Smuggler Archive
Thread: In Testing: Smuggler Quest (capital S)
gassygunslinger wrote:
Can you tell us ona sepparate thread how this is all set up (for spoilers) and what this really involves? I'm very interested in doing something like this on Bria, but I have no clue what this entails, and I'm too lazy to check it out! Lol
You are too lazy to go do the quest, but you want to spend the hours setting it up and running it???? *senses smuggler attempt to get hints*
I do have a word doc that has all the details in it. If people are serious about setting it up on live servers I think it is worth trying it once through on TC, before I spoil it all for you.
riotcontrol wrote:
HD space unfortunately.
If you can temporarily free up HD to do the first install then you can keep TC available with relatively low HD usage, simply have one set of *.tre (and *.dll if needed)files and move them between live and TC when you want to run TC, do a full scan of course but the tre files are the same between live and TC.
I'm asking about the requirements since I've been toying with a lot of RPish quest ideas to entertain my guild by surprising them lately - there seems to be a few event perks that could be used for this stuff if you, say, drop crafted hint "datapads" into those loot boxes etc. which wouldn't even require a vendor. But they would last for a very limited time.
This was the key reason I used vendors, player actors (even when returned) are unlikely to last more than one good day, vendors can run easily for a month.
An item of interest for such use would also be the possibility for proper NPC/lootbox/whatever interactivity inside NPC cities sometime in the future (as Pex did say something about possible event perk changes), as sending someone to a NPC city is immeasurably more immersive than sending them 1km outside of it. This could, of course, be done with player actors, but then you need someone to, say, wait at a cantina at a very specific time which isn't always that feasible.
I'm not sure how many changes Pex can get in the near term, with the new content being pushed back and event team turn at dev time being used to fix actors I can easily see months before decent quest tools are around. (Hope for better, but don't expect any)
All in all, I've been trying to develop a set of underlying mechanics for typical RPG quests (just theoretically for now - simple things like "dialogue: NPC actors" "fetch quests #1: NPC actors, lootboxes, vendors, emails from vendor owner when you place the needed item on vendor", "fetch quests #2: NPC actors, lootboxes with information on how to find the next NPC actor"), with minimal requirements for the "questmaker" - for example, lots of structures and vendors would be quite unfeasible for an universal system to be used by pretty much everyone. So if there's any clever stuff like that you managed to think of that's non-specific to the quest, by all means feel free to share.
Probably the only 'clever' bit in the quest is how I have used vendors - the ad bark welcomes the player, but then there are 2-4 fireworks named "Speech 1", "Speech 2" etc which enable the use of a nice long speech and instructions to people. I also use one extra vendor in my house for me to control the vendors (purchase the offers from people when they finish the three chapters) without visiting each vendor each day.
The other bit (which I haven't implemented but could be done) is to monitor who takes goods but doesn't return them, and then issue player bounties on the fools who cross you (simply monitor the purchase e-mail and see who hasn't offered to the next vendor).
The trickiest bit of the quest from a writer perspective was how to get people into space and not let them skip it, but that's a bit more complicated to explain why I did what I did, and is more suitable to a Smuggling quest.
Ahh, forgot about that old bug, ever since vendor search it hasn't been a problem
Vendors only appear on planet map after the first person visits them, so after each server bounce the vendor will be missing from the map until someone sees him, sorry.
The co-ordinates are 2516 -4628 in a merchant tent.
(None of the others are registered, you will need to write down or use /notepad to remember co-ordinates to them)