[MUD-Dev] Persistent worlds in NWN (was: Retention without Addiction?)

[shren]

On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Zach Collins (Siege) wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Matthew Dobervich wrote:
>> Valerio Santinelli Wrote:
>>> Sean Kelly Wrote:
 
>>> hours. I do not expect Bioware devs to do anything to help
>>> people make PWs. They always said that NWN was not meant to be
>>> used to run PWs. It's been that way from the beginning, even
>>> before they started working on the product.
 
>> I'm not sure where you got the idea that Bioware isn't interested
>> in support PWs, they've publicly stated many times that they're
>> commited to doing so.  Here is a dev chat log from a few days ago
 
>>   http://nwn.stratics.com/content/community/hoclogs/20021212_hoc.shtml

> Word on the street, as it were, says that this is a complete
> reversal of Bioware's attitude toward PWs and/or DBs as of the
> time that NWN was released.  I guess either their marketers/PR
> flaks didn't understand the issue, or the developers greatly
> underestimated their customers' desire to create and run PWs.

It's not just PWs.  If you have a single player adventure in many
parts, you can not communicate state between parts.  Stop and think
about that for a second.  Say I have the "end of part 1" trigger in
front of me.  Nothing I do can have any ramifications between part 1
and part 2.  I can go kill every living creature in part 1 and part
1 has no built-in way to communicate this to part 2.

Since only the character is saved, not state in any form, you have
to hack it in by modifying the character or the character's
inventory.  Killing the whole town might make me evil, but NPCs will
have no real idea why I'm evil even if they saw me kill thier loved
ones before thier very eyes in the last part of the adventure.

In _Shadowlords_, a rather nice single player NWN adventure, there
is a persistant romance side-plot, but it's kept track by different
versions of a "token of affection" - different levels indicate
different levels of progress, and if you sell the item the quest is
over.  It's an elegantly disguised hack, but try and keep track of
any large amount of information that way and it becomes grimly
transparent what's being done.  Of course, you could stuff the
player's inventory full of items that will be pulled out on the
login to part two and translated into data, but it's a hack and if
the player goes to a different adventure instead of part two of
yours then his inventory would be full of crap.  And what do you do
if the inventory is full?

Thus, persistant storage is needed not only to do persistant worlds,
but also to do single-player modules with any degree of plot
flexibility or persistance between modules.  Right now, if your
actions seem to have any consequences between modules, it's all
really just slight of hand and hard-coded plot.


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