Generic Areas for DM events

Development for CoPaP
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Alphonse
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Generic Areas for DM events

Post by Alphonse »

I am building a selection of small blank generic areas for use for DM events, which are accessed via cusom placeables, and decorated by the DMs according to the event.

Currently I am building:

Cave with 'hole in the ground' entrance
Dungeon with 'candle sconce' entrance
Castle Hidden Room with 'bookcase' entrance
Secret Valley with 'cliff cracks' entrance

I have already had some interest from Gaelyn who wants these for Avlis, and so am offering them to any other worlds that want them, and also taking any requests for other areas.
JollyOrc
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Post by JollyOrc »

great idea!

Here a few random ideas:

- ships belly, with trapdoor entrance
- ship on sea, with entrance on a small lifeboat (which would be placed on a shore)
bye,
JollyOrc
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Starslayer_D
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Post by Starslayer_D »

Abyss404 has had very much success with generic DMA (Dungeon Master Areas) wich could be prepped up with placeables for events.
Just make sure you clean up after yourself when the event is done.

Excamples:
Arena
Swamp
Peacefull village
Tower (Ruins) from Basement to several levels
Desert
Forest
various dungeon and cave layouts and styles
Tent
House interiors

This allows us to run many events without having to add areas to the server for eg. one-shots, and furthermore allows eg. us to hide villain strongholds for events everywhere without people stumpling over them when they are not in use by a DM.
And, and and.. DM areas add a lot of flexibility to the module.
Apandapion
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Post by Apandapion »

I had an idea for a server called "Juncture" where all of the transitions were reprogrammable, so you could plug together a bunch of different areas for an event on the fly.

I'll never do it, becuase I am lazy, but it was an interesting idea.
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Post by lafferty »

That is in fact quite simple to do. I once did a prototype of a DB powered trantitioning system. I could iron it out (after digging it out again).

Certainly that system shouldn't be used globally but only for certain transitions. New transitions could also be set on the fly with a dm wand whilst in-game.
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Apandapion
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Post by Apandapion »

lafferty wrote:That is in fact quite simple to do. I once did a prototype of a DB powered trantitioning system. I could iron it out (after digging it out again).

Certainly that system shouldn't be used globally but only for certain transitions. New transitions could also be set on the fly with a dm wand whilst in-game.
I have never actually explored how NWN handles data (I'm a programmer but I haven't looked into NWN at all), but I had an image of a room full of chests, one per transition. You access a menu to get a token for a specific transition, and you drop that token in a chest. When you do that, it links the transition for the token and the transition for the chest, and vice versa.

But I like your idea better (database driven transitions) because then you can just web-front-end it.

I *was* talking about dynamic transitions for the entire server (the server name was Juncture in my head), but I was thinking about a special server for use by any copap DM to run an event. Couldn't you lower the bandwidth by having the dynamic transitions cache the destination and not request a destination more than once a minute? That would keep every transition from requiring a DB call.
Arkonswrath
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Post by Arkonswrath »

The question i have with DB driven portals is how much more of a drain would it put on server resources. As it is, some of the standard copap scripts and db look ups do a fair amount of lag even on the best servers. Right now Hala is on an outstanding server, but we still get immense lag spikes when someone casts spells (some believe it's due to spellhooking, some don't) as well as when people do Changeling things (the 2da look up here locks the server up for sometimes up to 10 or more seconds, and can cause a server lagout)
Sindol
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Post by Sindol »

All you'd need to get from the DBase for a successful transition would be one string value; the tag of the waypoint or door to jump to. And using aps_cache you wouldn't even need to query this all that often really (only for the first user after a reset, or after a DM has reset the target). I can't imagine that this will slow down the server in any noticable way, unless you're already doing a lot of other things at the same event (OnEntering the exit transition).

I have noticed some severe spellcasting lag, and also the changeling lag on Avlis personally in the past, but recently it seems as if it got a lot better there (at least the spellcasting). I don't know which version of the spellhook is the latest, but if you haven't got it, I would try that. It might just solve it. Also make sure you have the latest NWNX MySQL connector (previously the ODBC module, might still be named ODBC, even though it's not using ODBC anymore).
So much fun,
yet so little time to enjoy it.
- Sindol
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Post by lafferty »

Well, my system didnt use waypoints. The transition destinations are completely db controlled.
Triggers are still needed and that is why i say it was a prototype since you'd need to place a lot of triggers just in case that might not do anything.
Web control is not what would be possible with my idea.
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Snow
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Post by Snow »

Were those secret areas completed in the meantime? Avlis could use some more secret areas. Thanks! :)
Alphonse
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Post by Alphonse »

They still need a bit of tidying up.

They got put to the side as everyone else seemed to be coming up with better ways to do it.

I'll get on it over the next few days
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