Jay_H's quest writing tutorial

For all talk about quest development - creation, testing, and quest system.
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Jay_H
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Jay_H »

Thanks Interkarma :) This is as far as I've gotten so far with my own quests. If you know about more things that are functional in 77 that I haven't written about, feel free to tell me them and I'll see what I can do to work them out. The only things I know work that I haven't done a tutorial for yet are:

gold range x to y
add NPC face
drop NPC face

My experiments with NPC generation were shaky, so I didn't go further with them. If that's the current status, I'll wait until the update with Mynisera's Letters to add them.

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Interkarma
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Interkarma »

Person resource and their use in quests should have about complete emulation to classic by now (excluding bugs and other unintended problems).

Check out some of the quests that generate NPCs (such as the giant killing one) and let me know of any issues. I'm happy to take a PM or email if you just want to bounce a problem off me. :)

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Jay_H
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Jay_H »

Part of the fun of this is the experimenting of it all and having something I can call my territory, distinct from all the other helpful people around you :) So I'll keep my questions to a minimum, but I will keep it in mind, thank you. I'll give NPC generation a shot.

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Jay_H
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Jay_H »

Once again, you were right. PCs place and interact correctly. Some of my mistakes come from attempting to follow TIpton's documentation too closely; he says place anNPC at aPlace when it should be place npc anNPC at aPlace. It's my mistake for not copy-pasting from existing quests.

So now opens the wide world of mixing NPCs and quest objects. Here come some more new quests! :)

"hide npc," "remove npc," and "destroy npc" seem to be ineffective. I can spawn people but not remove them.

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Interkarma
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Interkarma »

Jay_H wrote:Once again, you were right. PCs place and interact correctly. Some of my mistakes come from attempting to follow TIpton's documentation too closely; he says place anNPC at aPlace when it should be place npc anNPC at aPlace. It's my mistake for not copy-pasting from existing quests.

So now opens the wide world of mixing NPCs and quest objects. Here come some more new quests! :)

"hide npc," "remove npc," and "destroy npc" seem to be ineffective. I can spawn people but not remove them.
"hide npc" should be working OK, I've passed that in multiple quests so far. For NPCs placed via quest system, hide should be instant (see M0B00Y16 quest when you get the _victim_ pick). For individual NPCs (like Morgiah) it kicks in when environment is next loaded. I'll try to unify those behaviours soon. If this isn't working now, I've probably stuffed it up somewhere along the line. :)

"remove npc" isn't a command used in any active quests. I think Tipton might have confused with "hide npc". He only mentions it once in the docs, right where a "hide npc" should be used.

"destroy npc" isn't implemented yet. I want to research this a little first, because it can be responsible for famous BLANK error, which might not be intended. I may be able to smooth this out a bit rather than emulate bad behaviour fully.

If you haven't seen it already, check the Quest System Status page. It should give you a good idea what is working and what's still todo. I need to update this, some of the items on there are actually complete.

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Jay_H
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Jay_H »

I had forgotten about that page, thank you :) Yes, hide npc does lag until the next scene is loaded, so I think that was my hiccup.

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Interkarma
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Interkarma »

Thanks for letting me know Jay. Was the lag with an individual/permanent NPC or with a rando NPC created just for the quest?

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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Jay_H »

Random. The idea is for the flat to disappear and turn into an enemy:

Code: Select all

Person _assistant_ faction The_Academics

Place _place_ local magery

Foe _enemy_ is Spellsword

--	Quest start-up:
          place npc _assistant_ at _place_

_spawn_ task:
	clicked npc _assistant_
       say 1020
       hide npc _assistant_
       place foe _enemy_ at _place_

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Interkarma
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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Interkarma »

Cheers, that should work OK, so problem on my side. Thanks for letting me know - I'll take a look at my recent changes and fix this. :)

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Re: Jay_H's quest writing tutorial: Vengeance build

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Jay_H wrote:Just a reminder that in Daggerfall, only the specific quest object suffices. That's the one with the green background that this specific quest generated. Even if two identical objects are generated in two different instances of the quest, it'll require the item it generated this time.
This is just a curiosity, as I'm not coding quests, at least for now. But would the DFUnity system allow coding quests to find any item of a given type, e.g. any formal tunic? It would be an interesting type of quests in its own right, even if they don't appear in the original game.

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