Talk:Faking Dynamic Variables With Factions

Potential Uses

smashing good idea. i just need a reason to use it...--Snake 06:11, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

Let's see, a few ideas ...

• Remembering the last time an NPC spoke to the player, or talked about a specific topic, and using it in the dialogue to select an appropriate response. Due to the limited range of a faction rank value, you can only reliably store the week those two last spoke with each other in a single faction rank, though.
• Creating a "local fame" and "local infamy" factions, and giving other "local" factions like ChorrolFaction or AnvilFaction a reaction modifier of +1/-1 (or more - remember, the actual modifier is this value times the faction rank) to them.
• Flags for various things, like if an NPCs witnessed something (a crime, the player walking through a specific door, and so on). This can be used for various things, among other things dialogue. Another example would be a "Did this (N)PC have contact with diseased NPC X?" flag, which would get checked by a quest script to see which NPCs are infected.
• Counters, like the article suggests, for example for the numbers of goblins this NPC killed, to direct the revenge at a specific NPC, without him needing any special scripts and without actually knowing anything about this NPC besides him being in the general area (checked via a scripted spell effect fired off an activator) and being the one with the biggest "goblins killed" count around.

All this works without changing the NPCs themselves, and so is very useful for ensuring mod compatibility. --Khadir 08:01, 21 June 2006 (EDT)

Can a faction be used to store a variable per actor?

It seems that different actors of the same base share the same faction according to the info on CS Wiki.

Yes, faction rank is stored on the base object. Also, flagging NPCs by way of faction can have unwanted side effects, for example when SameFaction occurs in a dialog or script condition. Scruggs 12:03, 5 December 2007 (EST)

Deprecated

I'm marking this as a deprecated article. Someone else may want to reverse this, but I would suggest that this only be done if someone is actually using this.

Problems:

• First, I'm assuming that this is not just being used for signaling, but instead is being used specifically for variable representation.
• Faction rank is stored on base object, not on actor. (Although this wouldn't be a problem for vanilla non-generic characters, there are a number of mods which add generic (and non-aggressive) NPCs -- e.g. Crowded Cities.)
• It seems kludgey. Seems that for most practical uses, you would end up using a different technique.
• Upper limit of 127. If you're counting, this limit is rather close.
• Locks the NPCs factions against changes by mods. Since the changes are done ingame, they trump any changes to factions made in mods once the npcs faction is set.

--Wrye 23:07, 31 May 2008 (EDT)