Civilians

What this is

Towns on your map can be populated. People live in the zones you have already authored for objective placement, walk around during the day, go home at night, and are billed against the faction score if a player shoots them.

The point is that crossing the map costs something again. A town somebody drives past is a town with people in it, and a driver who does not slow down finds out what that is worth.

Civilians only exist inside zones. They are never placed on an open road in the middle of nowhere — a lone figure walking a country road reads as a bug rather than as a country with people in it.

What you have to supply

Zones, and nothing else. The mod ships four vanilla CIV character prefabs — a generic civilian, a businessman, a dockworker and a construction worker — so a town inside a zone is inhabited on a stock setup with no further setup.

Replace that list if your setting wants different people. One prefab is drawn per person, so several entries give a varied street. They are character prefabs, not group prefabs: each civilian gets a group of their own built around them and takes their faction from the character prefab, so who the locals are is decided by the prefab and never configured twice.

Zones are the part that is yours. They are the same zone list objectives are placed from, which you author on Objective placement. Each zone carries its own tick for whether people live there, so a military camp or an airfield can be excluded while the towns around it stay inhabited.

The two ticks are independent, which is how somewhere becomes populated but never fought over: a friendly town beside your main base with m_bAllowObjectives off and m_bAllowCivilians on is lived-in and never generated into.

Only while somebody is near

Nobody is simulated in a town nobody is looking at. A zone fills when a player comes within m_fCivilianSpawnDistanceM of its edge, and empties again once every player is past m_fCivilianDespawnDistanceM from it.

Measuring to the edge rather than the centre is what makes a large zone fill as somebody reaches the outskirts, instead of when they are already halfway across it. The gap between the two distances is what stops a player sitting on the boundary making a town flicker.

A Game Master camera does not count — the check measures player-controlled characters. Inspecting a town means taking your character there.

They do not all appear together. One resident is placed as the zone fills and the rest follow one at a time, spaced by m_iAiSpawnStaggerSec — so a large town takes several minutes to be fully inhabited, which is why the fill distance is generous enough to start before anybody is close. A zone that empties while people are still on their way simply drops the ones who had not arrived.

Their day

Everybody gets a house. When a zone fills, its buildings are surveyed and handed out one per person, and only repeat once a town has more people than usable interiors. A civilian is placed near their own front door, and wanders a circuit drawn around it at walking pace — so where somebody is at a given hour follows from which house they were given, and each of them keeps to their own street rather than crossing the whole town.

After sunset, m_fCivilianNightIndoorsFraction of them stop wandering and go inside their own house. The rest carry on as they were. It is decided by position in the list rather than by a roll, so the same people are in and the same people are out each night — a street that empties and refills differently every evening reads as a fault rather than as a curfew.

Somebody in a zone with no building they can get inside holds their doorstep instead. Nothing about this needs authoring: no building is tagged, and no navmesh work is involved.

When shooting starts

Civilians who hear a weapon fired stop what they were doing. Most of them drop where they stand and stay down; a minority — about a third — break for home immediately and sprint there. That split is deliberate: a street that empties on the first round is no harder to fight in than an empty street, and people still lying in it are the thing that makes a town different.

The longer the shooting lasts, the more of them give up and run. Nerve is measured from the first shot of an incident, and by about two minutes of sustained fire everyone who went to ground has broken and gone. They break in the same order every time rather than at random, so a street empties the same way twice.

Anybody with rounds landing around them personally runs regardless of which group they were in.

They come back out once it has been quiet for about 45 seconds. Every further shot starts that clock again, so a running firefight keeps them down for as long as it lasts rather than for a fixed spell after the first round.

How far the sound carries matches what the game’s own AI hear — roughly 500 m for an unsuppressed weapon and 100 m for a suppressed one, so a civilian and a soldier on the same corner react to the same shot. A shot in the open empties a whole town; a suppressed weapon clears only the street it was fired in. That is the whole of the difference a suppressor makes to them, and it is why there is no radius setting.

