I'm considering a change to NPCs and I wanted to get user feedback before I go and change anything. As things currently stand, "Movement" is defined as either a change in facing or position. For Frozen and Paralyzed, this makes perfect sense and should not be changed. However, it leads to some peculiar behaviors. For instance, if an NPC is facing NW and the script tells it to Move( N ), the NPC will not walk north, but will only face that direction. This is commonly seen in Move( ) where a direction is not passed in, but rather a bounding box. NPCs will "sit and spin" 7 times out of 8, and only move forward if the Random Direction it chooses happens to match its original facing direction. Needless to say, this doesn't do much to give the illusion of "life" to our NPCs.

Many of us have scripted around this issue with little jobbies like this:

or worse if they are to be constrained in bounding boxes.

So what I propose is to separate "Movement" (except in the previously mentioned Frozen and Paralyzed states) into two functionalities: Face( ) and Move( ). Face( ) will only ever adjust the NPCs facing attribute (exactly like altering npc.facing directly). Move( ) would cause the NPC to change location, regardless of its previous facing direction. In the above example, Move( N ) would cause the NPC to walk one space north, adjusting his facing in the process, even though he was facing NW before.

The other devs will be giving me feedback on the issue, and letting me know any technical reasons for or against the change that I may be unaware of, but I'd also like you, the users, to provide feedback as well. So please take a second, cast a vote, and leave a comment or question if you are so inclined.

Cheers.

I think this is a good idea. I find it unlikely that it would break many scripts- how many people are using Move to change facing only? (Which I suppose is what this poll hopes to find out.) And in the meantime it makes the behavior more like what is probably expected.

Separating facing from movement is a good idea. I can not think of any reason why it shouldn't have been like that all the time.

That's a good idea. I personally have another suggestion for general npc movement, but i'll put that into the feature suggestion forum later.

I'm not sure, not speculation is that it was set up this way back before there was write access to .facing.

Ok, that doesn't answer the question of why it wasn't seperated at the time. I really have no idea.