Custom NPC Races or Factions

[Airis Damon]

I know NPC crews are in the works, but it would be nice, if possible, for players to be able to create custom skins and attributes for different factions and alien races. The game is already rather complex. Maybe it was already taken into consideration when the dev-team agreed on allowing modding later on. Plus, I came across a game which used an algorithm for simulating institutional bias. The paper is at the bottom. Something like that could be added to the AI for considering things like diversity, diplomacy, or alien relations which could add character to differing factions.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

Dunno about races but custom, and procedural generated, NPC factions are planned. If the development timeline is anything to go by it's one of the next things.

 

[NeonSturm]

The OPs link is nice, but in 3D and with cars you don't have just 6 neighbours, in school alone you have 32 pupils sometimes.
And shared bias is not good for different species - this only works with nationalities and only if everyone is subject of the same propaganda.


I have been busy with FAI recently, Chatbots and thought about coding emotions vs coding thoughts.
You should plan where to start, here is my list:

The brain is a computer too

To build a computer, the highest worshipped piece of technology (apart from toilets and mangas), you need 6 core elements:
2 devices to probe combinations of 00,01,10,11 (usually archived with 2 elements: "not + and/or/xor")
2 devices to delay outputs (cache, storage) and copy+paste (programs, data)
2 devices for Input / Output (keyboard+screen, voice+braille, music+music, eyes+hands)
​

Magic or Technology - very similar, just Magic does not show you were it comes from.

Power - energy, electricity, geomagnetic and biomagnetic fields …
Will - you know what you want to do and how to use the focus
Focus - combines power+will as cause for an effect.

Arm - the mental or genetic(if magic) concept of a focus.
Art - building the focus. Magic would be to have the evolution and genes building your focus.

This means, we all use magic. Food, Brain with eyes, Brain which can use hands and feet. And we don't know how to replicate a human hand.
The difference is that evolutionary magic has limits and technical magic may not adapt at all and science is very adaptive but not as stable as evolution.
​

Everything is evolution.

Individuals can create a civilisation, if they are immortal (swarm intelligence).
Actually, human books are swarm-intelligence too.
It's the swarm intelligence and immortality of genetic knowledge across generations would be a "swarm of ancestors".
​

That is, where I would start thinking about the basic characteristics of a civilisation.

 

[jayman38]

I can see detailed NPC factions being a mod, but for the vanilla game, I don't see the dev team doing much more than spawning a random creature, randomly assigning one of the prebuilt fleets for their use, and calling the faction done.

I think the dev team has expressed interest in NPC diplomacy, but I suspect that it will be a simple matter of random friend/foe relations between different factions, with space combat being the constant result throughout the universe. (Just enough friendly connections to keep everyone from developing an "enemy" relationship with every other faction in the universe within the first week.)

NPC factions will probably become THE thing to explore for unique finds in the universe. After all, you'd have to traverse at least 4 galaxies to find another purple-hued shark-people NPC group with the same types of ships in their fleet. Therefore, by all means, a mod that improves NPC faction uniqueness, making it even harder to find duplicate civilizations is great. I just don't see it as vanilla-game material.

 

[Nickizzy]

I can see detailed NPC factions being a mod, but for the vanilla game, I don't see the dev team doing much more than spawning a random creature, randomly assigning one of the prebuilt fleets for their use, and calling the faction done.

I think the dev team has expressed interest in NPC diplomacy, but I suspect that it will be a simple matter of random friend/foe relations between different factions, with space combat being the constant result throughout the universe. (Just enough friendly connections to keep everyone from developing an "enemy" relationship with every other faction in the universe within the first week.)

NPC factions will probably become THE thing to explore for unique finds in the universe. After all, you'd have to traverse at least 4 galaxies to find another purple-hued shark-people NPC group with the same types of ships in their fleet. Therefore, by all means, a mod that improves NPC faction uniqueness, making it even harder to find duplicate civilizations is great. I just don't see it as vanilla-game material.

Or if it was in game it would take a ton of storage with all the skins and faction characteristics and stuff. Or maybe not. Some people save hundreds of blueprints.

 

[NeonSturm]

But we do not require full skins.
What if we had modular skins? (take head from this and feet from that, …)

If we could colour them like colouring the background/foreground colour of this post with CSS-rules.
It could all be done client-side after downloading a skin-pack.

Take StarTrek uniforms as example, those from Voyager. It's the very same uniform in 3 colours, 1x time for men and 1x for women