NPC's move without players?

[The Noob]

My dad had an interesting question the other day.....Do NPC's/monsters move when there are no players around? For instance, I found that the spawner I have puts large amounts of NPC's in the woods, but do they move if no one is around? Just curious about that.

[Redskull_1973]

Yes they do.
If you don´t want this, you need another spawner (like gigaspawner or xmlspawner) with "smart spawning".

[ArteGordon]

by default, the creature AI is turned off as soon as players move out of range. This is determined by the setting of the PlayerRangeSensitive property in BaseCreature.cs

		public virtual bool PlayerRangeSensitive{ get{ return true; } }

If you change this to false, then the AI will remain active even when players are not around, but be aware that this will result in a very large increase in your cpu usage.
You can reduce that cpu load by using something like the smartspawning that Redskull mentioned. You can also use the PlayerRangeSensitive mod (see the xmlspawner2 thread for a link to it) that enables the AI to remain active for some specified period of time after players go out of range even when PlayerRangeSensitive is true.

[daat99]

Originally Posted by Redskull_1973

Yes they do.
If you don´t want this, you need another spawner (like gigaspawner or xmlspawner) with "smart spawning".

No they don't move at all if there isn't any players in range (like Arte said).
I just want to add my opinion of those "smart" spawners.

Having tons of npcs will increase your save time but won't effect lag.
Having "smart" spawners will decrease save time a bit and increase lag a lot.
Personally I prefer longer saves with less lag...

[ArteGordon]

Originally Posted by daat99

No they don't move at all if there isn't any players in range (like Arte said).
I just want to add my opinion of those "smart" spawners.

Having tons of npcs will increase your save time but won't effect lag.
Having "smart" spawners will decrease save time a bit and increase lag a lot.
Personally I prefer longer saves with less lag...

That is generally true if you have PlayerRangeSensitive set to true (although the amount of lag introduced by the different spawn reduction methods will vary) since inactive mobs dont contribute that much to server load.

But if you have PlayerRangeSensitive set to false, then anything that reduces the number of active spawns will have a very significant impact on cpu usage and lag.

[daat99]

Originally Posted by ArteGordon

That is generally true if you have PlayerRangeSensitive set to true (although the amount of lag introduced by the different spawn reduction methods will vary) since inactive mobs dont contribute that much to server load.

But if you have PlayerRangeSensitive set to false, then anything that reduces the number of active spawns will have a very significant impact on cpu usage and lag.

As of now I never saw a shard that runs with PlayerRangeSensitive set to false so all my claims are based on it set to true.

I just can't think of any reason to set it to false

[arul]

It is a good thing to set it false at the dungeon entrance spawns, because they are usually surrounded by the allured monsters and getting into the dungeon means in most cases being instantly killed.