NPC's Anyone

Well, it may not be a long long time, we are making much faster progress now. We have been going at it absolutely full steam and with the rewrite nearing a close, it's a case of implementing the features we wanted in for 0.2.0! If it keeps up at the rate we're currently going at, we could be there sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately, the Creep Emancipation Act of 1873 makes what you are proposing (an NPC slave army) illegal, and would result in heavy fines. The army question depends on your interpretation of the Involuntary Conscription Act, and how much capital you have on hand to feed and house your troops (unless you also plan on violating the Quartering Act).

Hope this helps.

The AI for NPCs will no doubt have functions written in C++ that do the basics such as pathfinding.

The behaviour of the AI in the more human-sense (such as whether certain things make them aggressive or what tasks they have to do) will likely be written in Lua.

Specifying individual NPCs by hand will likely be done in YAML where data properties and scripts associated with them could be specified.

I also would like for it to be possible to specify groups of NPCs that random NPCs for that group are generated from, where the group has a YAML a bit like the trees in SoA, with ranges for different properties that all NPCs for the group are generated to have a property value within.

These are of course just my current thoughts on it, so don't hold the end system to them!

That sounds like a pretty neat idea. We'd have to see how and if it fits into our ideas for handling death and injury in SoA!

If you want to ask questions just post them wherever seems appropriate, if it doesn't get a response and you really want one, you could always try PMing devs.

You will indeed be able to load chunks not associated with the player location (there is a C++-side function for this as I recall, but no hook for Lua scripts to utilise it as of yet). Though if you wanted specifically an NPC to move around the world so to speak, I would probably say far more efficient would be to just approximate it.

Yup, loading extra chunks will ofc be an extra load on the machine running the game and so trying to keep it as efficient as possible will always be a goal we would have and would encourage in modders.

Also, don't be afraid to PM us, but I would still highly recommend making forum posts for questions you think would apply to the rest of the community - that way more can benefit from a response! Questions are perfectly ask-able as their own thread if they are of a generally broad/important topic - threads tend to get better coverage than a comment potentially lost in a long thread.

A final note, if you weren't aware, we intend to open a new forum specifically for the modding API when we get to the point that scripting is released publicly.

We have a blog post written by Cristian here: https://www.seedofandromeda.com/blogs/62-modding-for-soa which goes into details for our plans regarding modding. Like you say, C++ modding will be possible where a mod requires it for performance, but for security's sake we have some plans to encourage confidence in using such mods (given the sheer power C++ gives a modder over users' systems and the closed nature of built DLL's).