MikeyUchiha

I agree with everyone else who said to change combatants to characters. A slime can be a character as well. It would just be considered an enemy character.

Vlastan

I'd approve to change the status values naming as it got me confused the first time I approached Ork. I would prefer using the word Attributes or stats.
Abilities could become skills.

In regards to the word combatant, a change would be appropriate as not always an rpg has to include combat. They could be called simply "characters"

Raiulyn

In most use cases, ORK spawns gameobjects/actors that can engage in battles as combatants. According to Oxford dictionaries, 'Character' is all the qualities and features that make a person, groups of people, and places different from others while 'Combatant' is a person/group involved in fighting in a war or battle. Doesn't specify whether it is friendly or hostile.

In the context of ORK, ORK itself only spawns combatants for its battle systems while NPCs that won't engage in combat would be set up outside of ORK as Scene objects/Prefabs with Machines attached. Unless I missed something, ORK doesn't spawn combatants that don't engage in battle.

I argue changing 'combatants' to 'characters' would mislead and doesn't reflect what ORK uses them for.

Wrofir

You lose many benefits of Ork if you don't set up your non-combat NPC's as combatants. For instance if you want to be able to use, say, a charisma skill with NPC's and use status values to determine success rates, using a game object adds a bunch of extra steps VS simply setting up a NPC combatant that has its own stats and formulas that you could 'threaten' or 'convince' ext.
Point being, combatants have more uses than simply being in combat.

Raiulyn

Have the Schematics and Formula reference the ORK player when it runs so it grabs the variables and do checks. Attach it to gameobject's Machine and add Interaction components. If you want the NPC to have its own stats, there's the local variables to do that.

You don't lose much benefits of ORK as the Schematics contain most, if not, all of the functionality already. The benefits of doing it this way:
1) Cleaner Combatant list. Less bloat to keep track and filter.
2) Bit more control. Unity runs a Prefab system, changes made to a Prefab are applied to all the Prefabs in all scenes.
3) More performance efficient. Less components on a gameobject means less work for both ORK and Unity.
4) Easier to debug. Not having to debug additional ORK functionality you don't need.

gamingislove

Combatants will stay combatants, I'm not planning to rename them to characters (or anything else). They're mainly a 'vessel' for housing the status system and combining different aspects of it - yeah, you can also use them for non-combat NPCs or many other things, their main focus is still combat-related.
Also, renaming them would be a pain and probably involve half of the codebase :D

Interesting discussion, though :)