Things still afoot this month!

Infestations -- mentioned last month are in play this month.

Story Quest -- Baldur's Gate has acquired a new quest chain which runs out of Ruqel. CR 3, and very large in scope-- requiring several hours (and probably breaks to rest and recover abilities) to complete. Players will need to complete the existing Westra chain to flag it.

Ship Battles -- Moonshaes is in the process of upgrading its mechanics for ship battles, allowing sailors to smoothly transition between being at sea, engaging a hostile ship at range, and boarding-- or being boarded-- by enemies on that ship. We expect it to be live within a week.

Couple blurbs to talk about what's afoot this month:

DMA Election - Castano stood for the office again, and has been confirmed as the continuing DM Administrator. At the end of the vote of confidence, he's hinted at plans from the DMA to lure more participation to ALFA.

Infestations - our tech system to allow servers to declare regions to contain a (potentially-spreading) infestation of creatures, and thus causing all of the spawns in that region to be replaced with something else, continues significant progress and enters end user testing this month; it should be entering play soon.

If you would like to run for Player Administrator for the next six months please post your self-nominations. Please post your platforms (and question and answer posts) in a separate thread in this forum.

Few things rolling out today:

• Quest triggers now record that a given trigger has already been tripped by a PC by saving that fact to the trigger instead of the PC. This means that...
  • You may now have multiple identically-named triggers with different variables and still have all of them operate on the same PC.
  • You may now "clean up/reset" a quest by deleting and recreating all of the quest triggers (see BG's *_patrol scripts for an example of this).
• You may now add an integer variable named ACR_QST_FORCED_STATE to a quest trigger, and cause the activation of that trigger by PCs whose quest state is ACR_QST_LOWER_STATE to be set to precisely the forced state. As with the default behavior, if the PC's new quest state is greater than ACR_QST_UPPER_STATE, they will be given the XP defined in the journal. By default, quest triggers increment quest state by 1.
• Shuriken now acquire Mighty (+10) as a temporary (non-price-adjusting) property when equipped. While this looks a bit hacky, this seems to be the only way to allow shuriken to benefit from the thrower's strength bonus, as is appropriate for thrown weapons.
• ACR Spawn Points actually respect spawn types of 8 (traps) now.

Another small ACR update today-- server-side only, but servers had to recompile. Properly-configured hosts will have done this automatically, but be careful if you version control your NCS files (as the server should be the new source of truth at least on your acf_mod_* series of scripts).

Changes:
•Waypoints with the tag ACR_QUEST_WAYPOINT will be automatically converted to persistent areas of effect having the default ACR trigger scripts (acf_trg_*) on its three events, carrying all of the waypoints which are assigned to the waypoint. In practice, this means that you can use waypoints instead of triggers for scouting and bounty quests by assigning all of the variables that you -would- have put on the trigger onto a waypoint instead, and tagging it appropriately. By default, these areas of effect will be persistent effect #83 (which is about the size of one tile), but you can create an integer variable named ACR_QUEST_TRIG_SHAPE and set that to any integer represented in that 2da to get the matching size/shape (potentially visual-- keep in mind that if you were to, say, use 44, then your quest trigger will look like a mass of writhing tentacles. Whether or not that's a good thing is between you and your HDM.
•Creatures with touch attacks can now have ACR_TOUCH_ATTACK set to WISP to acquire a will o' wisp's touch attack (doing 2d8 points of electrical damage).
•A crash that could result from a creature taking damage from the module (as in #sethp or ACR Traps) is fixed
•It is no longer possible to pick invalid packages during character creation (which could cause a spellcaster to begin play without any spells)
•A very-rare bug that could occur if a DM attempted to reprice an item before any item had been generated has been fixed.
•A specific case which could cause the CLRScript object manager to crash and lose its collections (to hilarious and disastrous consequences downstream-- mostly NPCs forgetting who their friends are and taking way too long to respond to being punched in the face) is fixed.

This will be the first of semi-periodic updates on events occurring in ALFA on the DM/builder side of things. DMs/builders may contact me via PM to supply news for inclusion.

1. Monsters - With shad0wfax's efforts, BG is revamping its monsters to include tech's updated AI (smarter more IC monsters) and better fit 3.5e rules. These monster files (.UTC files) will be made available to all servers via the campaign folder. Servers wishing to use them need merely add the files to their campaign folders and call the monsters as regular spawns or use the DM spawn tools.

2. Static Content - Through Rumple's efforts, MS has added the first perform static to many of its taverns. Players of bards or others with perform ranks (or no ranks) now have an easier way to RP performances, both good and bad, without the need to macro performances. Also, they can earn a small stipend to cover their food and drink costs, and some XP. Since the system is skill check based it provides vital independent feedback to your PC's activities. You may access the perform static via a useable floor candle lamppost located in Kingsbay's inn. DM spawned lampposts currently reside in the other inns so the static may disappear from your inn of choice until such time as we respawn it/update the module again.

3. Loot - Static loot drops have been altered to take account of PC wealth. Thanks to Zelknolf in tech for devising and implementing this change after a rather nebulous suggestion from the DMA side of ALFA.