Building your first NPC

Now that you have built your first zone with rooms it's time to populate it with Non Playing Characters (NPCs) for your players to hunt, kill, and or interact with. In the last couple of sections you have looked through the fields. In this section we are going to make a nice easy NPC and then show how to use the composed.h to make your NPC building easier. As I have previously stated in the section on room building I like dragons so the first NPC you're going to learn to build is a big bad ugly dragon. Don't worry if you hate dragons or you just want to build a normal world you will learn plenty from my dragon example to be able to adjust it to whatever you want.

When making NPCs you create the zone source file first as shown in the chapter called Zone source file. If you only have NPCS you do not need the %reset, %objects, and %rooms fields. For the examples in this chapter we will use the zone we created in the chapter called The Room Section and add the %mobiles section where we will put all the NPC definitions. At the end of this chapter, in the Section called Dragon station with rooms and NPCs, we will bring it all together with the rooms we have already defined and our NPCs.

The first part of all NPC definitions is the symbolic name it is good to always pick a name that will match the name of the NPC so it will be easy to load the NPC. The reason the symbolic and name should match is when you use the command wstat it will only show you a list of the NPCs by symbolic name for example if you type wstat zone dragon mobiles You will get the following:

List of mobiles in zone Dragon:
dragon clerk trashman

List of mobiles in zone Dragon:
npc1 npc2 npc3

Now let's get started with our dragon. As with the rooms all that is required to make a NPC is the symbolic and end fields. That of course will make a NPC with all defaults.

bldragon
end

That's it for that dragon right? Nope not quite that makes a NPC with all defaults. That means this will probably be a very wimpy human with a symbolic name of dragon and no description, in short it will be a blank when you load it. Now let's start putting the dragon together.

The first three things we need are the dragons title, description and names. The description should be what you see when you do a 'look' in the room. The title should be what you see when the NPC is talking or fighting. Finally the names should cover everything in the title and description fields so if you wanted to kill them you can easily know what to type.

bldragon

title "a black dragon"
descr "A big ugly black dragon is clawing the ground here." 
names {"big ugly black dragon","ugly black dragon","big black dragon",
"black dragon","dragon"}
...
end

The names, title and description shouldn't be to hard so I don't think it's necessary to go into any more description on the subject. Let's move on. Now we have to take care of what a player sees when he or she looks at a NPC. To make the main description of an NPC you place an extra on the NPC with no names in the list. The blank extra is a special extra that will be shown every time you look at anything in the names list of the NPC. So a description of a NPC would look something like this.

extra {}
"The black dragons scales glitter like black granite that has been
polished for years by water.  He has a large neck and huge bat like
wings.  His eyes watch you as you stand before him.  One claw seems to 
be
tapping slightly on the ground as if the dragon is waiting for
something."

Now that you have a main description for the NPC you need to make any smaller descriptions that you want the player to be able to look at. In this case the dragon eyes and claw would be good things to describe and maybe a few other things just for humor.

extra {"eyes","eye"}
"The dragons eyes seem to follow you no matter where you go in the room
nothing seems to escape the dragons attention."

extra {"claws","claw"}
"The claw is big black and it looks very deadly.  It seems like the
dragon has two sets of 4 large claws and 2 sets of 4 smaller claws 
which
to say means the claws are about the size of short swords and long
swords."

extra {"scales","scale"}
"It's a scale!  Haven't you ever seen a dragon before!"

extra {"bat wings","wings"}
"The dragon sees you looking and flaps his wings creating one heck of a
wind blast."

Now that we have the NPC all described we should start setting things like race, gender, level, height, weight, defense, offense, alignment, abilities, and finally skills and spells. First we will pick a race. Normally the list of races are in your values.h. We have the list in the appendix called Race Definitions in values.h and I have searched for dragon and found the race I want it is as follows.

race RACE_DRAGON_BLACK

If you don't think there is any difference in dragons you can set them all to one race like you could define a race called 'RACE_DRAGON' or something like that.

Now we should chose the gender of our dragon. Make sure your descriptions match what you pick. It would be pretty weird to have a female dragon and have the descriptions say 'he, him, or his'

    sex SEX_MALE

Now let's set the height and weight. Remember you set the height in centimeters and the weight in pounds. In the future the VME will standardize to one or the other but for now we have to play the conversion game.

//20 feet  (1 inch = 2.54 cm
height 625

//566 KG (1 lb. = .45359 kg)
 weight 1250
 
 

Now that we have the size of the dragon we can pick a level. My dragon is only 20 feet tall and 1250 pounds so I think maybe he is a bit young and will make his level around 70.

 level 70

 

The dragon may not wear armour but by default a dragon should have an armour equal to someone wearing plate mail. Not only that but my dragon doesn't like to use his mouth as his natural attack and he sure can't punch with those big claws so we need to set his attack type to claw.

 NATURAL_DEF(WPN_CLAW, ARM_PLATE)

 

Not many black dragons are good so I will pick almost totally evil, since totally evil is -1000 I will set it as follows.

 alignment -900

Finally we get to the hard part. Many people have trouble setting the NPC abilities, weapons, and spells. There really is nothing to it if you have read the Section called The NPC abilities macro and the Section called The NPC weapon and spell macros. The only thing you have to remember is the numbers you are putting are not the actual amount but a percentage of the skill points you want the game to use on your NPC when having your NPC practice as it loads and all amounts of abilities must add up to 100% as well as all weapons and spells must add up to 100%. For the dragon the following would be what the abilities, weapons, and spells would look like.

//big strong and magical most ability points on str and mag
MSET_ABILITY(20,12,12,12,12,12,20,0)

//Set natural attack highest of weapons because he fights with claws
MSET_WEAPON(10,10,10,5,30,5)

//black dragons have natural defense from acid set it highest
MSET_SPELL(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,30)

That is all you need to make a basic dragon. True this dragon will not do anything but claw you to death if you attack it but in the Section called A More Complex Set of NPCs we will give the dragon some more abilities with some special DIL functions. For now let's take a look at our finished product.

bldragon

title "a black dragon"
descr "A big ugly black dragon is clawing the ground here." 
names {"big ugly black dragon","ugly black dragon","big black dragon",
"black dragon","dragon"}

extra {}
"The black dragons scales glitter like black granite that has been
polished for years by water.  He has a large neck and huge bat like
wings.  His eyes watch you as you stand before him.  One claw seems to 
be
tapping slightly on the ground as if the dragon is waiting for
something."

extra {"eyes","eye"}
"The dragons eyes seem to follow you no matter where you go in the room
nothing seems to escape the dragons attention."

extra {"claws","claw"}
"The claw is big black and it looks very deadly.  It seems like the
dragon has two sets of 4 large claws and 2 sets of 4 smaller claws 
which
to say means the claws are about the size of short swords and long
swords."

extra {"scales","scale"}
"It's a scale!  Haven't you ever seen a dragon before!"

extra {"bat wings","wings"}
"The dragon sees you looking and flaps his wings creating one heck of a
wind blast."

race RACE_DRAGON_BLACK
sex SEX_MALE
height 625
weight 1250
level 70
 NATURAL_DEF(WPN_CLAW, ARM_PLATE)
alignment -900
MSET_ABILITY(20,12,12,12,12,12,20,0)
MSET_WEAPON(10,10,10,5,30,5)
MSET_SPELL(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,30)

end

As you can see there is a bit more to building an NPC than a room but it's really not that much harder. Try changing some stuff and make sure to practice debugging your errors the more compiling you do the better you will get.