Duck and Cover

Arrest Scenario

I'm trying to come up with a (universal) arrest scenario, where the character will encounter a police force/town guard after commiting a crime(s) just like in FO1 when you get arrested in junk-city. I want the character to be forced to part with his inventory and enter a new mission (the prison escape mission) completely empty handed, I'm pretty sure there is no direct way to trigger this, so I've come up with a crude work-around for this, but I would really like to hear some suggestions from any of the knowledgeable out there.

Here are a few things I would like to accomplish with this arrest scenario
- Character is forced to part with his/her inventory
- Only main character will be sent to the Prison mission
- Want the police force to 'home' in on the main character after you
commit crimes, but not just attack in combat mode

If any of you have any suggestions please feel free to offer them
[/img]

your best bet is to talk to requiem to a starfury (if I got the nick right), but apparently he's gone missing as of late.

requiem_for_a_starfury

T-Bolt is his moniker today and he hangs around at NMA.

Requem was a much better name. :Babylon5:

jetbaby wrote:Requem was a much better name. :Babylon5:

Well get someone to change it back then. Who's admin around here these days anyway? But at least spell it right.

xkcon wrote:I'm trying to come up with a (universal) arrest scenario, where the character will encounter a police force/town guard after commiting a crime(s) just like in FO1 when you get arrested in junk-city. I want the character to be forced to part with his inventory and enter a new mission (the prison escape mission) completely empty handed, I'm pretty sure there is no direct way to trigger this, so I've come up with a crude work-around for this, but I would really like to hear some suggestions from any of the knowledgeable out there.

Let's get the easy things done first,

-Only main character will be sent to the Prison mission: Once you've placed the singleplayer spawn point on the map, go to entity edit and scroll down to the bottom and tick the box 'main guy only'

- Character is forced to part with his/her inventory: This can't be directly scripted but if you create a zone around the spawn point and spawn the player in a locked room the use a condition player has less than 1 items tagged equipped in zone. Leaving the space for the tagname blank, then have the action unlock the doors. This will force the player to drop everything even their equipped armour before they can leave the room.

- Want the police force to 'home' in on the main character after you
commit crimes, but not just attack in combat mode: Presumably you mean when they get caught? The easiest way if they get caught pickpocketing and their target turns hostile is to change their communication level to 10 so surrounding units will come to the rescue. Outside of combat you can create zones around areas that crimes might be likely and place a waypoint in each zone. If a crime is discovered in a zone then set the police units to move to the appropriate waypoint. How crimes are discovered depends on what sort of crimes you have in mind. Or you can have the townsfolk use the squealer ai so if they do turn hostile they'll run to the nearest alarm.

The biggest problem is this 'universal' aspect, if you intend to send them to another map using the go to mission command every time that they get caught. I think this trigger can be used only once per map. You can have several triggers that'll send the character to the prison map (for different reasons) but once one of them is used the two maps become linked and as soon as you return to the town map the trigger will send you straight back to the prison even if it's not preserved. So far I've not been able to turn this off with variables, it'll mean that once the player has been sent to prison the rest of the town and quest will become unavailable.

Thanks Req for all the Help, I've finished my Arrest Scenerio

So if you kill random citizens, (or commit other crimes)
[/img]
the local guard will be sommoned

that was the hardest part to trigger
[/img]
Then you are arraigned at Sheriff's Headquarters, where you lose your squad and inventory and weapons

Then you are held in in a holding cell until you transfered to the Prison mission
[/img]
I finally got it all to work real nice, I forced the player to talk to a recruits-master to relenquish his squad, and used your suggestion to unequip to force a trigger, and I forced the player to Equip a "prison uniform" that encumbers him (making him dump his inventory, so he can regain mobility), but it is just like you said, when I return from the Prison mission to South lake City (the place where the arrest occured) I am automatically shipped back to the arraignment mission and from there automatically Back the prison, thereby losing Access to South lake City for good. This is very frustrating as no logical triggers seem to function at all. So now I am at a crossroads as to whether or not to even include the whole Arrest/Prison storyline... sigh

