Hello,
I am looking for a way to not allow wandering NPCs to enter certain rooms. For instance, it is somewhat strange when having villagers that are supposed to be in a village wandering through mountains inhabited by monsters.

I have used the tutorial for Independent NPCs and I have edited the NpcSearch function so that it is now:

exit = PickOneUnlockedExit (npc.parent)
if (GetBoolean(exit, "barred")) {
  loop = true
  while (loop) {
    exit = PickOneUnlockedExit(npc.parent)
    if (not GetBoolean(exit, "barred")) {
      loop = false
    }
  }
}
oldroom = npc.parent
NpcMove (npc, exit.to)
return (obj.parent = npc.parent)

The problem that I have is that the game is very slow (I believe this is because of the while loop). Is there a better way to do this?

I have named the exits that I want to be unusable and I also have set a flag on them 'barred'. Also, I use the online editor of quest.

Thank you

The slowdown is probably because you're going through every exit in the game, checking if they're in the current room and unlocked, and if they are, put them on a list. Then pick one from the list, and discard the rest. If the one you picked is barred, go through the whole process of generating the list again until you get a different one.

You could make it quicker if you generated a list of exits to start with, and then pick from the same list each time. (PickOneUnlockedExit is just ScopeUnlockedExitsForRoom and PickOneObject stuck together – the first one is the time-consuming one, and you only need to do it once.

Even better, make a list of the valid exits, remove any barred ones from the list, and pick one from the remaining exits.

So:

possible_exits = ScopeUnlockedExitsForRoom (npc.parent)
possible_exits = FilterByNotAttribute (possible_exits, "barred", true)
exit = PickOneObject (possible_exits)
NpcMove (npc, exit.to)
return (obj.parent = npc.parent)

@mrangel
When I try that code, I get an error saying: "Error running script: Error compiling expression 'exit.to': Variable does not refer to an object: 'exit'"

The only way I can see that happening is if the NPC is in a room that doesn't have any non-barred exits. I would normally check for that just to be safe, but I assumed that wasn't the case (as the code you posted would have looped forever in that case).

How about something like:

possible_exits = ScopeUnlockedExitsForRoom (npc.parent)
possible_exits = FilterByNotAttribute (possible_exits, "barred", true)
if (ListCount (possible_exits) = 0) {
  msg ("Can't move NPC " + npc.name + ", room " + npc.parent.name + " has no exits.")
  return (false)
}
exit = PickOneObject (possible_exits)
NpcMove (npc, exit.to)
return (obj.parent = npc.parent)

That should help in working out why there is a problem.

Thank you, this works perfectly.