New Releases: PANPC 2.0.7, Natural Camouflage

I'm taking a break from video production this Spring Break week, but stay tuned next week for new content on the GreslinGames YouTube channel.  

In the meantime, I got PANPC 2.0.7 out the door, and here's what it looks like:

Overhauled Deathclaw AI. The Deathclaw AI system has been long overdue for a revisit, and I took a little longer on this release than usual because I wanted to get it right. I'm pretty happy with how vicious and unrelentingly aggressive they are now. 

First, I added ranged combat tactics to their AI, so expect them to consider now whether a direct melee assault or a ranged dirt throw would fit best in a situation. I also modified their targeting, adopting a "if he bleeds when you hit him, hit him again" tactic that nearly guarantees that Deathclaws will press the kill. There are a number of other tweaks and changes, but in general they should be much more focused and directly murderous now.

Rewritten ApplyEffect script. This was another long overdue effort: stripping down and rebuilding the script that identifies NPCs and selects the appropriate AI system for them. The overall structure is now cleaner and more expandable, which means it'll be easier in the future to implement compatibility features and make sure AI assignment bugs don't happen.

Natural Camouflage support. My plan originally was to implement an invisibility mechanic in this release on Chameleon Deathclaws, but as I dug deeper into the idea, I realized that the idea was out of scope for PANPC and deserved to be its own mod.

That led to my new Natural Camouflage mod, named after the tonic in Bioshock. This mod gives you a perk that can be given to any NPC (including the player), which applies an invisibility cloak on that NPC conditioned on a set of available keywords. With this mod, NPCs with this perk can be made to turn invisible when moving, when not moving, in/out of combat, in day or at night, and in rain or in snow. (And again, you can also apply this to the player: if you then give yourself the Not Moving keyword, you basically have the Bioshock Natural Camouflage ability.)

I then added support to PANPC 2.0.7 to give Natural Camouflage to Chameleon Deathclaws, triggering invisibility when they are moving and when they begin hunting/ambushing actions.

As always, PANPC 2.0.7 is available to Citizen role users on the GreslinGames Discord, in the PANPC #releases-latest channel. If your user name is white, you don't currently have access. DM me or post in #role-requests and I'll give you access.

Natural Camouflage is available in the #natural-camouflage channel.