Another Problem is after I escape from the Prison map, my vehicle is right there, ready and waiting for me.

xkcon wrote:This is very frustrating as no logical triggers seem to function at all. So now I am at a crossroads as to whether or not to even include the whole Arrest/Prison storyline... sigh

Probably the only way to get around it is to have duplicate maps. Have a variable fire when the player is arrested. Then have a trigger to change the mission state of the city map to covered (IIRC) and also complete the mission which will deactivate the city map and then open a duplicate map of the city in the same location.

There are problems though, if you want the player to be able to go to prison again you'll need duplicates of those maps as well. IIRC if you have two maps using the goto command to the same (third map) you'll get in a feed back loop.

xkcon wrote:Another Problem is after I escape from the Prison map, my vehicle is right there, ready and waiting for me.

If you allow vehicles on the city map and the player leaves it there then it shouldn't follow you to the prison.

Yeah Duplicate Maps... I thought about that myself, but thats a hell of a workaround, it would mean going back and changing every mission variable into a campaign variable (CVAR), and making a life/death status CVAR for nearly every citizen in town, (In theory) all the quests should be functional with the variables transfering to the duplicate mission, but with this engine?! there's bound to be problems. Do you know if it would work or not Req? And play testing these multi-map campaign situations is a real Bitch!

This is a REAL BRINGDOWN because now it seems that we can't even make a multimap city like 'The Hub' or 'New Reno' or even create caravan missions like the jobs offered by The Crimson Caravan, or the other caravans in the Hub. For that matter, does that mean if we create a 'cut scene' mission (ie: when u had to drive out the raiders from that guys farm in FO1) that everytime you enter the main mission, it will 'cycle' through the cut scene mission and then back to the main and back to cut scene and so on...?

In theory it should work, I've only done it on a small scale with Melee Meltdown and a couple of test maps. A lot different to a great big town though.

There is one advantage to using duplicate maps and that is you can change the tiling, to reflect changing events.

Campaign variables are used quite a lot in the default campaign and I don't remember any of them not firing.

Why would you want to make multipart maps anyway? That was a limitation of Fallout and Fallout 2. FOT can handle great big maps so there's no need. If you remade Fallout in FT Tools you could reduce it to 13 locations. Someone recreated New Reno for multiplayer as one big map and OTB recreated the Hub as one map, impressive it was too.

As for caravan missions you'd just need a staging point outside of town, a small location on the world map where the player could meet the caravan and start the go to triggers. Though to be honest I wouldn't handle caravans in the same way in FOT as in Fallout.

The small missions wouldn't be affected, just build them as part of the big town map. Or if you really need to have them open on the world map rather than transporting the player there.

Thinking about it rather than having the player arrested why not have them escorted out of town? You could do it by having the police make their way to the player as you currently have but rather than transporting them to another map have dialogue telling them to hand over their weapons and follow the police then having a game fail trigger if they don't comply.

Once the player leaves the map you can use the same triggers for the duplicate maps to turn off every open/visited location and all the random encounter but the police station. That way the player will have to go to the station and get transported to the prison (once they escape the prison you can turn the locations and ecounters back on) to continue the game.

It'll still need duplicate maps for the prison and police station, and campaign variables to tell which maps to turn on/off but it should be less work than duplicating a town and all the possible variables there in.

Nice! Those Suggestions have re-inspired me!

As far as the Caravans, you're right about the small staging point, it's exactly what I was thinking would be the only way I could do it. I already have a few 'in town' Crimson Caravan mission and a couple of goto missionX, but I really want to have a few (percieved as) random caravan combat type of missions. Do you suggest maybe triggering a Special ecounter type of scenario instead?

Great, The Escort out of town and subsequent Police station scenario is a Brilliant Idea. this really Helps me as I was almost ready to give up.

