Ambient Civilians

Automatically populates towns, villages, settlements, ports, farms, landmarks and monuments with wandering civilian AI. No manual zone placement required, the mod discovers every location on the map at game start using the terrain's built-in location data/labels and should be plug and play.

Civilians spawn when players come within 1km of a location and despawn when they move away, hopefully keeping server performance in check. Each civilian wanders independently within the zone, picking a new random destination every two minutes. Spawn positions are validated against terrain and geometry to avoid placing civilians in water, inside buildings, or under staircases.


---For Mission/Mod Developers---

Add the AC_CivilianManager to your GameMode entity. All settings are tunable per location type directly in the component attributes, including spawn radius, civilian count, and a prefab override for locations where you want a specific character type. A global prefab pool handles all other zones, picking randomly from whatever characters you add to it.

If you wish for the locations and numbers of civilians to be persistent between zone activation and deactivation you can enable persistence within the component. (this is turned off by default)

Community made terrains may use different type integers for locations. To discover them:

1. Set Log Level to 3
2. Load your mission on the terrain
3. Search the server log for "[AC] Found location" every location entity prints its name and type integer:

 [AC] Found location 'MyTown' type=42 at <1234, 56, 789>

4. Note the integers for the location types you want to populate
5. Add entries to Location Configs in the component with those integers
6. Set Log Level back to 1 for normal play

Take a look at GameMode_Editor_Full.et within the mod for an example of the default settings, tweak until your heart or server is content!


---Future Plans---

Write some better documentation
Introduce random civilian vehicles driving between locations. (maybe a separate mod eventually)
Have all settings editable via a custom .json for server operators to configure the component values