Are the "cheap" npcs temporary?

[Szczuku]

Don't worry I'm not talking about npcs that are cheap to hire. I'm talking about npcs that are made by taking a head of another npc and placing it on a body.

Some of the Luminitiates and Spree Thugs in Experimental are just someone else's head placed on someone else's body. 

I mean, it's such a chep way to make 'new' npcs that it's gotta be only temporary, right?

Spoiler

 

[RageLeague]

Maybe you exhaused their skinned npc supplies that they started to generate generic ones.

[Wumpus the 19th]

I mean, I think its intentional. It gets the job done and ite not like 50+ spree thieves spawned for nadan's fight will...Show up later. Most of them come only to walk off screen afterwards.

[Scrumch]

I'm assuming so since I've discovered most of the bandit NPCs and their boons/banes - yet Nadan's fight sometimes brings in completely new NPCs that don't get added to my compendium. 

[RageLeague]

Technical stuff: Every skinned NPC has a uuid, which is used to identify an NPC's unique skin in the game's files. Each NPC's boon unlocks are tracked by their uuid, and the game tracks a list of available uuids to spawn skinned agent. Each time a skinned agent is spawned, their respective uuid is removed from the list to prevent the same agent from showing up twice as different NPCs. However, there are only so many skinned npcs, so when all uuids of an NPC class is exhausted, the game goes through an NPC generator that generates a "random" skin for the NPC, that doesn't have a uuid. Since these NPCs don't have a unique uuid, the game doesn't track their unlocks. The game clearly wants you to figure out on your own that the boons are tied to an NPC class, so they only track boon unlocks for each individual agents instead for a whole class, and the only feasible way of doing so is by uuid.

Note: the algorithm for generating a uuid guarantees that the value generated is unique each time, for a reasonably long time(it might be hundreds of years before the possibility of generating a uuid that already exists), so it's not really feasible to assign a uuid to a generic npc and store unlock data with it. If you do that, your data files will get larger and larger every time you play a game of Griftlands.

[Szczuku]

I mean... just look at this. Something like this in the final release of the game wouldn't be pretty good. 

Not to mention that the original head comes from a laborer, if I'm correct

[pacovf]

It's his long lost twin brother from an alternate dimension. He wants to take his place in this dimension. Don't let him!

[Maniafig]

This isn't really any different from pretty much every other game where there's a limited quantity of unique NPC models and sometimes you just see several identical-looking NPCs. It'd be nice if these extra NPCs are generated with more possible permutations of different parts of their face so it's less likely you come across two people who look the exact same, but that's pretty low on my priority list for what I want to see added to the game.

The only time I think it's actually distracting is when the randomly generated NPCs don't look right. Randomly generated Bilgebrokers look weird since their masks don't cover their faces properly, and I've seen Kradeshi Lumaries with no room to cover their eyestalks and entirely too many male Spree with horns despite not being Shrokes.