Topic: Asking NPCs to find quest related persons in villages  (Read 8776 times)


Sami

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« on: April 28, 2018, 05:55:11 PM »
You know, despite of my lazy posting frequency we are active behind the scenes and adjustments for a next update are on their way.
Lately I've been sorting out mostly the quest related annoyances and confusions arising from locating certain villagers, and their names.

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- added: ask NPCs to find quest related persons in villages

          You can now ask villagers if certain quest related persons are around. This is done by automatically appearing
          chat options within the common greet dialog. For example:
          "Is Sampsa around?" or "Where can I find Tornia?"
          All the quest related persons, including the original quest giver, are covered within these chat options if you
          are aware of them.
            There are some exceptions though; NPCs who are involved in quests themselves can't be asked for others
          whereabouts, but there are always enough common villages around to assist you.
            When it comes to finding quest related persons in other villages the chat options become available only when
          you are in the right village where the person can be actually found. This can be considered slightly gamey in
          our standards, but it is more helpful that way.

 - adjusted: no more multiple villagers with same names

        Possiblity of two NPCs having the same name within a single village has been removed. In seriously crowded
        clustered villages it is theoretically possible that villagers might run out of unique names, but real chances for
        that to happen are practically non-existent.

 - added: dozens of new northern names

        Due to aforementioned adjustment it was necessary to add lots and lots of new names for northern men and women.

 - improved: NPC name randomization routines

        NPC culture has more distinguishable influence to their given names. There's noticeable variation between
        the eastern and western names, but especially the current wider range of northern names now appear unique
        from rest of the world.


These are future additions not yet functional in current version 3.50 (stable).
- Sami | UnReal World creator

PALU

« Reply #1 on: April 28, 2018, 08:54:09 PM »
Good stuff. I don't consider it gamey for a villager to know they don't have any fellow villager with that name and description (the description part isn't visible, but I'd expect quest givers to actually provide some info on who they're after beyond what's stated in the dialog). Thus, the absent option would basically be an automatic: "No, we don't have anyone with that name and description here".

The same name is bad enough, but the same name and "profession" can definitely be annoying. Fortunately, both old men with the same name happened to be in the same building when I got a quest direction to one of them.

Names: I've found Sami:s but no Erkka:s, so I hope that's been rectified ;) Otherwise, in the naming department I've seen lots of names that seem out of place/time:
- Anna, seems like a Scandinavian import. There are quite a few of those, although some have Finnish spelling (like Aarne the Eagle). I guess they could fit in on the western side, though.
- Names like Natasha and Katushka seem slavic, and could be pushed to the eastern side.
- A lot of names seem suspiciously Christian, e.g Tuomas.
However, weeding out names goes opposite to the desired direction of more name variability...

Dungeon Smash

« Reply #2 on: April 29, 2018, 03:24:09 PM »
I've met a few named Erkka... ;)

 

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