Too many NPCs and spawn management: people go to an ASD facility and whittle the numbers down to 12, 10, 6, and then they bump back up because things are respawning too quickly. What's going on?

This is one of the ones that completely infuriates me because it touches on many things. So spawning in the game is all over, right? There's multiple different types of spawners. Some of them are item port spawners, for example. I hate using the bartender as an example. Apologies. But the bartender picks up a glass from an item port that's on the counter, and then we are at some point going to respawn a glass on it so we can do the animation again, or things like that. Same thing for AA turrets. In 4.0, we've had many, many issues related to overspawning from those spawners, and we fixed a lot of them, mainly conditions where designers would set those up as infinite spawn and no limits, which is great, right? So that's one thing. Now, since we've been putting out content this year, the different locations all have a population of AI NPCs in the place. And so we've had overspawn, I think, with every content patch this year, where every patch there's at least one report that comes up. It's like, infinite NPCs at location. Is it meant to be this hard, right? And I was like, all right, what's the cause now? This is an example of: the symptom is the same, the cause has been different every time. This is something I really want to get time to solve properly. The replacement system is in the works, but it's not close to being there. So the way this works, I'll give you the most recent one, for example. I think it was in 4.3.0. The mission module is the system that actually activates the NPC population for a mission in a given area. So when you enter the action area of a specific part of the mission, then the mission code is going to go and initialize submodules. And then one of those submodules will say, hey, put some AI in there. And then it's going to activate the spawn closets in the area. And that's going to start. The issue is, there was a bug with the way the mission flow was working for these things that would cause these modules to doubly initialize in certain cases. And when that started, then it would actually do it again and again and again. And so that's the latest source of these overspawns. The proper fix for this is the population manager. This is something that our R&D team have been working on, which is a replacement... spawn closets are still going to be around, but the systems that drive the spawn closets to make these AIs appear and spawn on top of, what's the word they use for this, the base population in an area, like, let's say, walk around New Babbage, all the social NPCs. Currently, all these social NPCs are placed there, right? And some of them, like, again, the bartenders, are driven by mission modules or area modules. And those always get this overspawn. So we just need this replacement system at this point, because we keep repeating this error from different angles, right? And so the population management system, its approach is different. It's going to know what's in the game world. It's like, I need five guys. Do I have five guys? We're good, right? Instead of going, when I start, I spawn five guys. Which is a complete problem. And so yeah, overspawning will be solved by this. In the meantime, we're putting in more verifications for the cases where you stream out and you stream in and the module resets, or you abandon a mission or start a mission while you're already at the action area, so that the actual logic doesn't run twice and that there's actual limits in those areas.

So, obviously, that's a bit of a whack-a-mole thing until you get the new system online.

Yeah. One thing that I'm hopeful about, though, for this is that the teams have actually built some good additional debugging tools that allow us to view the state of this. It sounds a bit weird, but it was difficult to even know how many NPCs are there at this location. That was actually difficult information to find. So now we've got super good tools to be able to tell that. If I'm able to just open the tool and view that information, it means that game designers can do the same. And so that means they can debug those problems in advance without us having to do it post-launch, which is the big thing.