A Land Far Away

Is possible.

Apparently no one was interested in my discussion of dynamically creating player housing to represent lifestyle. I don't imagine this will get much wub either, but...

You can recreate a NWN1 type experience in NWN2. That is to say, you can cover massive, massive tracks of land inside a single server. You are not constrained by the 2gig limit if you use proper architecture. That is to say, you don't build areas for most of your areas.

You only specifically toolset up important areas that need to be unique. For everything else there's Mast... stock areas and instances. Think of stock areas as not unlike tiles from NWN1. These areas must be created in the toolset by an experienced builder. In the areas, you setup a bunch of nodes where placeables, triggers, and other things can be defined in game.

In the case of player housing, these things are selected by an interface designed for use by the player. In the case of building, these tools are available to DMs. Anyone who can figure out how to DM can build areas.

Areas can get built in a fraction of the time that tooling them out toolset takes. It could really even be done quicker than with the NWN1 toolset.

Speed and allowing most anyone to become a builder are good, but the advantages go beyond that. As I mentioned before, you can cover vast areas. More roadways, more dungeons, more stores, player/guild housing, all of this and use fewer resources than the traditional building approach. Relying upon instances, the key determinant is the number of instances that need to be created (and destroyed) dynamically. ALFA servers are capped at 30 players and, moreover, ALFA is solo heavy.

So the stock areas would not have quite the same variation as crafting everything uniquely (it would feel more like NWN1), but you can cover so much more ground, so much more quickly, and save the effort/resources required for the uniqueness for the areas where it matters. Also, dynamic generation would allow you to do things to enhance ambiance. If you wanted to, for instance, you could make a Summer/Spring, Fall, and Winter version of some of the stock areas. Everything is green and flowery in the spring and summer. In the fall, you get tall wheat in the fields, golden and red leaves in the trees, and generally darker textures. In the winter, you get less vegetation and maybe traces of ice/snow? (Or even snow particle effects.) You could add details like this and still use fewer resources than the traditional building model, when covering enough ground.

Something like this could be useful if ALFA has any ambition of trying to recreate the scope it had in NWN1. Having said that, I'm not certain you'd be able to find enough players to fill up the vast expanses of Faerun, even if you could build them 20x as quickly and with fewer servers.

Whats Mast?

what the hell? I feel like I just listened in on a conversation where I know enough of the language to grasp the potential meaning and feel strangely excited by it, but not enough to make sense of it.

Mirabai wrote:what the hell? I feel like I just listened in on a conversation where I know enough of the language to grasp the potential meaning and feel strangely excited by it, but not enough to make sense of it.

ditto. Please elaborate; this is tantalizing.

Sounds intrigueing. If I understood it right, this is really just like an on-equip script for an NPC: Instead of the builder making a soldier with a sword, he gives a script that chooses randomly from [sword, axe, halberd]. Now you can do the same for any content, and use anything as the basis of the choice. So instead of a placeable table, you have a waypont tied to a script that chooses from [table, chair, altar of Loviatar with a recently sacrificed virgin impaled on it]. Some of this stuff is included in NESS spawns.

I suppose possible ways to choose from the table are
1) Randomly (random scenery for a generic cave/woods/hills/house)
2) AT the PC enters from (differently decorated houses in a city)
3) Globally (It is now spring/summer/fall/winter)
4) Manually (DM avatar enters the area and triggers conversations for each node)

At least two strong caveats
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.
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?

All that said, it holds great potential, at least for a system of PC-owned houses, and for "Random Cave/Forest/House" type of areas entered under DM-supervision.

Would love to know more, and perhaps if you have one (or can make one easily) a Demo module to take a look at? the concept is quite intriguing!

@ 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.

It sounds truelly awsome if it'd work...

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.)

My head's blown up. How exactly are you creating multiple copies of an area in-game? (not saying it's not possible, just can't see how).

Anything that can blow up a Teric's head has got to be really, really cool.

Seriously, this sounds awesome.

CreateInstancedAreaFromSource() was added in 1.23

Quite a long time ago for no one to have really setup a system for utilizing its potential, but NWN2 never really caught on the way NWN1 did. Most of what exists was probably up or deep into development by then, making fundamental changes in architecture unlikely.

Still, I'm surprised player housing and random dungeon libraries aren't out there on the vault.

It's not a question of if it's possible as much as it is when I get around to it. I have a half a dozen projects I'm working on, all of which revolutionize the NWN2 experience in one way or another. Now, if someone wants to build me the exterior for a faithful copy of the town of Highmoon, that would do much to expedite my finishing these projects.

Let's see:

Ambient Weather System (90% done)

Weather moves realistically across the OM and exterior areas. Fog and other occlusion routines. Exterior weather influences interior lighting and sound. (Windows on the west side of the inn redden up at sunset. Light from windows dims and you hear rain when it's raining outside. ect.) Lightning! Only need bigger fog and snow VFXs, potentially too resource intensive otherwise.

Dynamic Economic Model

• Copper, Silver, Platinum, and weighted coins. Done.
• Stores respond to Micro Supply and Demand. Done.
• Player businesses based off of DMGII and Power of Faerun (10%)
• Caravan escort and travel system / Trade Networks -- Macro Supply & Demand (20%)
• Trade embargoes, war fatigue, mercantilism vs. free markets vs. royal charter (0%)
• Resource extraction businesses and crafting (0%)
• Diplomacy engine (0%)

General Dynamics

• Player Housing (33%)
• Random Dungeons with my advanced AI and automatic Challenge Rating system that "learns" (10%)
• Player led strongholds -- ie Abbeys, Forts, Villages (20%)
• Advanced Village management (0%)
• NPC (Bad Guy) strongholds and growth / warbands / assassins (10%)
• Dynamic, detailed, dm-replacement quest system (20%)

I'm busy. Doing the Toolsetless building wouldn't be all that much further than player housing, though. If an HDM is serious about giving it a shot, I can try to prioritize my projects accordingly. You'd need to sell AL first though.

ALFA is welcome to any of my stuff, but it's being built for my own project and might not mesh well with ACR or require hak modifications, ect.

I'm impressed.
And excited.
I await the word of the Exarch of Technobabble residing on the Plane of Boffinland....Acadius Lost

Impressive stuff.

CreateInstancedAreaFromSource() was added in 1.23

So it was. I had no idea. *Head still exploded*

Well... bits of my brain are smattered all over my living room still. I say Regalis should just *make it all happen* then for those of us who learn mainly visially and by doing, he can give us a walk through or make us a youtube how-to video