Travel map vs Dynamic travel area vs grid building

[indio]

If you make the encounter area large enough to provide various alternatives (sneak around the encounter, run, attack, take another route, turn around and go back), compulsory melee shouldn't be a problem.

[AcadiusLost]

I'm concerned about is if it boils down to "compulsory combat to proceed"

I'm solidly resolved to making sure it doesn't turn into that. The "encounter areas" should be designed with enough room and the party and the encounter should be placed far enough apart that avoidance will still be a feasible alternative. I'd also want to stress that these should not be all hostile/combat encounters. A pair of deer, a traveling merchant, or a man who's lost his dog (somewhere in the encounter area) are all example alternatives. I'd also like to make it so a party including PCs with survival/spot/listen investment will tend to be placed further from whatever it is they're encountering, than one stumbling about without 0 ranks on any PC.

[Teric neDhalir]

What is it exactly you don't like about the Baldur's Gate encounter system?

I didn't like it because after navigating through an area with interesting content you'd get gratuitously stiffed by a random bunch of powerful monsters who'd always managed to either surround you or backed you into a blind alley. And it got to be a real chore. God knows there's enough scope for killing things in the rest of the game.

I've been thinking about the encounter system as it pertains to PWs. Do you think, script gurus, there is a way to copy areas while the server is running? This way we can generate more than one instance of a particular encounter area saving room in the mod but also not breaking immersion when the scripts proc more than one encounter/rest at a time....

Here's a thought; can you use the same walkmesh (TRX/TRN) file with more than one area? That would make building huge quantites of (admittedly identical) generic areas a possibility.

[Rick7475]

I don't like the encounter system for several reasons:

1. I like to explore cool geographical features and far away places just like I was actually outside in the hot sun sweating my ass off for real instead of farting and belching a lot at my computer downing a few brewskies.

2. When I travel and vear of the chosen path I may discover new and interesting paths, short-cuts, hidden caves, dungeons, and other mysterious places of adventure, or instant death, either one bringing an air of satisfaction for time spent, or reflective thought on my next character and why he or she should be a ranger.

3. When I travel, I like to simulate the realism of travelling, by walking long distances, hopefully with a party, carrying on good conversation, getting to know one another, and practicing formation marching to see if this party is any good, or looting their dead corpses if they have no formation discipline and die instantly as they are blabbering away and not noticing the band of orcs ambushing them from the trees.

4. When I travel, I hope that if it is on a patrol quest, that the patrol will be challenging with adventure so that I crap my pants several times, and if you don't think this happens, ask anyone who has done a patrol quest on Daggerford.

5. As I become more experienced with familiar landscapes during my travels, I can become a guide, charging would-be orc food ... err, I mean clients ... for my services, earning a good honest day's salary or adding to my reputation by bringing more victims to my master.

6. And it is probably the same amount of work to script an encounter area with multiple encounters, various placeables, and different geographic features and debug and test it to fake extra travel areas than to make the actual exterior travel areas themselves


How's that? And, yeah, I have 10 travel areas on TSM, maybe 3 more coming, that have caves, crypts, waterfalls, and other cool geographical natural settings that will make you believe you are actually in a National Geographic special, or riding with Jim, Marlon Perkin's little toadie who actually did all the work on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (oh crap, now I am dating myself ...)

[Thangorn]

I didn't like it because after navigating through an area with interesting content you'd get gratuitously stiffed by a random bunch of powerful monsters who'd always managed to either surround you or backed you into a blind alley. And it got to be a real chore. God knows there's enough scope for killing things in the rest of the game.

I agree whole-heartedly with Acadius on this matter. A few things I want implemented as part of this system -:
1. Encounters as opposed to just fights. Non-combat encounters aswell..
2. A "surprise roll" system that'd work like pnp encounters as in you might see/hear the enemy first and that could give you time to prepare and/or run. Acadius' outline above I think works for me.. rangers and outdoor survivalists become much more useful to a party..
3. DM deactivateable encounter triggers. I also want enough encounter areas for DMs to be able to jump people to them when they decide they want to run a DMed encounter..

