I want to have certain NPC's track the player and other objects with their heads and eyes, in other words I want them to be looking at the player or other objects in the game, is this possible in vertex aniumation, or do I have to use bones animation? Or perhaps the best question would be: what is the easiest way of accomplishing this??

you can make an animation and script it using either bones or vertex.

Ok, I thought that it would be much more difficult to script the rotation of every vertex in the head as opposed to the scripting of just a "neck" bone for example..

Then what do you do about deformation? In the example, if I turn the head via script wont the mesh deform or would you need to model the head as seperately so that it turns withougt affecting the shoulder?

And if you model the head seperately, wont that be difficult to do walk animations if you have to coordinate the vertex animations of 2 meshes?

Do you see why Im confused?