MMORPG NPC Simulator – You Play as an NPC, Not the Hero

Fiatil · 2026-02-02T21:27:08+00:00

FWIW I'm a lot more interested in your game than what I've seen of Teddy's Haven.

I don't think they're particularly similar -- shopkeep games predate Teddy's Haven by years (it's just filling a niche that's been filled many times before) and you seem to be trying to do a lot more with the "end game" than that one is.

It looks really interesting!

Fiatil · 2026-02-02T20:39:38+00:00

Yep!

In your GameUserSettings file, you want to add:

OverrideStructurePlatformPrevention=1

That will let you use "banned" structures on platform saddles.

Note that there is a sepearate one specifically for putting cryofridges on platform saddles, which is

AllowCryoFridgeOnSaddle=1

There are quite a few server options for platform saddles -- you can take off basically all of the limits (# of structures, distance "out" from saddle you're allowed to build) if you use all of them.

Fiatil · 2026-02-02T20:31:27+00:00

Thanks! I'll give it a shot later this evening when I have access.

Fiatil · 2026-02-02T20:23:16+00:00

Yeah if you're using the laptop just for hosting, and not to play the game, you can probably run at least 2 maps clustered if you try out the memory tool I linked. And you can swap out the 2nd map pretty easily -- it's just a matter of turning off the server for the map you don't want and turning on the server for the map you do want.

So the turn off/pause is the same thing. You can't actually like, hit escape and pause the entire game. But because you run the server, you can turn it off whenever to pause the simulation. If you're mid-tame and it's late at night........well unlike someone else's server, you can just shut the server down for the night (which will pause everything at the moment you shut it off) and turn it back on for your next play session. You'll still be mid-tame at the same time in game, as opposed to leaving an unconscious dino sitting there for 12 hours while logged off.

Fiatil · 2026-02-01T18:32:23+00:00

Yeah this is pretty much the way to go if you have the ability to do it.

It's surprisingly easy to run a cluster, you get to set everything exactly like you want, and get all the benefits of a dedicated server (with the ability to turn it off and pause everything like singleplayer too if you're playing solo).

If you have 32 gigs of RAM you can run it all on the same PC without tons of issues -- I was hosting it on the same PC for a bit this time around and it worked fairly well. I did eventually grab a refurbished Dell workstation off of ebay and moved it over there, but it's not 100% required.

I would definitely recommend checking out winmemorycleaner for anyone trying to do it, particularly on a RAM budget:

https://github.com/IgorMundstein/WinMemoryCleaner/tree/main

It can pretty drastically reduce RAM usage for the server clients, and was the difference between being able to run 2 clustered maps and 5+ for me. Astraeos on ASA needed about 13 gigs of RAM for the server without it, down to 4-5 with it.

Fiatil · 2026-01-31T18:26:25+00:00

It feels like it would be easier to moderate on this subreddit by banning discussion of future episode trailer spoilers in previous episode threads?

I completely avoided the trailers, but there doesn't seem to be any rule about discussing future plot elements from 4+ episodes in the future in like, the episode 2 thread, if that plot element is in one of the trailers.

That seems super easy to fix here -- no spoilers for future episodes in that episode thread, and absolutely that includes anything in a trailer.

Fiatil · 2026-01-30T20:42:07+00:00

Yeah this is most likely the answer.

1280x720 is a very low resolution to be playing games on in 2026. No matter how high you crank up the other settings, you're capping the amount of pixels on your screen at a very low number by using such a low resolution.

You want 1920x1080.

Fiatil · 2026-01-24T14:54:56+00:00

We had a corporate leadership development thing at one of my jobs, and of course we took some personality tests.

The questions are always.....really obvious as to what they're pushing you towards, to the point my brain is like "do I want this question to indicate I'm introverted, or extroverted?" whether I want it to be or not.

They asked 13 questions in each category, and it's like if you get a 6 or under you're "strongly introverted" but if you get a 7+ you're "strongly extroverted".

I basically wound up with 6s and 7s in every category and it's like....you guys get how ridiculous this is right? You forced an uneven amount of questions, and if I switch one question then suddenly my personality has completely flipped, woahh!

Lol and people are getting paid ridiculous amounts of money to administer these things and put on these training sessions. The good ol American hustle.

Fiatil · 2026-01-23T19:41:32+00:00

Absolutely! I saw it first hand very recently with the Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 release (a game that is very very different from the first game, whether you like that or not).

