How to make characters appear randomly in a mission/scenario?

Ya, I would say the easiest way to do it would be to create a scenario with the maximum amount of suspects and hostages. This would then act as a sort of template.

With a custom app you could then load that template and it would generate many different random versions of this scenario. The only difference between each scenario would be the random number of suspects/hostages.


I may be able to talk my son into making a Python app that does this. He sounded interested when I mentioned it the other day. Just let me know if you want it done.

I may be able to talk my son into making a Python app that does this. He sounded interested when I mentioned it the other day. Just let me know if you want it done.

Dang, I'd really appreciate that. Second time this website is willing to work with a relatively big request (1st was Copy Cat remodeling hostages for me).

After a bit of research it looks like there are only 2 sections of the scenario file that needs to be modified to make random versions from a "template" scenario.

Objectives

    Hostage    Rescue    1
    Suspect    Neutralize    2
    TRACI_B    Arrest    1

Characters

There are 5 different types of characters in this section:

Primary suspect - action is "Arrest"
Primary hostage - action is "Primary"
Suspect - action is "Neutralize"
Civilian -  action is "None"
Hostage - action is "Rescue"

I can see the amount of suspects, civilians, and hostages to be randomized but should the primary suspects be randomized also?   It can be done but you would have to be careful not to mention the primary in the mission description (since they might not be there if randomized).

Updated:  forgot to include one type of character action
 

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This is nice. But how do you restrict the app to a certain type of suspect/hostage?

You know, I should have mentioned this earlier: if you played SWAT 4, the Quick Mission Maker has something very close to what you are making, except you can restrict the suspect or hostages to certain type. So if you want only mechanics in the repair shop, the game will put a random number but restricted to that type.

EDIT: There also something else: whenever you use the in-game randomizer for custom maps, sometimes most (if not all) characters spawn where SWAT does. Of course this doesn't happen with the vanilla maps. So if it's not too late, could you also define the spawn points for the characters so they don't spawn in the same place as SWAT?