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Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 12:23 pm
by BansheeXYZ
None of the classic quests ever send you into the woods. I'd love to add some for variety from the town and dungeon slogs. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a knight's quest that says something like "There's a group of cultists camped out just east of Grimwich, yada, yada, we think they're stealing cats and dogs and livestock to perform animal sacrifices." Then you'd travel to Grimwych and walk east into the woods until you saw a campfire with all those animal billboards and click on them to save them. When you clicked the last one, a message would fire off and you'd get ambushed by 7 cultists.

Is a quest like this possible? You'd have to be able to set coordinates for the animal and campfire graphics.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 2:15 pm
by Jay_H
Currently you can choose sets of locations (temple-homes, tavern-homes, cities, dungeons) or nowhere as a location. A specific non-location isn't something the quest system can choose. So a quest could require you to go out into any wilderness, but not a specific one.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:38 pm
by BansheeXYZ
How would the player know how to get to the spot, though, unless it were a short distance and in a cardinal direction from a city? You can only fast-travel to cities.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 10:11 pm
by Ommamar
BansheeXYZ wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:38 pm How would the player know how to get to the spot, though, unless it were a short distance and in a cardinal direction from a city? You can only fast-travel to cities.
Uh what? You can fast travel to dungeons, temples, shrines, farmsteads, and graveyards. There is a quest pack that adds quest like go cleanse a shrine or take this group to different places. Usually it is a graveyard, a farmstead and a shrine so very possible to make a quest to send you to others places then a dungeon or a city that would be considered wilderness areas.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2019 10:19 pm
by Jay_H
BansheeXYZ wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:38 pm How would the player know how to get to the spot, though, unless it were a short distance and in a cardinal direction from a city? You can only fast-travel to cities.
That's the problem. Daggerfall's engine is made for specific, predefined points on the world map. It can't make use of a specific undefined location.

I can make a quest action trigger upon, say, entering any village:

_approach_ task:
when pc enters village
say 1012

But there has to be a village in existence that I enter. We can go more specifically and make the game choose a specific village, which is what it does most of the time. But it can't handle a location that's not already defined in the game code.

I can also do it for any wilderness:

_exit_ task:
when pc exits anywhere
say 1015

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 4:38 am
by BansheeXYZ
Ommamar wrote: Thu Aug 15, 2019 10:11 pmUh what? You can fast travel to dungeons, temples, shrines, farmsteads, and graveyards.
I know, I was trying to speak contextually. As in, you can't fast travel to a campground, you can only (at best) fast travel to cities near it.

Anyway sounds like this isn't possible ATM. Would be awesome if it ever gets in. Think about being able to do "guard the gate" quests where ally archers get placed on the wall and 30 orcs come streaming towards a particular gate, and if they reach the gate you fail.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 5:45 am
by ifkopifko
Without much knowledge on the locations and map system, just throwing an idea in:

- I suppose it is not possible to create a "point on the map" (like town, dungeon, graveyard, ...) during a game-play session? Does it have to be in the data-structure "from the beginning of time"?

- Would it be feasible to create a new type of very small "points on the map", placed randomly a short distance of cities and towns in certain directions (south, north, ...) with a mod? Under normal circumstances (no active quest for them) these places might be populated by "wilderness sprites" like trees etc. so they would not stick out visually. When a quest is given, particular sprites and stuff might be appear at the given location.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 12:50 pm
by Jay_H
In 2017 Interkarma theorized adding a new coordinate system to be able to determine specific points on the world map. It would allow a quest writer to choose any X and Y coordinate as a location, primarily to specify a given dungeon/town for a given quest. It hasn't been implemented but the idea and possibility are there.

The quest system can't create sprites per se, but pacified enemies are possible. Thus you could "meet" an NPC there and have some interaction.

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 3:43 pm
by BansheeXYZ
It's not so much coordinates that we need, it's the ability to make a quest say "place _hostage_ 500 tiles east of _town_" or whatever. I don't want the quest to always send the player to the same city outskirt, which is what X/Y coordinates would do. The city needs to be random, and the placement some kind of definable distance away from a city's border tile. It specifically does need to be in a direct cardinal direction, though, or the player would get lost in the woods.

To help you visualize:
camp.png
camp.png (2.53 KiB) Viewed 6894 times

Re: Is it possible to make a wilderness quest?

Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2019 7:29 pm
by Ommamar
I would think you would need to write it so it would use variables such as "place_direction _distance_town". The direction be an int 1-4 with each choice being a direction on the compass, you could even make it 1-8 if you wanted to include all possible directions. The distance being 300-1500 with the same concept of an array of variables assigning each choice. Then the town could use the function already include to choose the town in that region.

You could even do this with a coordinate system but I think since that has to be built the simplified way of thinking about it posted above might be a good starting point.