Category:Procedures

Procedures are the main "building blocks" of how a package is put together. These define what behaviors the package will make an actor do. New package types can be built from procedures in the editor.

Procedures take inputs or parameters that further define behavior. For example, a Travel procedure takes a piece of data that defines the location to travel to.

Packages provide Data inputs which can be defined, and then used by the procedures at run time to control the specific "parameters" of the procedures behavior. For example, you can define a "Travel" package's "Destination" data to be a particular XMarker reference, or even an actor's "Editor Location."

In Oblivion and Fallout, these procedures were there, but not exposed, and so could not be changed. You were locked into choosing between a finite number of behaviors that was defined by the packages available. In TESV's creation kit, we now have the ability to define brand new packages picking what procedures we want them to use.

In other words, the basic building block of AI behavior in the editor has gotten smaller. Whereas before new packages required a change to code, we can now get new packages by building them out of procedures directly. (New procedures require new code... but with the procedures we have, we can get a tremendous amount of fine tuned behavior out of our NPCS)

By linking a series of procedures together, various complex behaviors can be designed.

Some simple packages, like a "follow" package to make an actor travel from where ever he is, to somewhere else, are made up of a single procedure. In this case a "follow" procedure. (Procedures often have similar or the same names as the package types they are commonly used in).

In more complex packages, more than one procedure may be used, for example, you may want to create a "street sweeper" package, that has an actor walking from one end of town to the other, picking up objects that are laying around on his way. This might be built with travel proceedures and acquire procedures, "packaged" together.

Procedures can be conditionalized; conditions on procedures will be re-evaluated once every fEvaluateProcedureTimer seconds.

See list below for all the procedures you can use to build packages and package templates.