A Land Far Away

I'd like to hear from all you scripters out there on what customizations you may have made to global scripts, in particular systems like NESS and AJAI. I'd like to review and evaluate those changes in considering their integration back into global content. This is all part of flushing out our to do's for the next 4 months.

Thank you.

AJAI:
-Mostly just different OnSpawn scripts. I personally don't like AJAI at all (because of the resources it uses and its AI), but there isn't much better.

NESS:
-Fiddled with being able to choose a spawn group at random from a list of spawn groups (spawn group group?).
-Added a variable to disable NESS behaviors. Utilized this variable in my Omega wand, to allow DMs to turn off NESS behaviors.
-Kept NESS behaviors from being executed while a NPC is posessed.

alfa_persist:
-Changed the functions to store persistant locations so they actually persist across a module update. Instead of storing a location type variable, I store the PC's vector, area tag and area resref. So when PCs log in after an update, they get sent to their last location.

Weather:
-Made my own weather system. It could be a lot better, I made it with some misconceptions on how weather worked in NWN. Still loads better than the ACR's.

Spellhook changes:
-Too numerous to list.

Persistant storage:
-Added debug messages sent to the PC (so they know their stuff is being saved).
-Export their PC after a successfull pChest save to prevent duping. Now I just need to figure out why write-back caching on shfs isn't working so I can eliminate vault-lag...

Other:
-Large-scale tracking of objects entering and exiting areas for the purposes of creating mythals or wards.

Other stuff like subrace fixes too, but thats not relivant to NWN2. The current problems in our ACR are so many and so obvious that I wonder if using any of the old scripts is worth it.

Thanks Ronan. I think at this juncture, Murky is leaning towards a rewrite, and I'm inclined to agree given when the ACR was written, who it was written by, and the general opinion in our community. I think you're also best suited to tackle/lead that effort and where I have you tentatively penciled in.

Other stuff like subrace fixes too, but thats not relivant to NWN2. The current problems in our ACR are so many and so obvious that I wonder if using any of the old scripts is worth it.

Did alittle research on this, improvements will be made to how the game handles subraces, but they can't make any promises. My guess they'll include ways to add subraces in the full sence of the word into the game though 2da's. Would save alot of headaces if that's the case.

If they do not, then I recomend winging a subrace system our selves. It's possable as it is right now in NWN with alot of work, lets just hope they open the door to easier minipulation of races. Anyway you slice it, I recomend doing away 100% with the old subrace system.


Also, if we can, lets be sparing on what we stick into HAK's as far as global scripts go. Expecialy when we're dealing with beta and getting on our feet. I do recomend generic starter scripts added to the HAK's to aid those who are script ignorant to at least have a basis to go by.

That's the plan LP. Modularized scripts in the HAKs, config scripts for the HDM to tweak that aren't updated, and lots of stubs for future content.

Yes, basically all the "core" acr_ scripts go in the haks. But every event of any sort has its own executable script. We call any file which is ment to be customized by individual servers (and thus not overwritten in ACR updates) a acf_, for Alfa Configuration File. So nearly all executable scripts are ACFs, and builders can alter them as they need to. ACFs nearly always just contain configuration constants, or one-line calls to the ACR. So each server can't alter the ACR, but it can add or remove things as it wishes.

NWN2's subrace implementation is suffecient for our needs, we won't need any sort of complicated subrace system.