Somebody with no building they can get inside runs to their doorstep instead, the same as they do at night.

They react to players firing, and to rounds arriving near them from anybody. A player shooting in the street empties it; so does a burst from a garrison that lands among them. What does not reach them is distant AI-on-AI shooting they are not caught in — a firefight two streets away leaves them wandering.

None of this is configurable. The shares, the timings and the ranges are fixed in the mod, and there is no switch to turn the reaction off.

While a town is being shelled

Everybody in a town with rounds falling on it stays behind their own front door, and keeps to it for five minutes after the last one, rather than coming back out after the usual 45 seconds of quiet.

What they do around you

Anything in this section runs only while nothing is being shot at. Gunfire outranks all of it: somebody who takes cover or breaks for home drops whatever they had wandered off to do first, including putting a cigarette out and handing back a dressing they had taken.

Nobody runs for any of it. Every approach here is a walk.

Sharing a cigarette

Somebody within 30 m of a player who is standing about with their weapon lowered may walk over, stop three or four metres short, and smoke with them for a minute or so. One person per town every four minutes, so a player is never surrounded.

Standing over a body

Any character killed inside a populated town is remembered for four minutes. Once the town has been quiet for the usual all-clear, up to three locals walk over and stand a couple of metres off it. The first to arrive lights a cigarette, and the group breaks up when he finishes.

A dead soldier draws them as readily as a neighbour does. Destroyed vehicles do not — a burnt truck is not something to come and look at.

Backing away from a raised weapon

A player who raises a weapon within 9 m sends anybody that close walking 30 m off. They settle again once the weapon has stayed beyond 18 m for fifteen seconds.

Two ranges rather than one, so somebody standing on the threshold does not flip the same person back and forth every second.

Pointing out where the soldiers are

A local passing within 5 m of a player who is standing still may stop, turn, point towards the nearest hostile inside 50 m, and go back to their day. One person per town every five minutes.

Hostility is read from the faction of the player being warned, so this covers whoever your preset has declared enemies of each other, with no list to maintain.

It only happens where no hostile that local can see has a clear line to them — being watched from across the valley counts, not just being watched by the one they would point at.

Bandaging somebody who is down

A local passing within 20 m of a player who is unconscious, in a town that has been quiet for the all-clear, walks over, searches them, takes their field dressing, treats whichever wound is bleeding worst, and puts the dressing away before going back to their day.

The dressing comes out of the casualty’s own pockets. The locals carry no medical kit of their own, so a player with nothing on them cannot be helped. If the treatment fails part way through, the local keeps the dressing.

A dead player is not treated. An unconscious one is.

Whether the locals will deal with you

The cigarette, the warning and the bandage share one test. A town closes to soldiers while either of these holds:

• somebody who lived there was killed in the last ten minutes, by anybody at all
• the town’s notoriety standing is up, which denying an asset there is enough on its own to cause

A closed town is not an empty one. Their day, their reaction to gunfire and their willingness to come and look at a body are all untouched. What stops is anything they would do for a soldier.

Standing decays slowly, so one denial closes a town for the better part of an hour.

Killing a local does not feed the notoriety ledger — it is held against that town on its own. Shooting civilians therefore closes the town to you without also summoning a harder military response.

None of this section is configurable either. Every distance, share and interval is fixed in the mod.

Name tags

Set m_sCivilianFactionKey to the faction your civilian prefabs actually carry, and name tags are kept off them. A street of neutral characters otherwise wears a wall of white names that hides anything moving behind it.

It must match the prefabs to have any effect, and it changes nothing about how they behave. Leave it empty to keep their name tags.

Killing one costs the faction

Shooting a civilian charges the faction score and names the player who did it.

The tariff starts at m_fCivilianPenalty and climbs by m_fCivilianPenaltyStep for each further kill inside m_iCivilianPenaltyWindowSec, up to m_fCivilianPenaltyMax. The window is measured from the last kill, so somebody who keeps going keeps climbing, and somebody who stops for the window drops back to the base rate next time.

