ShadowMan777

Yea and it'd be nice if it was just organic, and things could happen that the programmer didn't even think would because of the complex interactions between npcs, which is what I'd like to aim for. As for the amount, I was thinking maybe 700-1000. I don't know what the foot print would be like on this. I am using Unity for the game.

Thanks for the awesome responses. I had thought of a similar solution along those lines(the probabilistic approach), but it seemed more complicated and takes out some of the possible random things that could occur if using approach one. For example, if the player kills a ton of orcs in an area, then less traders die. If it were a probabilistic approach, then it would be harder to keep track of these types of things, and they would have to be manually kept track of, whereas with approach one, it will occur natural that if there are less orcs, less merchants die.

It seems my original design isn't too far off base, which is what I mainly wanted to make sure of. My final question would then be how many NPC's would one conceivable iterate over in a reasonable time? I am not very good at estimating this kind of cpu usage. I realize this depends on how complex the NPC logic is, but assuming it is reasonably simple(go to a, do x) could anyone give me an educated guess? Thanks again everyone.

Sounds kind of like what I had in mind, however, you said a "feasible" position. I am worried that this wouldn't be good enough in determining how NPCS affect other NPCS. For instance, imagine the player is in town. On the world map, there is a merchant NPC moving from Town A to Town B. There is also an orc "roaming" the area on the world map. If the merchant is in the range of the merchant, then the orc would move to attack the npc. 

I don't know how this would occur and be calculated, since the player isn't seeing any of it, but for what I want to do I feel it is important for it to occur this way, even if the player isn't seeing it. And the issue is of course the world map isn't loaded, and so I feel as though I will have to make some kind of system that mimics this behavior when the player isn't "looking". 

I guess this is in general a very difficult issue of "How do we make NPCs interact with eachother in complex ways when they aren't even on screen"

Thanks for the info and that calculator. I finally fixed the issue. Apparently I had a DepthBias set to 1 somewhere at some point. Thanks for all the help and information everyone.

How big am I allowed to have my far plane without causing issues? My far plane right now is 40,000, and if I set it super low and get close to the sphere there doesn't seem to be issues.