NTA

Sounds like he’s heavily on the autistic spectrum, and you may find online resources that handle that to be really useful.

I’m a computer guy, introvert and very much see Z’s point of view. When I go through a difficult time with a partner, I get nervous about any message they send me. I find that if I spend too much time, even with the people I love most, I get absolutely drained and need to run away and hide, often for days at a time. Hell, I even still live with my ex. I see his side.

You’ve tried to do the right thing here by coming forwards and communicating. Any other relationship, that’s gold star behaviour. He, however, was already overloaded from things and needed to quiet the gremlins in his brain before he could have that conversation. As such, raising any issue would likely have set him off. All the voices in his brain are screaming, and you just handed him one more.

To be clear, you still did nothing wrong. In a relationship, you can’t just ignore problems. The issue is that communicating with people like us can be a nightmare.

People like us need a lot of space, and it’s really hard (but important) for us to learn that every communication a proper partner starts with us comes from a place of love. When overwhelmed, we feel attacked by absolutely any comment at all. Even a simple question like if we’re hungry or want anything from the shop can feel like we’re being made to process more burden. Learning how to not see things that way is a skill we simply lack, and need to actively and consciously apply. I often find myself reading a message from my partner, having to stop, change my frame of mind, and start again. I had to learn how to do that.

To help him, when you approach a topic, reassure him as much as you can that he’s not done anything wrong. Tell him he doesn’t have to deal with something straight away. That the two of you can deal with this in your own time, but you want to help both of you be happier by dealing with this problem.

If you want a relationship with him, you’ll need patience, and he will need to learn how to handle his emotions in these situations. It won’t be easy, and he will likely reject help from a councillor or some other person (introvert, remember?) so it will be a very personal battle.

He may also benefit from having an office or man-cave, somewhere that he can retreat to, where you don’t go without a good reason, don’t talk through the door, don’t go in without knocking, and don’t go in without waiting for you to invite him in. Yes, it’s your house too, but this will give him a space to decompress where he doesn’t need to worry about having another person in his space. If you’re really short on space, a screen door dividing up the room may create that space. This will give him a space to quiet the screaming in his brain.

I mentioned online resources at the start of this, and I would highly recommend going through all sorts of material. See what he agrees with, and see what helps you both communicate. Here’s a starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3tTYlPuGH0

About 28 or 29. I’m currently mid 30s and starting to have a bit less energy than I used to.

Would the dark Eldar GF not keep you alive and torture you for as long as possible, possibly even keeping you alive long past when you’d normally die, just to use up as much of your soul as possible?

Would she not basically be a Cenobite?

+200%☠ chance of survival. Expression is still appropriate.

Correct. If an American can’t do it, James Bond will. :)

There’s a lot of reasons why people will respond negatively to someone deciding to excise themselves from reality, and part of that is because there are a lot of different types of people, but we’re almost all of us inherently social creatures.

Some people may feel sad that the person who ceased to be didn’t think to reach out to them, or didn’t clarify what was going on. This often comes with a strong feeling of guilt, a feeling that the former individual was let down by their friends who ‘should have seen the signs’. The signs can however take many forms, and be easy to miss.

Some people may feel that life is so amazing and wondrous that’s a straight up insult to discard it. Anyone doing so is almost invalidating their optimism, and it feels like a personal attack.

Yet other people, much like the first group, will feel like they were indeed given up on, like they weren’t given the chance to support the no longer present individual. A slightly different perspective that can feel like disrespect.

Finally, there are people who don’t want to acknowledge the option even exists, and anyone who uses it is making it more real. We want it to be so last-resort, that it’s never considered an option.

At the end of the day though, it’s always a permanent solution to a temporary problem, no matter how big. If you’re really considering it, you’ve spoken to the helplines, tried to get the support of all your friends and you’re out of ideas, sell all your shit, hitchhike 3 states over, and spend 3 months trying to live there. You literally have nothing to lose, and it’s worth trying every fix before making what is literally the last decision you will ever make.

Same reason we do today, they’re cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_Arch

From my limited experience, NPCs come in two varieties, persistent, and instanced. An instanced NPC is a bandit on the street who, if you kill, will drop loot, and then never affect the game ever again. They appear and disappear as easily as a glitchy texture. A persistent NPC, you will probably want to track more of, but even then, you don’t have to track everything.

A shopkeeper, you may generate their shop inventory when the player loads the area, but then clear it when the player leaves the town, or a certain amount of in-game time has passed. Same with aggression responses, you could have a list of NPCs who are unhappy with the player, and after a while, they’re removed from that list. No need to store the NPCs dynamic opinion on each NPC, just that they are unhappy and when from. When you load the area, you check that table, and the NPC reacts accordingly.

Maps, you’d want to do region by region too. Of course you’ll need your data files, terrain, navigation maps or whatever you need, but for the most part, you can choose to only store changes. This means you don’t store the whole region in a file, only which containers have been looted, what persistent NPCs have been altered (enraged, seduced, quest actions completed) and such like.

Player stats… yeah, surely you need to just store those in the save file and assign them to the player object. Level up, when you reach the level up conditions, you get to improve. How that works is entirely down to you, the dev. Don’t be afraid to play around and see what works.

I’m sure there will be other people with far better advice, but this should help guide you in the right direction.