A Land Far Away

This post will summarize all global area suggestions for the NWN2 ALFA Base Mod. General and specific suggestions welcome but please read the summary before suggesting new areas or their specific details.

Thank you.

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Policy

*Create ALFA tilesets that include standard tilesets and only use ALFA tilesets?
*Decide on AT system


Summary

Day/night
Skyboxes
Quarrantine
Start Area
Loot Merchants
DM Only
Template: City Area Layout for Maximum PC Interaction
Morgue
Set of generic tents
Faction holder area

Day/night
Skyboxes
Quarrantine
Loot Merchants
DM Only
Template: City Area Layout for Maximum PC Interaction
Template: Start Area

I know the new game is giving us sun, moon and stars, but I'd like to see if moon phases are doable in NWN2. Ditto, I'd like to have expert discussion here on how the game is going to handle skies and if there's anything we'll need to do to customize further.

Specific areas I'd like to see globalized include the obvious: Quarrantine, Loot Merchants, DM Only.

I'd also like to see a complete Start Area template that can be customized as to appearance by DMs but at least contains an area specific to new PCs:

1) A starting merchant with standard items for new PCs only;
2) Server guidelines
3) ALFA guidelines

Finally, I'd like to see another template that can be customized as to appearance but is an urban 'hub' area well-designed by a builder experienced in funnelling PCs together. Whether or not the DMs use this area as it is or customized would be entirely up to them, but I think n00b builders would welcome a chance to see technique for bringing PCs together in game. The template could contain suggestions for street layout and/or waypoints titled "Put central gathering spot here" or "Place major point of interest here", in places where PCs would have a likely chance to meet when crossing to and from those, for instance. Could also contain bulletin board waypoints and suggestions for where to put/how to incorporate pointers towards major quest givers. All these things and more could be included or not at the actual DM team's discretion.

From previous posts I've made:
* If we have useable tents that have ATs, then ~20 tent areas that people can AT into (allocated when tent set up, deallocated when tent pulled down).
* Morgue.

I'd like to re-iterate my suggestion here that we encapsule the standard tilesets in ALFA tilesets and only use th ALFA tilesets - for futureproofing purposes.

Assuming factions are unchanged in NWN2, I'd like to suggest a Factions area which can be used to store "faction holders". These would be used for programmatic faction reputation adjustments without any hard coded dependencies on specific NPCs (essential for persistant faction reputations). Unfortunately, custom factions cannot be referenced by name or id so any adjustments to faction reputation need to be in relation to a MEMBER of that faction, thus the need for a "faction holder" for persistence. Globally speaking, this would pertain to canon NPCs and factions that I presume we'll go about creating in the base mod. In addition, reputations will be the foundation of any NPC reaction system we choose to build, so global consistency will be important if we take that route.

Assuming NWN2 will not have a seemless AT system, one such system has to be chosen, to avoid situations where a server looks like a patchwork of many incompatible systems (TLR, TFN and WD).

Should we have a rule about areas scale?

See http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpbbforum/ ... hp?t=23402 for discussion.

I think scale isn't really our issue to define. It's up to the community and/or build teams who make the actual servers. The only areas we'll be populating are templates and non-playable areas for which scale is irrelevant. It's an important topic nevertheless.

It's my intent to take the time and scale threads and formulate a policy from them, even if it's just that servers can build to whatever scale suits their build techniques. (Nobody take that as the policy, yet.) I haven't had a chance to review those threads and see where we are with them, or boil them down to some suggestions for secondary debate, as yet.

Are we going to set up a morgue like the Fugue Plane from the very start? There'd be less arguing about it then later on when someone already spent time and effort to make a one of thier own.



If everyone wants to keep the morgue strictly out of character... (ugh) an extra Fugue Plane area might, at least, come in handy now and then.

The morge will be part of the ACR, so it goes without saying that it be included from the start.

Baalster
HDM 081 Whitehorn

Um. Yeah.

What about the question, though?

Not sure whether anything will be changed in the way we die or resurrect/raise.... but my guess is that the morgue will remain an OOC area. The powers above may have an opionion on that...

Baalster
HDM 081 Whitehorn

Kestenvarn wrote:Are we going to set up a morgue like the Fugue Plane from the very start? There'd be less arguing about it then later on when someone already spent time and effort to make a one of thier own.

If everyone wants to keep the morgue strictly out of character... (ugh) an extra Fugue Plane area might, at least, come in handy now and then.

Are you suggesting a 'playable' Fugue Plane as an alternative to the present day Morgue? Is this simply an area design issue for you or one where the death system is also affected? I'm not sure what would make the FP substantially more appealing than the Morgue.

A morgue visually made similar to the fugue plan would be cool, but I'm not sure about the playable aspect... maybe just something to keep the user entertained, like quotes from the nine hells or similar...

Not something to be discussed in this thread. Start a discussion in the General ALFA forum.

Baalster
HDM 081 Whitehorn