TBH I'd much rather build everything in grid format (I made many many posts to this effect way back before the toolset even came out) but I've heard from the technical gurus that this is not going to be possible as it will overtax the server when too many players are in too many different areas. Therefore I wish to create the maximum amount of explorable terrain for ranger/dr00d types ..

as you can see from my initial live plan.. some sections of the dynamic travel area will be 16 24x24 areas encapsulated in a superarea.. this should give you ranger types somewhere to roam -:

1. Raven's pass region through the Dragonspines to the Citadel of the Raven. Key focus of Knights of the North/Zhentarim Conflict
2. Grasslands/Tickleberry Hills/Giants Cairn/Lone Tower. For a range of adventuring sites
3. Eastern Dragonspines. True rugged mountainous terrain with catacombs beneath, key focus of humanoid conflict (and drow shenanigans for reasons I wont share here)
4. Cormanthyr Forest environs near Voonlar (if I'm allowed to stretch the boundary.. I just need some foresty bits). This will be a good spot for dr00ds, rangers, elfies and plenty of conflict if DMs so choose it.
5. Phlan and environs.. awesome adventuring spot.

I can even add a superarea for the Great Grey Land of Thar which will be a really badass place for even high level adventurers..

plus there is plenty of bits and pieces which will hopefully keep life interesting and it would be easy just to add/subtracts bits if parts are getting stale/under-used to keep the server load low.

If I was to grid build the entire area.. it would be 576 exteriors which is obviously never going to happen. This way people get to explore as much as possible. Even if I was to grid build even a third of this, it'd never work properly.

If I manage to get whats on my plan done I am talking a maximum 150 exterior areas in the mod at any one time including encounter areas which is obviously huge but afaik the area doesnt actually exist in the memory unless it is loaded up by a PC being in it.. I think the general consensus among the community is that 150 exteriors is still completely unworkable but we'll have to see.. I've got time to test it before it becomes a massive beast like that..

I'm bouncing my plans off the rest of you as I dont really have a team so I have to see whether what I plan is actually going to float..

so feel free to pick the s**t out of it.. devil's advocate if you will. It'll make it a better experience for the players in the end..

[Teric neDhalir]

Oh, d@mn the lot of you, I'm talking myself into thinking this is a good idea .

I don't know what kind of scaling anyone's tried but I had a quick experiment with reducing a human to 25% and reducing the fog and far clip settings on an area to 25% of what they were and got this:


Interestingly, because I use fractal noise to generate the base terrain and textures it doesn't look any different to the original. Just colossal.

There's some issues with the texturing falling apart at that magnification and the camera position is plain wrong as it's now 20' off the ground (hence the toon is right down at the bottom of the screen) but suddenly I've got an area equivalent to 16 32 x 32 "real" areas. You could get lost in there for days. (And hopefully it's realistic enough even for Rick).

Now stop distracting me I have the OAS to finish!
Teric

[indio]

Very cool.

All I'd need to be convinced to use this is the removal of the PC bounce barrier....having just the party leader visible is a reasonable solution, but over time it will significantly diminish roleplaying within an area that could conceivably be used for hours on end.

[Thangorn]

yes I was thinking 20% myself.. my initial 32x32 travel map would then be roughly equivalent to 25 32x32s...

wait until you see the miniaturisation screenies I'll post sometime this week.. makes everything look pretty cool. Yes the textures break up but it still looks 3000% better than pointing and clicking your destination on a static 2D map..

The idea behind dynamic travel areas is to stop the immersion breaking of a regular travel map and keep exploration alive and well. It'll make it so much easier to add and subtract things from the mod for campaign stuff too.

Big module lagging? No PCs going to x mountains for a few months but you have PCs wanting to go to y swamp thats not in the mod yet? Drop the mountains until the interest level rises and plug the swamp straight into the travel map.

Got a campaign region you want to use just outside the boundaries of your travel map? Make a superarea and whack an AT at the edge of your travel map in the direction of your campaign superarea and viola.. brand new content without too much stuffing around..

I think it'll make everything so much more flexible and give much better performance.

I'd like PCs to be able to jump to a larger scale terrain specific area when they need to though. Say you run into someone on the travel map who you know. Merely add them to the party, click your GUI panel or an item to jump to the large scale area and then drop them from your party if you want to keep your distance. Both should remain in the area until they AT out... Keep a heartbeat on these areas to give the possibility of an encounter too. This could work for resting, random encounters, etc. aswell.