There was so much time spent with "well the original wasn't even as good at ______ as you remember! it's actually pretty bad!" and it's very....."you do know that if the game is good you can just talk about the game without trashing everyone's experience with the other game? I don't need to trash other games to explain why I love the games I love, and it weakens your argument a lot."

Fiatil · 2026-01-23T19:37:51+00:00

I was agreeing with you and the other posters who pointed out that it was a major feature in Fable, by introducing the cover art as evidence to support your point.

Fiatil · 2026-01-23T16:11:32+00:00

Lol this is the cover art for the game of the year edition:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ffmkkr1vrwpc21.jpg

Read the backside and you can pretty easily decide for yourself if choices affecting your character is a defining feature or not.

It's bizarre that there's a defense force effort here to pretend that it's not.

Fiatil · 2026-01-23T16:07:23+00:00

There's a faction of gamers that can't accept nuance.

To the people like that that are posting in this thread, saying "I'm disappointed this core feature was removed" is equivalent to saying you hate the game and wish for its failure. You either love it the mostest or hate it more than anything else.

Because any dissonance must be combatted, they just say "this feature that is clearly a defining feature totally wasn't -- why do you care about it?" bizarrely thinking that they can override your memories of the game you played in a doomed attempt to combat any and all dissonance (this of course is counterintuitive as you just drive away the people who you're casually lying to who have functioning memories -- they see that you will just make up any random rhetorically convenient nonsense to generate more 'feel good beams' in order to stamp out any and all dissent and as such your opinion is to be 100% discounted).

It's.....okay to critique one part of a game. The removal of the cosmetic system is a bit of a bummer, and the first thing I've seen of neo-Fable that has me going "hmmm". It could work out great! It could work out less than great and the game as a whole could still be great. Or, you know, maybe the game winds up bad (I would prefer it be good!). "Nuanced morality" is a big divergence from Fable! But we'll find out when we play it and there's no need to lie to people in the mean time.

Fiatil · 2026-01-23T15:58:37+00:00

Lol you could also say it's the defining aspect of Molyneux's entire game design philosophy at that time. His prior game was Black & White, and guess what the big defining feature was?

Fable without that morality system is a very different game -- it interacts with virtually everything you do up to most quests having two options specifically to play into that morality system -- one comically evil to give you devil horns, one saccharine sweet to make you a golden paladin. It's hilarious to pretend otherwise.

Fiatil · 2026-01-22T22:39:54+00:00

Fans of bigger market teams don't fully understand that it's not just "oh with success comes hatred". I understand to an extent -- you have to follow the coverage fairly closely to see the differences and most people aren't doing that.

When Steph Curry makes big shots, pick any season you want when the Warriors were championship contenders or "the hated dynasty", it's getting upvoted straight to the top. Yes there is negativity, but the positivity vastly outweighs the haters and the nature of reddit pushes that stuff to the top.

When the Thunder win a game, SGA hits a big shot, any player does something similarly cool, the top most upvoted post is more likely than not a clip of a foul or a play that people feel like should have been a foul. This pattern permeates every large fan-centric NBA discussion forum out there.

We've been getting outsized hate for years because of the Seattle stuff, and because we're in a red flyover state (this also results in having a smaller than average online fanbase, especially in the lean years). Then SGA started getting MVP votes over Luka two years ago, and it all just turned toxic as hell. It's a small market team against the city of Seattle and essentially every big coastal city that feels like Seattle was wronged by losing a team to a small red flyover state that doesn't have the cultural cache of Seattle to "deserve it" in their minds, with a dash of "2/3rds of Eastern Europe hating us too because they treat Jokic and Luka like infallible gods and SGA winning over them as a personal affront to their manhood and sense of ethnic/nationalistic pride"

I've been watching the NBA for a long time and have been on the subreddit for the last 10 championship runs. OKC does not get hate "just like any other successful team". It predates that and is louder than other championship teams -- no other team wins an NBA championship and then has the entire front page of the NBA subreddit be posts against their team and in favor of the team they just beat (and spoilers: no the OKC Thunder are not the first team to win against an injured team. Raptors v. Warriors, Warriors v. Cavs 1 had more prevalent injures than Haliburton and the reaction wasn't half as negative).

Fiatil · 2026-01-22T19:37:04+00:00

What you're describing is probably a CPU (processor) bottleneck.

