Why do NPCs love standing on chairs so much?

I think Fran's answered that a few times already, haven't you? It's one of those things. I mean, I've answered it when I've been doing Star Citizen streams as well. It's one of those kinds of bugs that has the exact same visual output, but it has lots of things that can cause it. So you fix it one way and then the next week you've got the exact same visual output, but it's a completely different bug. It's just one of those.

There's so many things going into the usable code. It's really a jungle sometimes to figure out what exactly is causing this bug.

Yeah, definitely. It could be a missing animation. It could be the animation names changed. It could be the setup changed slightly by accident in the parent above the variant. So it could be absolutely anything.

I remember one reason. It was caused by people leaving the area, then the NPCs that were still sitting in the seats basically got turned off. And then when a player came back, they were turned back on, but the game didn't put them sitting correctly in the seat anymore. So they were just standing on it instead.

There are tons of problems basically that are causing that, and they're mostly coming from the streaming right now. I'm the first one that hates that bug. The problem is that the AI is at the end of the chain. So every time something gets improved, we get these side effects that all look like the same bug. But for standing on the chair, this is what we are trying right now. We will dedicate some time to make a proper plan. I'm scheduling some time, because I'm a bit tired of seeing it. Of course, eventually, I really want to have a proper animation of a guy standing on the chair just on purpose, and it would be like, gotcha, a one in 1,000 NPC. One in 1,000, it will happen, and he does it on purpose. Yes, we need to do it. But it's basically a lot. Sometimes, for example, when something streams out, we don't know that it will eventually come back. We can't right now guarantee it, because we don't have the proper persistence of that stuff yet. So we either reserve that object for somebody that might never come back, or it might come back with a different ID. And sometimes it's like, this was yours, but now you can't use it because it's reserved for somebody that is never going to come back. So we are not doing it. And then, of course, sometimes what happens is another NPC actually sits there before. And this is why you sometimes see two NPCs, one next to each other. The streaming takes too long, and then the guy's already there. But there are also lots of fallbacks in place already, and whenever we find them, we basically add them and then we try to recover from some of the situations right now as well. So there are a lot of little pieces, because with the population manager, of course, this is meant to be different, right? When NPCs go away, those will be repopulated by the population manager. So this is why, in a way, this is not really a problem that will exist in the future, right? Because with our plan it's already a non-problem in a way, the fact that the guys just come back because the streaming kicks in, right? But then there's of course the stuff that there might be some bugs sometimes with the LOD update. We try to be efficient in updating stuff that is not visible, and maybe that one fails to attach, and we are searching for some of this stuff. So, as Dan said, it's the same visual problem with several bugs that we are constantly fixing, and some new optimizations and things might still bring it back.