Only a player is billed. A civilian caught in a firefight between the AI is a casualty of the war, and charging the faction for a stray AI round would make the ledger lie about who did what. Those deaths are logged and cost nothing.

Civilian kills share one record with damage to protected areas, so somebody who does both does not get a fresh allowance for each. Warnings and removal escalate across both together.

Those four settings live with the rest of the enforcement settings on Configuration.

During a narrative op

By default civilians carry on through a narrative op exactly as they do the rest of the time, so a town stays as lived-in for an authored scene as it is for a rolling objective.

Turn m_bCiviliansInNarrative off and every zone empties when the op begins and fills again when combat ops resumes, which leaves the map to the characters your Game Masters placed. It takes a few seconds either way rather than happening on the instant of the switch.

On a server not running the mode switch at all, this setting does nothing.

Settings

Population works out as the rate multiplied by the zone’s radius, then held between the floor and the ceiling — so the ceiling is what bounds one very large zone, and the rate is what bounds your server.

Per-zone overrides

Two fields on each zone, alongside its name, centre and radius on Objective placement:

Set m_iCivilianCount to make one place busier or quieter than its size suggests.

Overriding these on your server

If ATG Core is loaded ahead of this mod, all of the above can be set per server from $profile:ATG/atg-scenario.json without touching any mod files. Booleans are written true and false — a 1 is ignored and the setting silently keeps the value it already had.

{
  "m_bCiviliansEnabled": true,
  "m_aCivilianPrefabs": [
    "{22E43956740A6794}Prefabs/Characters/Factions/CIV/GenericCivilians/Character_CIV_Randomized.et",
    "{B3AB6D12D247DDB5}Prefabs/Characters/Factions/CIV/Businessman/Character_CIV_Businessman_Randomized.et",
    "{5882AE7A4543AFB4}Prefabs/Characters/Factions/CIV/Dockworker/Character_CIV_Dockworker_Randomized.et",
    "{D97EAE64721478F3}Prefabs/Characters/Factions/CIV/ConstructionWorker/Character_CIV_ConstructionWorker_Randomized.et"
  ],
  "m_sCivilianFactionKey": "CIV",
  "m_fCiviliansPer100M": 4,
  "m_iCiviliansMin": 2,
  "m_iCiviliansMax": 16,
  "m_fCivilianSpawnDistanceM": 600,
  "m_fCivilianDespawnDistanceM": 900,
  "m_fCivilianWanderRadiusM": 60,
  "m_bCivilianDayNight": true,
  "m_fCivilianNightIndoorsFraction": 0.6,
  "m_bCiviliansInNarrative": true,

  "m_fCivilianPenalty": 50,
  "m_fCivilianPenaltyStep": 10,
  "m_fCivilianPenaltyMax": 100,
  "m_iCivilianPenaltyWindowSec": 600
}

Delete the lines you do not want to change — a key you leave out keeps its shipped value. m_aCivilianPrefabs needs care: it is a list, so naming it replaces the whole thing rather than merging, and naming it with an empty array places nobody at all. Leave it out unless you are changing who the locals are, and write resource strings out in full, braces included, taken from the Workbench picker rather than typed.

If nobody appears

The server log says which of the reasons applies, at startup:

[ATG_Scenario] Civilians: m_bCiviliansEnabled is off, no civilians will be placed
[ATG_Scenario] Civilians enabled but no civilian prefabs configured - none will be placed
[ATG_Scenario] Civilians enabled but no zone allows them - none will be placed

A healthy start names how many zones took part, and each town then reports itself as it fills and stands down:

[ATG_Scenario] Civilians active - 6 zone(s), 4 per 100m of radius (min 2, max 16), spawning within 600m, day/night 1
[ATG_Scenario] 10 civilian(s) went about their business in "Naudeh", between 9 house(s)
[ATG_Scenario] Civilians in "Naudeh" stood down - nobody within 1240m

If people appear but every one of them is on the outskirts, the town’s buildings are not being recognised as somewhere anyone could live — the house count in that line is what to look at.