Yesterday I mentioned making NPCs into their own thing, instead of being very small buildings.

Today, I added a few behaviours to them. They now wander around within a small area near where they’re placed, and they now look at PCs who come to take quests from them. In this screenshot, the PC in the bottom left (the oddly named “Phoplofe” the thief) is collecting a quest from the NPC quest giver (as yet unnamed). I was surprised at how much life it adds to the world, having NPCs wander a little, and turn to face the players who interact with them. I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to do the same thing with monsters as well.

Some other new things from today:

• Quests must be turned back in to the quest giver; they don’t give quest completion experience in the field any more. (Exception: Each quest giver’s final quest does not need to be turned back in to the quest giver. This allows you to use the final quest to send players somewhere new; perhaps to the next quest-giver NPC, and not have to return. This also resulted in a few minor adjustments to subscriber AI, regarding when subscribers would prefer to work on more quests in their quest log, versus when they would prefer to go back to quest givers to actually turn in their completed quests)
• Buildings can no longer be built on jagged terrain (most typically, this is mountains, ravine walls, etc). Those areas are treated as “obstructed” for the purposes of building placement.
• Trees are no longer treated as buildings. They are instead treated as scenery. This means that you can no longer select them, can no longer individually destroy them, and they no longer block building placement. Also, they don’t cost any money — they appear automatically as part of the cost of setting a terrain type. Also note that placing a building will destroy any nearby scenery objects. Still TODO is destroying scenery items when a road is built through them.
• Regions now display information in the Info Panel, including their tint (which is displayed as a color, not as text). Still TODO is making Info Panel items editable.