Tutorial originally released on Running With Scissor's Postal website. Was taken down more than 10 years ago. Mirrored here for archival purposes.
POSTAL 2 Editor and Modifications
HomeNodes
This tutorial covers the use of HomeNodes in Postal 2.
It assumes you have some understanding of and experience with PostEd and you have some knowledge of pathnoding. If you are unfamiliar with these we suggest you familiarize yourself with these using tutorials available on other sites.
Keeping people out of homes:
Homenodes are generally just to prevent the problem of having people randomly walk into other people’s homes. It can help with stores and basically with any ‘restricted’ area. They do not perfectly solve the problem, but fix it most of the time. All the AI really does with them is when it’s randomly wandering around, it checks to make sure it doesn’t pick a home node to go to if it can’t go in homes. So it’s possible they’ll still use them in transit to other pathnodes. The around this is to make sure your home nodes are all in the same house, which is enclosed by doors. With that, most pawns won’t try to go in, if they are allowed to.
Here we have 2 homes and a workplace. The red dots are homenodes. All others are just pathnodes. Homenodes connect just like a pathnode, there is nothing special about it. It should link just like a normal pathnode after you build reachspecs.
As you can see, all the homenodes in those two houses, are within the confines of walls and doors. They are not a few lingering outside doors or anything like that. In the store, there are homenodes, but an open way into the store. The reason people stay out of the store properly is because there is no path through the store to viable pathnodes on the other side. If you have a normal group of pathnodes, then a few homenodes out in the open, Pawns would not choose the homenodes to go to, but they may walk through them.
Keeping people in homes:
So it’s nice that no one goes into those 3 places without being allowed to. To allow a person to use Homenodes, select the pawn and under FPSPawn set bCanEnterHomes to true. This will cause the person to start out and seek homenodes. So if you start a person in Scottshome, he’ll never leave. He will continue to mill about the home, inside, never going out.
Making people go home:
If you set bCanEnterHomes to true, and you place a person outside a house, they will start the game, and slowly make their way to the house, enter the house, then stay inside forever. This is very nice to make it seem like people are going home for various thing
Giving each person their own home:
You can also tag all the homenodes of a particular group for advanced use. In the above shot, in the two homes all the homenodes are tagged Bobshome in the middle house and Scottshome in the house on the right. If you place a pawn (or spawn one, see below) you can set his FPSPawn::HomeTag to ‘Bobshome’ and set bCanEnterHome to true. Now, no matter where this pawn starts, even if he starts in Scottshome, he’ll go to just Bobshome. If you don’t specify a tag, the people will randomly walk to only homenodes which means they might ‘home jump’ so be careful if you don’t want this behavior.
You don’t need to have any wacking convention for naming the homes. You just need to make sure to set the HomeTag to the same thing you set all the Homenode tags. You don’t need to make it correspond to your pawn’s tag.
People knowing your not allowed in their home:
If a pawn is given a specific HomeTag and if they are around those homenodes, and if another pawn (say, the player) is in their view, they’ll see if that pawn’s HomeTag matches their own. If it does, like you made two people roommates by setting the HomeTags both to ‘Johns’ and bCanEnterHomes to both true, then they’ll do nothing odd. But if someone they see doesn’t have the same HomeTag then they’ll go into freak out mode and think you’re robbing them.
Spawning people to use homenodes:
PawnSpawners can be made to set people to want bCanEnterHomes and also what the name of their home and workplace is. This is usual for spawning people outside their homes and having them walk into them, or triggered spawns for such an event.
