PvE Idea: Roaming gangs

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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1

Hey,

I have been playing with friends on a PvE server, while I do have fun building stuff and the occasional dino fight and stuff. I find it a bit unchallenging at times. So I have been thinking of a way to improve the PvE a bit. One of the things was an idea where at certain interval the players would get attacked by a roaming gang. The premise is quite straight forward.

A timer that runs as soon as the server starts, after each interval there is an X percent chance a roaming gang would spawn. Spawning the roaming gang picks a random player on the server. Takes his level and fellow online tribe members levels and creates a group of NPC’s appropriate to the average level of those. Give them some random weapons and let them hunt the player/tribe members.

I hope this wouldn’t be to hard to make. But considering I have no UE4 experience at all I’m curious what other more established devs think about this. I’m a profesional JAVA programmer with ANSI C and C# backgrounds, so learning C++ won’t be to much of an issue. This is what I think should do, thinking logically

  • Extend the current GameType class to spawn a new thread running a Monitor class (the timer)
  • Write my own class for the spawn logic
  • Write my own class to form a group of NPC’s to spawn
  • Write my own class that instructs the group to attack the player

It doesn’t seem hard, but I’m dreading the learning curve a bit , if I have to be hounest , it’s not like opening my favorite IDE and start writing code I imagine ?

2

You cant do C++ part, only blueprints.
Idea is good. I got a similar idea but with kidnap option :slight_smile:

3

Talk to the developers of NPC Bush Peoples v6. They’re very good at responding to comments/posts on their mod page. They might have this “gang” option enabled, or could very easily add it.

4

I’ll see if I can get in touch with them. For now over the weekend I will install the dev kit and try something simple. A timer that displays Hello World on screen every minute or so. Sounds simple enough to get my feet wet. I’m not interested in any GFX stuff or sculpting world stuff , just game mechanic and data crunching things. So if I keep my scope limited to this. I’m hoping to get the hang of the modding requirements to get my idea going.

The idea is to create this as some kind of “mutator” for those that are familiar with the old unreal mechanics. That way you can use and deploy it regardless of mod, TC etc…