First, I want to praise our Foundry gods for finally giving us the ability to make NPCs disappear.

However, like all new features, it is not perfect, so I wanted to leave some detailed feedback.

1. In the simplest of scenarios, when we want to make a NPC disappear, he or she or it usually beams out. On tribble, they fade to nothing. This means that when our NPCs beam up, they fade into nothingness. That is very strange. I'm not saying that they should always beam out instead of fade away. The fade away function could be greatly used if...

2. On a more complex level, there is a great opportunity here to add complexity, but the mechanics of the animations hinder the functionality.

For example, let's say that I want to create a animation change for a NPC. With the ability to make a NPC disappear, I should be able to instantly replace him/her with a new version of him or herself, set with a different animation.

So, with this feature tied into triggers, I should be able to walk up to a contact, decide to punch him, and instantly replace one NPC contact with a second version of him that falls to the floor. A standing NPC is replaced by a hurt one.

There is so much potential here, but our inability to toggle on/off either the beam in animation or the fade out animation makes these types of npc changes impossible.

The new NPC that replaces the old has a beam-in animation which ruins the entire effect.

So, please, give us a way to toggle on/off both the beam in animation and the fade out animation.

Having this ability would also allow us to change a NPC from friendly to enemy and vice versa. Or, we could instantly change the various states, like setting a run away animation to a dialog prompt.

But, bottom line is, the beam in animation ruins the greater functionality of this feature. And without the beam out animation, it ruins the very basic function of making a NPC disappear. We need to be able to specify the effect that we want here.

Edit: I've been testing with different mobs and costumes to try to find one that has no beam in animation. If we can find one, then there would be an elaborate workaround based on tribal knowledge. So far I've had the most success with Attack Saur Neutral - Single, but the beam in animation returns if I change the costume. Any other authors have ideas?

I wouldn't say the beam in ruins this feature necessarily... this has been the case for NPC spawns from the start, no matter what the reason is for them appearing.

Basically what needs to happen is that EVERYTHING that spawns and despawns in the game should have the option to select how they appear... IE the animation that occurs ONCE when they appear. This is also needed for ships that warp in... if they are friendly or NPC contacts, because it is an "idle" animation, it repeats. What we need is a spawn animation and a despawn animation, with the default set to "appear" or "instant". We could then change it to what is best.

Just my 2 cents

I made note of this in the Foundry bugs post on the Tribble bugs form. I agree with needing to be able to set spawn and despawn animations or appear/disappear, whatever they want to call them.

As I recall if you use the single neutral animal NPC combat groups (single targ, multiple targs, et al), they have no beam in animation even if you change the costume. With this work around you can't use the NPC as a contact though, it has to be a reskinned (neutral) enemy group. Also, if there are any other enemy groups besides Fed or Klingon, the "neutral" animals attack them, which kind of sucks.

When I test this, the single targ and the single saur don't have beam in animations by themselves, but when you change the actor's costume to a cadet or a custom ground costume, the beam in animation returns.

The animation seems tied in with the costume that you pick, not the underlying mob (during the playtest. I didn't test a publish). It may now be that setting the "behavior" in order to specify a costume, changes the spawn animation of the Targ. So, the default unchanged Targ doesn't beam in, but a costumed Targ does.

Anyways, I can't get that workaround to work on Tribble.

I know it used to work, because on one of my missions I used a bunch of reskinned targs and I had problems because they wouldn't use the proper beam in animation. On that mission I was using the targ groups for maximum NPC coverage, so that could be the trick. You should try using a group of targs instead of the singles, and see if it works with the groups. I do now seem to remember that the singles would use the Klingon beam-in animation.

It's also possible it's been changed. I can try to verify later this evening.

So I just did a test with a saur squad with one reskinned as a ground character and it faded in instead of beamed in. It could work.

Update: I've put together a proof-of-concept mission showcasing some cool things that you can do with disappearing NPCs. Made use of the saur groups lack of beam animation in a number of them. It's called "NPC Study" and it's on Tribble now. Check it out.

Sorry to butt in, but does this "despawning NPCs" thing work on ships in space?

I didn't check in space, but the mechanics are the same, so I assume that it does. I guess that means we can finally replace contacts with a hostile enemy group............ which will then separate into a MVAM escort and destroy whatever costume we selected.