[MUD-Dev] Neverwinter Nights (Was: The Future of MMOGs... what's next?)

[Valerio Santinelli]

From: "Dave Trump" <trump at trumps.net>
> At 10:48 AM 7/6/02 +0200, Valerio Santinelli wrote:

>> In NWN you can assign local variables to each character in order
>> to track quests completion and similar things. The problem is
>> that when the server saves the character, it does not save those
>> variables.

> As one of the people who has a persistant world up and running my
> biggest problem early on was the inability to save those local
> variables.  Obviously the most elegent solution would be for
> bioware to attach those variables like this to the character, but
> myself and many other builders have found some nice workarounds.

Workarounds are the only way to go with NWN. Bioware is officially
not supporting persistant world development, and they stated clearly
that they are not going to add any new functions to save local
variables status in characters savefiles.

> The most obvious route for the builder is to run quests EQ style.
> The guy gives you a note.  You take the note someone else and get
> a key.  You use the key to get into the boss's lair. You take the
> boss head back to the guy.  It's all item driven, and the items
> are saved with the character.

This is a way to do the quests, but then I can repeat the same quest
an infinite number of times since there's no way with this method to
assess you already completed it once.

> Some other people have done some rather clever things like
> assigning values to the hidden natural weapons and natural armor
> slots on the player, or making an inassessable zone and filling it
> with items that hold the values of whatever variables they need to
> save.  Daggerof PlayerBob_Quest7_Step3 ... heh

Hidden slots are a nice idea, but you're limited to the number of
variables you can store. It's ok for a little module, but if you're
building a larger world you're going to get at a point where you
cannot add more quests.

The room with items is an optimum solution, but you have to take
special care when updating your world. I assume you're using a
"clean" module to make modifications. This means that when you stop
the server and restart it you've got to merge your savegame with
your development module. This procedure is prone to corrupting your
module very easily.

At the moment the best solution seems to be to dump variables to the
log and parse them back and create an include script to attach to
your module when restarting. This way you can double-check what
variables are assigned to each player since you get everything in
clear text, and you can remove unwanted/wrong ones. And you're
always sure that you're not going to corrupt your module.

I think that other ways to accomplish all this will pop-up in the
upcoming weeks.

People have also been siggesting simulating a DM client and
listening to special strings sent by the server in order to archive
everything to a database and then rebuild all the changes through
the emulator itself. There is an infinite number of ways to
accomplish what we're trying to do. It's just a matter of finding
the cleanest solution.

--
Valerio Santinelli
One Man Crew Gaming Community (http://www.onemancrew.org)
My Lab (http://tanis.hateseed.com)
HateSeed.com Founder (http://www.hateseed.com)
In Flames Italia Webmaster (http://www.inflames.it)



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev