*nods. I see, Arcana. (But, GM spawning aside in private 'chat rooms'...which is on the timeline...) I was also specifically wondering if the 'spawn points'/mob indicators from the developer view mode could be used to put the mobs where they used to be in each zone?
...once the technical issues are resolved? (...and whether this could be made persistent each time you log in?)
Though I'm quite enjoying Paragon Chat and 'wandering around' as it for the moment.
Azrael.
It should be technically possible to do, but feasible only from the client side of things, just like peds and cars. Sure, it would be great to see the city getting some semblance of life beyond us running around, but we have to be realistic.
We have a -chat- server, that just lets us talk to each other and also, thanks to some extensions, lets us see each other and move about. We don't want NPC data going through the XMPP chat server as it would just take up valuable player slots in the zones.
We have Paragon Chat itself, which acts essentially as a sort of micro-server to the game. Taking the messages CW and team have managed to decode, sending it to the XMPP server, and reading messages it gets back and feeding them to the game client. This is where NPC spawning would be best to happen, with maybe occasional timebase synching between clients, though that would likely cause NPC's to rubberband a lot.
The important part here is, have the SCoRE team decoded the messages needed to tell the CoH Client to spawn villain mobs in the zones, and have they decoded the messages needed to spawn peds and cars and setup their pathing to send to the CoH client? Using in-memory hacks as per ICON is a lot different to reading and responding to client messages. If you don't understand the language, you just hear gibberish.
The other important part is, does the client PC have the horsepower to run the client AND an emulated mapserver, because that's what we're actually talking about here.