Does having many NPC's slow down the game as it runs?

I was wondering if having many NPC's, particularly copies of NPC's that are non-moving and invisible, would slow down my game in each area?

example) Would having 200 NPC copies that are standing still on a map slow the game down in that area?

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No, that should be fine.

(The limit on NPC instances is still only 300)

I've had around 250 npcs on a map at a time, no real slowdown seen. It might slow down if you're scripting something for each of them though, but that would depend on your script.

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Sounds good, I'll just test it out then. Thanks.

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Hm...I don't know if AR-PUH-GUH! will be liking that in the end...

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The limit is 300 NPC instances on a single map

Although if you use some really cunning and clever script magic, I'm pretty sure you could find a neat little work-around for having more than 300 NPCs wandering around. It'd definitely involve using slices and scripting your own movement thing for them and it'd be pretty darn complicated I believe. Though one wonders what anyone would be doing with more than 300 NPCs on a single map...

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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Do you people seriously underestimate how big AR-PUH-GUH! is going to be? I'll be needing lots and lots o' NPCs for things such as signs to be read and monsters you do side-quests to hunt. I want to get the world on a single map instead of broken up like I originally was gonna have it. There, of course, will be boat travel accessible eventually. By about the end of the first major continent. 300 might suffice, but I couldn't rightly say. This is a project that's years in the making, and many years still lay ahead in it's development process.

On a similar token, what's the current max doors allowed? Because that may, too, cause a prollem.

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You could "load" areas, possibly using zones, deleting old NPC instances from other zones and creating your new ones as players move into those areas. If you really need that.

Scripting can get around max door limits fairly easily (on-step script, check to see if the player just stepped where you wanted there to be a door, if so suspend, fade, teleport, etc).

Scripting can also get around the max NPC limit as long as all 300 don't need to be all around the same 'area'. It's a bit more tedious to write the script, but you can have an on-step script that checks the player's position, and alters NPC attributes and places them accordingly depending on which part of the map the player is in. Tales I did this a little bit to get around the 36-NPC type limit that existed back then. I'm pretty sure other old games used this trick as well.

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And as for signs and stuff, you don't -need- to use NPCs for that. Have an on keypress thing that checks the coordinates, looks it up, and based on those coordinates, does what you want.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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I think the easiest way to script your way around NPC and door limitation, is to use 4 or 9 or 16 maps, and write a script to smooth the transition between the edges of the map, so you get the illusion of one big map, without actually being limited to one big map.

...and thanks to the mark/clone tools in the map editor, it would only be modestly difficult to synchronize the edges of the maps

That being said, the NPC and door limits are not written in stone. They can, and probably will be raised in the future.

Oh geez not this again. I hate to see people come up with elaborate workarounds for the 300 NPC limit when raising that limit in the engine isn't very hard. It hasn't been done yet because no one has requested it. But 300 is definitely far too low a limit. You don't have to do anything crazy to hit it; for example SoJ actually hits and exceeds it on a couple maps (it depends on a bug where the createNPC command overwrites existing NPCs when the limit is reached). So I'm surprised that I've never heard of any other game hitting it.

You may have up to 100 doors and 200 door links per map. I think you're only liable to hit that if you want to place doors along the edge of a map (using scripts for that is easier anyway).

There will certainly most likely be the need for more than 100 doors for AR-PUH-GUH!. Script may be able to get around that, though. But default dooring would be a nicer thing. /puppy eyes
I'll probably make a note of it in the AR-PUH-GUH! thread once I get close to that limit.
I mean, I suppose I could just do something where the world map is separate from each area map. I just wanted to make a grand epic map was all.
Thanks for lettin' me know me limits. 300 NPCs and 100 doors, seems coo'.

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I recently encountered this limitation and so I broke my world map into 2 maps. Actually, my game is better for it, but it would be nice not to have to mess with all those work arounds.