What about moving the player from place to place on a map, I know you can move the spawn point to a different location so that the next time you enter the map, you will enter at the new location, but is it possible to move the player without leaving the map?

Thanks a lot, your help has truly proven to be invaluable.

I was thinking along the lines of random encounters. You can turn random encounters on and off via triggers and you can determine which actors are most likely to appear. So you'd just need a sprite for the wagon cart, a trigger to turn on the encounters including the caravan enitites and add the encounters to the campaign file and map. Make the caravan encounters have a higher chance than other encounters so they should always appear when you get a random encounter.

Alternately you could try adding the caravan entities to the landscape maps deactivated with a campaign variable to turn them on if you've taken the guard job. That way again they'd always appear when you get an encounter or stop on a landscape map. Though that does mean editing nearly if not all the landscape maps and adding entities and triggers.

To move an entity it needs a tagname, to give the player a tagname you'd need to limit them to prefabs but it isn't worth it as tagnames get stripped the first time the entity goes to the world map.

Req said

Thinking about it rather than having the player arrested why not have them escorted out of town? You could do it by having the police make their way to the player as you currently have but rather than transporting them to another map have dialogue telling them to hand over their weapons and follow the police then having a game fail trigger if they don't comply.

Once the player leaves the map you can use the same triggers for the duplicate maps to turn off every open/visited location and all the random encounter but the police station. That way the player will have to go to the station and get transported to the prison (once they escape the prison you can turn the locations and ecounters back on) to continue the game.

I had an Idea along these lines; Once the player leaves the (South lake City) map, would it be possible to trigger a special encounter Immediately after the player enters the world map, this unique encouter could use the trigger Goto mission_Prison. I'm not familiar with special encounters, could you elaborate on how they are handled ?

There isn't a trigger to turn special encounters on/off. Just the trigger to enable/disable random encounters and the triggers to open missions/change mission state.

The placement of special encounters on the world map is also only approximate. If you cross a square where a special encounter has been placed you may get the encounter that has assigned to that square but you could just as easily get one of the other special encounters.

Well, after a lot of thought and work, I think I have finally come as close to an 'Arrest' scenario as I can get. It meant I had to tile another new map, but I'm actually quite happy the way it worked out.

OK, so now when you surrender


You are basically forced to turn yourself into the police headquarters (or else the Police force will attack you if you don't)
[/img]

Where you are stripped of your inventory and squad


and detained for a while...
[/img]
Instead of turning off all the Locations and forcing the player to the transport mission (formerly the police HQ/arraignment mission) like you suggested, I decided to allow the player to choose to rondevous with Prison transport or to not go there, there by effecting an 'escape' attempt.


I figured that if the player chooses to try and escape (not go to the prison transport/train station) that this would give as good a reason as any to enable some 'Bounty Hunter' random encounters, and using some CVARS to script a few fugitive type situations in some of the closer locations (to South Lake City).

If the player does choose to accept his sentence and actually enters the Prison transport mission, then he is 'processed'
[/img]


and transported to the actual Prison Mission via the 'GOTO_MISSION' command
[/img]
Req, thanks for all the valuable insights, without your help, I probably wouldnt have been able to finish. It will be alot easier to use duplicate maps of the 'Prison transport' mission than re-scripting and duplicating South Lake City. Thanks again.

As a bonus, it turned out that having a vehicle on the map worked quite well, as the Arresting officers always seem to find the car a lot faster than when the squad is on foot. In fact when the player 'parks' the car and commits a crime the arresting officer will often come accross the parked vehicle and begin to smash it (using only a melee attack) making the player choose to come back and defend it, or else the police will destroy it. (and nobody wants to lose a vehicle.) Once the player 'surrenders' they will stop attacking the vehicle.

Now I'm wondering what can or cannot be done with vehicles and tagnames...

What can I say, it looks awesome. Makes me want to reinstall Tactics once you've finished it.

The police/prison guards sound like real gentlemen. You might want to consider making the dialogue a bit more brutish and intimidating.