NPCs are spawned when and only when players are in the same zone. So while there may be ways to track this, the numbers you'd get would not speak for an actual faction war. Also, you would want the NPCs to be weak enough for players to harvest so any time a player is responsible for NPC spawning it is likely that he also is very strongly affecting the outcome of a battle (up so far that twice as well equipped factions would be wiped out by the worse one).

A bit off-top:



Actually you do not always have to enter a zone to get npcs spawned.

Still they will spawn only if a kind of a player exists.

Ok guys this is starting to sound really philosophical and stuff, kinda like "if a tree falls down in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" Well I don't really care if it makes a sound I'm not standing under it .

I'm actually only worried about when players are in the zone atm.

So you're trying to tell me that when you undock from planet manhatten for example NPC's will be spawning in the encounter zones at fort bush, pittsburgh etc? My understanding is that an encounter zone only spawns NPC's when you enter the zone, you seem to be arguing differently.

If we were talking multiplayer, that might present you with a situation where you undock from manhatten causing npc's to spawn there, and another player was at fort bush causing npc's to spawn there. Otherwise NPC's would not be flying around outside fort bush.

OK the vanilla FL ONLY spawns NPCs within 2.5k of a player, this is to reduce the amount of crap the server has to worry about. Modders CAN change this to whatever they want, whether it's 50m or 500K.

For my purposes when and why a NPC spawns has no real bearing on what I'm trying to do at this point. What is important here is that they do A. spawn and B. can I track if that NPC kills or is killed by a player? if it's just absorbed back into the matrix from which it sprang it doesn't count for anything. And even where only matters up to the point of what system.

NO



NO

What are you referring to Skotty? If you're referring to NPC max spawn distances then as I understand it that just effects how far away from the player a ship will spawn. Vanilla is 2.5k and one reason for upping that was because battleships look a bit daft just popping up out of nowhere right in your face. I spent ages tinkering with that when I was playing around with itano circus and saw no other effect. You still had to be in the encounter zone to effect a spawn.

C'mon Vital, don't just say NO, clue us in to how things actually work if you have a better understanding of how encounters are called. I certainly want to know how they work if I've got it wrong.

Edit: I see there is a proximity to zone for patrol paths and tradelane encounters, but I guess they are such small zones that nothing would ever spawn if that were not the case. Can't see anything for any other kind of zone.