Jolt Country

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere or if this is in breach of protocol, but I haven't been able to locate the question myself.

I was playtesting my latest game and noticed that ALL of my NPCs are in critical condition due to the manner in which I built this one. I was tackling things in a different way: hoping to get the NPCs "designed" into their environment better and so I focused on their graphics placement and stories first. This includes the creatures in my dungeons. (Only half are random or wandering encounters) So I placed them all added their dialogue etc. and later went back to the people editor and focused on game balance: I raised their HP added xp values and weapon abilities and attacks and so on.

What I didn't realize is that the instances of my people weren't updated as far as current HP goes (it seems other changes took effect, although I could be wrong on this too) so when they were placed into the maps they had the default 4HP they were created with. When I raised their HP, and consequently their HPMAX, the already placed NPCs had their HPMAX updated but their HP remained consistent. This has resulted in every character and creature in the entire world currently having 4HP and being in CRITICAL conditon.

What I would like to know is if there is a way to force the HP update accross all of my NPCs easily without having to erase them one by one and replace them with upated people and resetting their behavior and dialogues. Cause I think there are in all honesty around 600 of them, possibly more and I don't remember the "motives" of all the town and castle dwellers.

Sorry to be so long-winded! Thanks in advance for your time and consideration of my question. Cheers!

Ouch! Well as far as I know I'm fairly certain the objects that have already been placed on any maps should show the changes you make to their corresponding object definition in the object editors. Any save games you had will no longer be of any use ofcourse after making any changes in the editors. And to show the changes while the editors are still open you need to press tab key to update other editors to reflect changes made in the one your in.

That's what I was afraid of. I start a new game every time during playtesting to ensure that updates take effect and yeah, everything got updated except for current HP, only HPMAX. I'm going to use a Map Editor Log file as a guide and just replace each one of those guys one by one unless by some miracle I hear anything new.

I appreciate the response, though. Even empathy is helpful :)

Yep, just tried it myself in one of my own adventures and you are right. If you raise the hp of someone or something in the people editor after it is already placed on a room map, then press tab to update/save, and then playtest and look at that creature in game, they are shown as being in critical condition. This is definitely a bug.

While this sucks for your situation where you already have 600 or so creatures placed I just realized this could be a cool feature if you wanted to make an injured NPC that the PC meets and heals.

Depending on the context of your npcs there may be a few more options for you other than having to replace every individual one, one at a time. If for example many of them qualify as monsters, or always aggressive enemies of some kind which the player will usually encounter more than one of you can add to the death macro of them to respawn itself 1 time and see if the respawned version has the proper hp.

Another way for special npcs would be to put a healing spot in their room if they are the only ones in the room. Or in an entering room macro check for npcs or creatures at every tile and heal them immediately upon entering the room. This might cause other problems for you but whatever new problem it creatures perhaps would be easier to deal with than changing 600 individual creature placements one at a time across many rooms and maps.