@ Cadaver
Sorry, there is no strikethrough. I was parodying a Mastercard Commercial.
t-ice wrote:
4) Manually (DM avatar enters the area and triggers conversations for each node)
A custom GUI should be a little bit more efficient than conversations.
t-ice wrote:
1) Anyone who has ever built a competent area knows that placing the placeables can be painstakingly arduous. You can spend hours in a small area to make things not float mid-air, be embedded in each other etc. etc. You just might not be able to line several things rights from a waypoint of fixed location. And if you need to add further displacement coordinates to the waypoint based on the alternative chosen, even the best of builders will probably just give up.
Random generation would run the risk of things looking a bit awkward.
Builders would probably want to tweak facing and possibly displacement. Again, a custom GUI can make this process much less painful. Probably less painful than in the toolset, since you are confronted only with a few options, rather than the full might of the properties panel, and can test how they will look in game in real time, since you're in game!
t-ice wrote:
2) Conflicts. When two PCs enter the same area in-module, representing different "instances", what happens? These aren't true instances, so you can't have a dynamic number of copies active at the same time, right?
These are true instances. The only thing you can't do, reliably, is destroy them after they are created. (I've had mixed results with this.)
So if you had AREA_00 (Road Along River Bank), you could create however many unique instances of it you needed to meet demand. The only thing they share is the basic walkmesh, which is where some of the resource saving comes in. (If you can share most of your walkmeshes across 5, 10, 20 areas and still make them look different upon casual inspection, that's a lot of memory you've freed up on the server.)
The number of players you, have/allow on the server is pretty important. For a server with 90 players, this might not be so great if all of them go to their homes 1 at a time, that's 90 unique instances of player homes! And they're going to remain running until the server restarts. (Although, even with 90 exterior instances of one stock, it's not the same as 90 normal exteriors because, again, the walkmesh is shared. So it's more like the equivalent of 45 normal exteriors.) With smaller players bases and, especially, if you would normally have several points in the day at which no one would be logged on, this isn't a problem! You can simply use NWNx to restart the server when it is empty, and you wipe out any instance buildup. (If you had a 24/7 player base, you'd probably want to count the number of instances and auto-reboot every 48-72 hours or if a critical number was reached.)
You don't need to create a new instance for each area a player goes into. Basically, you create areas on demand.
Going back to AREA_00 (Road Along River Bank), let's say you have a party consisting of Olaf, Kaleb, Fox, and Chris. They are walking from Silverymoon to High Hold without an overland map. (I'm not suggesting this change--merely illustration!)
They leave Rauvinwatch and AT into AREA_01 (Road Along River Bank), whereupon they see a watermill. This is the first instance.
They continue down the road and AT into AREA_02 (Road Along River Bank), whereupon they see a cabin, critters, and not much else. Some of these critters are goblins, which they kill. They leave a corpse behind, which gets cleaned up or pushed to the server. This is the second instance.
They continue down the road and AT into AREA_01 (Road Along River Bank), whereupon they see a few boulders but not much else. This is back to the first instance, since it was available.
They continue down the road and AT into AREA_02 (Road Along River Bank), they see whatever was stored in the database in the various nodes. Now Aalyah logs in. She was already on the road at the cabin. She'll log into AREA_01, and possibly see the goblin corpse (depending upon time elapsed and global settings).
If the others continued on without waiting for her, they'd AT into AREA_03. A third instance of (Road Along River Bank) would be created on demand.
The trip would be consistent so that each time players walked along the road, they'd get the same placeable/trigger configurations in the same order. (Although, you could do random dungeons or "infinite areas" too.)
Since the system is setup to dynamically create and clean-up placeables anyway, this allows you to consider adding in a few small details like: the potential for blood stains to possibly be left on the ground for (3,6,12, or 24 hours) after battles. Ditto for scorch marks after a fireball spell. You wouldn't want to go crazy with this stuff and the size of your active community and the amount of hack-and-slash would impact what you'd want to set the constants to.
--
Implications:
Well, DM Viigas is setting up for his Thursday campaign. His party is going to be in the Moonwood and following the path from HH to Wintersedge [pretending it was all done with this system]. He decides he's going to use a plot hook to get them to take a little detour. He creates a pair of new exterior areas, one of which has a cave. He sets the cave to be a mini-dungeon crawl. (He could configure it all manually or rely upon a random dungeon generator that scales to the party.) He then links them together and one of them with one of the pre-existing Moonwood "tiles." When the party is on the way to Wintersedge, they get attacked by damnable Druegar! What Dwarf can abide this? Well, one of the Druegar flees across the new AT. The party chases him but loses sight. They now find themselves in the new areas to explore and eventually wind up at the cave.
When the adventure is over, the new areas remain and the server has gotten just a little bit bigger.
Now, you obviously wouldn't want people building willy nilly without any plan or approval. They might violate zoning ordinances. We haven't finished putting the rules together, but I think that involves like a 12 month inquest by the PA.
Areas could also be "deleted," but that is a power best reserved for the likes of HDMs and the TA. Otherwise, you could break the server into several parts accidentally.
