SHELVES:
One of those little things I took for granted in Fallout is that many places had shelves and lockers. Searching those was one part of core gameplay. Their owners noticing you and attacking you was another.
Shelter now has searchable shelves. With owners.
Said owners will come running if they notice you messing with their stuff.
Whether the locker belongs to someone, is displayed in a message that appears when you Search it. It will NOT appear if your Awareness is below a certain value. Awareness, as you may recall, is part of our preliminary base stat system called ALIASED.
Awareness
Luck
Intelligence
Appeal
Strength
Endurance
Dexterity
Upon dragging an item into your inventory, there will be a check performed against Player stats and the owner, which may or may not cause the owner to attack you. I'm working on this check right now.
Another thing I'm finalizing is the Steal skill, which will be similar to looting lockers, only used on people.
Here's how shelve looting looks. Yes, reuse of the inventory image falsely suggests that shelves do, in fact, have a torso.
NON-LETHAL COMBAT:
Non-lethal combat has been downsized in scope. Reading that Fallout walkthru made me realize the need to keep the scope manageable. Managing NPC reactions after they "gave up" and are still pissed at you firmly walked into the category of unmanageable.
Therefore, NLC now only works for Player.
For instance, if you are stealing from someone's locker, and they attack you, you can give up to them. They will take your most expensive item, then the give-up flag starts blinking and you can increase the distance between you two, before they may aggro you again for standing with your weapon drawn too close to them or whatever.
If the item you took is the only one you have, it works out nicely. If, under some odd circumstance, you give up to a person while carrying something worthless, like a rope, they will yell "You are of no worth!" and attack you. Good luck with that!
Combat/aggro in Fallout was used to control the flow a great deal. Non-lethal combat currently allows for retarded exploits, such as giving up to guards and then going right past them during the "grace period". However, we will figure out how to make it work.
Here's a reminder of what our tactical menu looks like. Where else would you have the option to give up to the very leader of human resistance?
