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Wandering NPCs, and quests

Posted: 25 Aug 2008, 16:29
by Rygan
Just curious if NPCs can be made to wander around, or if they are just fixed objects.

Some ideas I have for NPCs need a bit more involvement on the part of the server... I remember how NPCs were handled in Ultima VI, you could type to them and ask questions allowing for a lot of variety in content. Similar games, such as the BBS game Land of Devastation (which was basically Operation Overkill 2 on beefed up a little in areas, and made more adolescent in context).

I have a plan to write some transport quests that reset every day and pulled from a random list. Why not? Why should everything involve whacking monsters for body parts or goodies they carry around in their goo? "Smith down in the mines ordered fried a maggot sandwich again, everyone here is afraid of the snakes and red blobs -- but they're harmless I tell you! That's what the mine foreman says anyway when looking for new miners." "The blacksmith needs a new hammer." "Mad Mad Mage Martha needs a limb regrowth potion delivered because of an 'accident' animating her cooking utensils...mmm.. make that four limb regrowth potions." "Khan: Deliver this message to the man funny wearing gold, next to the man wearing blue over in the north.What's so dangerous about it you say? It says I'm dating his sister."

Re: Wandering NPCs, and quests

Posted: 25 Aug 2008, 16:35
by Crush
Rygan wrote:Just curious if NPCs can be made to wander around, or if they are just fixed objects.
Not on the current official server, but they already can on TMWServ.
I remember how NPCs were handled in Ultima VI, you could type to them and ask questions allowing for a lot of variety in content.
In my experience text-parsing based NPC interfaces are extremely uncomfortable and unintuitive for the user and do not add as much RPG flavor as one might think.

It is not a coincidence that they were completely replaced by multiple choice dialogs and graphical point&click interfaces in almost every mainstream game of the last 15 years.
I have a plan to write some transport quests that reset every day and pulled from a random list. Why not? Why should everything involve whacking monsters for body parts or goodies they carry around in their goo? "Smith down in the mines ordered fried a maggot sandwich again, everyone here is afraid of the snakes and red blobs -- but they're harmless I tell you! That's what the mine foreman says anyway when looking for new miners." "The blacksmith needs a new hammer." "Mad Mad Mage Martha needs a limb regrowth potion delivered because of an 'accident' animating her cooking utensils...mmm.. make that four limb regrowth potions." "Khan: Deliver this message to the man funny wearing gold, next to the man wearing blue over in the north.What's so dangerous about it you say? It says I'm dating his sister."
We can always need new eAthena scripts to make the current server more interesting to play.

We could also need some people who actively write scripts for the new servers to beta-test the script bindings and to find out which additional script bindings are required.

So feel free to write some scripts in the eAthena scripting language or in LUA.