NPC Casting questions
 

Hello all,
I just saw the new screenshots of NPCs casting in battle and buffing themselves. I'd like to ask this. Will the NPCs use mana and eventually run low and have to med or will they have infinite mana to use? I hope they will have a limited amount relevent to their level and then have to rest or med to get it back. Just curious here. Anyone have an answer?

Right now npc casting is limeted to a command. later versions may allow npc's to cast by themselves without input.

everquest version is this

npcs has infinite mana and regen as long as they got nobody on aggro list.

but once aggro they got limitions just like players.

Now that the "trigger" opcode/data to make NPCs cast has been found, a basic but probably fairly effective spellcaster AI would be, once a NPC of a caster class has "aggroed" and targeted a player, to make it randomly cast spells from the list available to its class (is there an easy way of randomly choosing a spell?), targeted at itself if a buff/heal and at the player if a damage/debuff spell.
Maybe some sort of script with a list of damage, buff, debuff and heal spells would help in getting the NPC to choose the right spells.

i'd also keep open to the idea of npc's buffing pc's so its possible to make a quest for a npc to heal a pc for gold etc

In Qeynos you can get an NPC to cure disease so I dont see why the emu cant do it. Would be nice to have SoW NPC and Bind NPC since the population of Emus will be less then EQs. That way nobody is sitting for hours waiting for a bind. Just make it so 5gp=npc01 {cast 1945(heal)}.