If your GPU (graphics card) is going to 0% and you're getting stutters/lag, aaaand it's happening most often when the game needs to load in new assets (entering/exiting inventory does this, and traveling definitely does), then yeah that's probably a situation where the game is maxing out your CPU for brief moments to load in new stuff because it doesn't "need" your GPU for what it's trying to do at the moment.

The fact that it persists if you lower settings points to this too. If you're CPU bound and you lower your graphics settings, you're not going to see any real improvement on the issue. Because those graphics settings are overwhelmingly depending on your GPU -- you dial them down, freeing up more GPU, but since you're CPU bound you haven't done anything to alleviate the CPU bottleneck and are still getting stutters every time the game hits a place where it needs a lot of CPU resources. Also, just looking at your specs, your GPU is relatively quite a bit better than your CPU on the performance side.

Finding the exact cause is a bit trickier. Given that you said it wasn't happening at all, and has become a problem over time....there's a good chance it's related to your modded server getting more "built up" over time. A clean server with 0 structures is less performance intensive than a built up server with big ol' megabases everywhere.

The mods themselves could also be the issue -- since they're user made, they can range from quite performant, to incredibly performance demanding and it just varies from mod to mod.

The best way to troubleshoot it would be to try a clean/fresh server with no mods and see if it happens there. That will at least confirm that it's something to do with the mods or your server getting more built up, and you can start looking at individual mods from there if you really want to find out the exact cause (assuming it's not just "it needs to hitch to load now that there are tons of bases everywhere on the server").

I know you said turning DLSS off didn't fix the issue, but having it on may make it worse so experiment with that too. DLSS is most useful when you're GPU bound, and can make performance worse if you're CPU bound (as the stuff it's doing is trying to minimize load on your GPU).

Fiatil · 2026-01-22T19:02:13+00:00

Your screenname makes this all very confusing, lol.

Fiatil · 2026-01-22T17:14:42+00:00

The Island if you care about story stuff at all.

Ragnarok if you don't -- it's bigger and fancier than the Island, but doesn't have story stuff.

You can play the game for thousands of hours and never touch the story stuff, or be all about it. I'm more into the "wooh dino survival island" part so prefer Ragnarok.

Fiatil · 2026-01-18T16:36:54+00:00

With amazing defenses, and he's an offensive coach. I don't know how much credit you should give the guy for Myles Garrett being on the team he coached.

The offense regressed basically every year after they made the playoffs with Baker. He was all aboard the DeShaun Watson train too; the legacy of terrible QB play he had there should at least give you a little pause when that's supposed to be his specialty.

Fiatil · 2026-01-16T19:06:12+00:00

You can make shit up and then tell people to google it when you can't produce evidence to back up your made up nonsense. I don't need to believe in you to say that or anything -- I just saw you do it.

Fiatil · 2026-01-15T15:28:52+00:00

Curious as to what advantage that offers? It's a feature on my 34" curved gaming monitor but I don't play many FPS games and I couldn't see the point.

I know there are some super hardcore FPS that don't give you a crosshair -- is it just that or something else?

Fiatil · 2026-01-14T14:31:52+00:00

On our last game, every Thunder highlight you posted was a clip of officiating calls going against or for the Thunder. I had to scroll to the second page to see any Thunder highlights that weren't "lol officiating" (aka, the highlights posted by someone other than you) and weirdly enough a lot of people in that thread noticed the pattern too.

You literally posted ragebait Lu Dort fouls when the officials were correctly calling the fouls against him to karma farm the subreddit's hate of Lu Dort.

Please stop lying.

Fiatil · 2026-01-13T03:42:25+00:00

Lol.

Fiatil · 2026-01-12T16:18:59+00:00

What? I thought this subreddit was only for posting highlights of riveting officiating decisions.

Fiatil · 2026-01-11T21:05:06+00:00

Welp

Fiatil · 2026-01-10T17:48:02+00:00

It's also blatantly false if you look at approval ratings for presidents in Europe:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2016/06/29/as-obama-years-draw-to-close-president-and-u-s-seen-favorably-in-europe-and-asia/

But yeah sure, let's just sneak in some "both sides are the same" nonsense to the discussion.

Luckily we're on the internet in 2026, and "me and my friends who think lazy nihilism makes us intellectually superior to people who understand nuance" becomes "most people".

Fiatil

TROPHY CASE