawn, just walking across the room, then gone, mid-stride. It seems to be reliably reproducible.   Has any one seen this sort of thing?  

 

There's nothing in the script that destroysobjects, it's not time for NESS to despawn (and as I said, there's no fade out, it's an instant wink out).  I'll debug it more when I get back to it. I was just curious if any one else had seen this sort of thing. If there was some protection in the engine for resource hogging objects that I triggered or something.

 

(reposted to scripting as that seems related...)

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Kato -]

               

The only similar thing I've seen is when a NPC passes behind the Drow Bar placeable. If standing still, the NPC looks like it is concealed, but when passing behind on its way to next waypoint, the NPC often disappears for a few seconds. Pretty sure that this has nothing to do with your problem but I had to mention it.

 

 

Kato

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               Maybe a timeout on ForceMoveToObject? I have a similar issue, I suspect a scripting error.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kalbaern]

               

It sounds like the NPC is following a set of tagged waypoints or objects and is being ported to another area containing an object with the same intended tag.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_meaglyn]

               

Thanks for the ideas. There's no use of ForceMoveToObject. There are only two waypoints invovled and they are only in this small area. What happens to a MoveToObject command if the target object is destroyed before the mover gets to it? I wonder if she's trying to move to a patron who gets despawned before she gets to him. I've added some instrumentation to try to see what happens. If she's getting jumped to a different area this'll show that too.  I'll see what I can learn tonight.   Thanks!  

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_meaglyn]

               

Found it! The winking out was throwing me off. Code I was modifying was leaving her with a handful of delaycommands which seemed to be effecting how the NPC was despawning. When I backed that code out she was fading out like a normal despawn. Turns out to be a bug in unrelated code in NESS. The code is mishandling the despawn hour when it is set to 24. The barmaid went off duty at midnight, but because of this bug it was despawning her at the next hour change instead. So it was not five minutes but six (minutes per hour in this mod). The NESS docs say 00-24 are valid but when I changed the hours code to wrap I made it only work for 0-23, which I had forgotten when I setup the spawn point. The moral is to always make the code and the documentation match '> 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy__Guile]

               I'd look at the spawn in script, is it delayed to kill the NPC?

Or are we talking is there but vanishes?