3-4 for each general terrain region should do the trick, 2 of which could be for roads (since these are the most likely places you'll "jump" to large scale from) make them 24x24/28x28 areas or so with 4 specific zones where you cant cross. This basically gives 16 different areas for each terrain type, 8 roaded + 4-8 non-roaded.

anyway just continuing to toss ideas as they come to me..

I think we grass that it is miniaturised trees to fully make the eyecandy for the system work.. placing forests becomes a horrible horrible laggy chore in dynamic travel areas..

We could also create textures that look better minaturised aswell but its hard to avoid pixelation at the miniaturised level.

[Teric neDhalir]

All I'd need to be convinced to use this is the removal of the PC bounce barrier....having just the party leader visible is a reasonable solution, but over time it will significantly diminish roleplaying within an area that could conceivably be used for hours on end.

We need to think quite hard about gameplay issues with this. It opens up fabulous vistas about landscapes and expanding what is possible (you wouldn't believe the list of famous Realmsian landmarks you could squeeze into half a dozen areas around Soubar), but what if no-one actually wants to tramp about for hours? And the blow to immersion of just typing in a chat box while your "leader" plots a course is pretty fatal. Worth opening the debate to a wider audience, I think.

Teric

[Teric neDhalir]

Are the scripts for shrinking/slowing PCs onenter/onexit available anywhere? I'm pretty close to having a "shrunken" area and would like to see how it plays.

Cheers,
Teric

[HEEGZ]

As a DM I've seen players RP on a world map while partied. I've also gone out in a party (as player) to a high point on a world map to look out to the south over the land we were just discussing in the tavern an hour before. Also, players not in the party using a world map have gone about their own business not using meta to just walk up and insert themselves into conversation. So from that standpoint I'd say to not limit movement to a party leader and allow everyone to use the map. I was never sure how this idea would work out, but in practice I find it helps immersion considerably and as Teric mentioned, the landscape possibilities are droolworthy

[Teric neDhalir]

Are the scripts for shrinking/slowing PCs onenter/onexit available anywhere? I'm pretty close to having a "shrunken" area and would like to see how it plays.

Cheers,
Teric

Pretty please?

[Thangorn]

acadius has them teric.. he gave them to me.

when I have some time I can put them on the ftp, unless someone beats me to it.. (bloody busy atm)

[AcadiusLost]

Sorry for the slow reply on this. Only two scripts needed to work the basics. The first would be an Area OnClientEnter() script, to shrink the incoming character.

Code: Select all

#include "acr_area_i"
void main () {

effect eSlow = EffectMovementSpeedDecrease(80);

effect eShrink = EffectSetScale( 0.2);

effect eTravel = EffectLinkEffects(eSlow, eShrink);

object oEnterer = GetEnteringObject();

if (GetIsPC(oEnterer) && !GetIsDM(oEnterer)) {
   AssignCommand(OBJECT_SELF, ApplyEffectToObject(DURATION_TYPE_PERMANENT, eTravel, oEnterer));
}

ACR_AreaOnClientEnter();

SendMessageToPC(oEnterer, "You have entered Travel area "+GetName(OBJECT_SELF));
}

The second script goes in the travel area's OnExit() event:

Code: Select all

#include "acr_area_i"
void main () {

object oExiter = GetExitingObject();
effect eTest = GetFirstEffect(oExiter);

if (GetIsPC(oExiter) && !GetIsDM(oExiter)) {
   while (GetIsEffectValid(eTest)) {
      if (GetEffectCreator(eTest) == OBJECT_SELF) {
         // SendMessageToPC(oExiter, "Removing "+IntToString(GetEffectType(eTest)));
         RemoveEffect(oExiter, eTest);
      }
      eTest = GetNextEffect(oExiter);
   } 
}

ACR_AreaOnExit();

SendMessageToPC(oExiter, "You have left travel area "+GetName(OBJECT_SELF));

}

With these in place on your test travel area, any AT into the area should also shrink and slow the PC, any AT out of it will bring them back to size. Note that while this works to test the concept, it's begging for some refinement.

[Teric neDhalir]

Thanks matey!