quote: Original post by wazoo69

What if quests were nothing more than links (akin to web terminology)?

Yes! and the links are changed based on the actions of PCs and NPCs.

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Hahaha! Man, this proves my philosophy about not bothering to hide your design ideas because a ton of people already have them... (as they say, great minds think alike )

You know, I think I''m starting to agree with your philosophy on this point

quote: Original post by Nazrix

Doesn''t AI also play a very important role in all of this? Something has to motivate the NPCs to perform different actions. (NPC''s are people too!)

Yes. The way I see it is you would have a List or Tree that would be updated at the completion of the quest (see wazoo96''s post) and every NPC and PC would be notified of the change in quest. For the NPCs it would be simple, just update them. But, for the PCs (MMORPG or CRPG) this would have to be handled differently. I do not like the way DiabloII issues quest... so, something a bit more personal is what I have in mind.

Hmmm, How?


Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

I''m giving something like this a go. Greatly simplified :

A list of all objects, a list of all NPCs, a set of base rules which define what can and cannot be done with each object.

Choose an NPC to assign an object (the goal of the quest). If an object is destroyed, delete it from the list. If an NPC is killed, delete them from the list. If a quest is solved, mark the object as attained, and generate a new pointer to an object for the NPC.

Does this make (enough) sense?

To expand it further, allow the generation of new NPCs who can be assigned objects (which also include "Search for NPC2" BTW). Maybe implement a technology system, so that as the game progresses new object types are developed, and give them new names (random name generation anyone?) so you don''t run out of quests AND don''t start looping ...

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Mindphuq Software : "Who do you want to do today?"

You would have to have a pretty specific scenario for this
to work, but heres an idea.

Say you were making a game where the player is the local law
enforcement (ie sherrif) in a town, and there are certain
protagonistic groups (and families) who are fueding. For each
npc you keep a table of friends,a table of family, and a table
of enemies. You also have a reference table of things that they
would do, ie: X does a driveby on Y, P kidnaps Q''s daughter.


You pre-define the FIRST event, ie: Joe throws a brick through
Mary''s window. Then when the player resolves this (ie: finds
out that joe did it and arrests him (npcs could go to jail for
set periods of time), A random friend/family of Mary [ie: her
son Matt] could perform a random act on a random friend/family
of joe ie: Matt kills Joe''s dog. For each event you would have
to have another table for clues and npc responses, so it would
be time consuming, but a large enough table set might keep you
going for ages.

well thats my (abnormal) thoughts anyway...

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Moved
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quote: Original post by morfe

I'm giving something like this a go. Greatly simplified :

A list of all objects, a list of all NPCs, a set of base rules which define what can and cannot be done with each object.

Choose an NPC to assign an object (the goal of the quest). If an object is destroyed, delete it from the list. If an NPC is killed, delete them from the list. If a quest is solved, mark the object as attained, and generate a new pointer to an object for the NPC.

Does this make (enough) sense?

To expand it further, allow the generation of new NPCs who can be assigned objects (which also include "Search for NPC2" BTW). Maybe implement a technology system, so that as the game progresses new object types are developed, and give them new names (random name generation anyone?) so you don't run out of quests AND don't start looping ...

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Mindphuq Software : "Who do you want to do today?"

This is a cool idea, but wouldn't things get repetitious and forumlated? I realize that this explaination is probably over-simplified comapared to the actual implementation of it, but it seems like the quests could be a bit repetitous like they were in Daggerfall.

I don't mean any offense toward your idea, but it reminds me of how Daggerfall was. The quests were randomly generated.

There would be basic kinds of quests like take object A to Person A and return here for payment.

Then there was go to Dungeon A to retrieve object A and return here for payment. That was about 90% of the side-quests.

There were a couple alternative types of side-quests, but they were few and far between. It got repetitious pretty fast.



"NPC's are people too!" --dwarfsoft

"`Nazrix is cool.' --Nazrix" --Darkmage

Edited by - Nazrix on September 9, 2000 1:07:11 PM

Repetitive? No way ... But, it does depends on how the quests are assigned. I''m using a scripting engine which implements inheritance, so I might have a class Find_NPC which is a child of class Quest, and parent of class Rescue_NPC, and so on ...

I''m trying to be vague on purpose - I don''t want to give too much away just yet (so sue me ) - but I''ve made sure I can cross over sub-quests between classes. I guess I''m turning my quests into neurons, which can be dynamically linked and destroyed to one another.

It works a lot better than it sounds, and I''ve had some fun trying it out. One of my favourite memories is running all over the place after this girl who went missing, and turned out to have been kidnapped, and then sold to slavers, escaped, and joined a cult, and when I finally caught up with her, she killed herself rather than come with me.

So, it doesn''t get that boring

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Mindphuq Software : "Who do you want to do today?"