Nobody gets up

An arrest starts with a man on the ground, and the whole plan depended on getting him back on his feet. Thirty builds came at it from every angle we could think of. Resurrect him, and he sits on the floor, alive and unharmed, doing nothing. Order him to move, and the order is ignored. Order him into the car, and the command lands on a behaviour tree — the logic that decides what an NPC does next — that is not running.

The dump of the game's scripts explains all three at once, and we should have read it before writing any of them. Falling hands the NPC what the game calls a gate signal, tagged downed, at priority nine, with a lifetime the game rounds off to forever. As long as that is the loudest signal on him, his behaviour tree stays pinned in its downed branch and nothing else gets a word in. Resurrecting clears flags but does not touch a single signal, which is exactly why it changed nothing.

So we searched the fifteen hundred script files for the command that lifts a downed NPC: get up, stand up, revive, wake, recover, and then the full list of AI commands underneath. There is no such command. There is no such task. No NPC in Night City gets up after going down. We had spent an afternoon building a verb the game engine does not have.

There is exactly one exception, and it is the one that saved this. Lose an unarmed fist fight and you get up afterwards. That NPC gets up because he never received the downed signal in the first place: the game sends a fist-fight defeat down a different path, with a different tag. Mark the suspect as being in a fist fight before he goes down, and the engine puts him on the floor by that other route, where standing up again is routine.

That is the whole finding, and it turns the problem inside out. You do not fight the state after he has fallen. You choose how he falls. Which is exactly what the player had proposed on his own, from the design side, that same night: criminals should go down alive, not dead. The two turned out to be the same piece of work.

Getting him upright was not the end of it either. He stands up and walks off to patrol on his own, because being on your feet is not being in custody: the tree simply goes back to its normal routine. The follow command stopped being a later step in the plan and became the urgent one.

What runs today, played end to end: he falls beaten, he is untouchable while you close in, the game's own dialogue menu opens over him, he stands up with his hands behind his back, begs in his own voice, follows you to the car, gets in the back seat, rides to the precinct, and walks off into the black.

Two things it does not do, and they stay in writing. You can still sit down in the seat he is using, because the engine does not mark that seat as taken by an NPC and no script can mark it. And the hands-behind-the-back pose does not survive the walk: of the fifty-eight animation wrappers the game names anywhere, not one is a submission pose.

The cheapest lesson of the session had nothing to do with arrests: read the log before theorising. Four separate times it answered, in a single pass, what days of hypotheses could not, and the worst afternoon of the lot went on guessing with the file sitting right there.