[Quest Making] Circle of The Black Thorn

from Elemental Forums

I have been working on a line of level 1-10 quests that focus on a Cirlcle of very powerful and evil beings, hell bent on returning the realm to its former, rampant evil, state. I want to do a lot of things with the questing system, but I am unsure of its capabilities. Right now I am thinking about making one quest remeber a choice I made in a previous one.

Example: If "Choice0" allows me to gain a hero to fight for my cause, can the next quest or thirty quests later remember that he is:

Instance0- alive and in my party.

Instance1- alive but in a different party.

Instance2- dead, because I never let him join me.

Instance3- dead, becasue he died in service to my throne.

I wouldn't mind putting this on hold until we get the python exposed so I can just add the qualifiers to the game, but is this something that can be done now? It seems a vital aspect of long arching plots.

2,385 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

 

I'm working on a quest to, and eventually intend to do a whole pack of quests. Very slow progress so far, the XML for the quests seems to be a tangled nasty mess and theres a lot of stuff for which there is no schema or data dictionary that I am aware of?

For example, in the QuestConditionDef you can use flags such as...

<Flag>RevealTarget</Flag>

Beyond looking at the core game quests, theres no listing of the available flags that I am aware of. Also, I am having a ton of trouble getting failure class to work, for the QuestConditionDef. It seems that no matter what I do it won't work. So if the quest objective does not succeed, it either displays no message or displays the success class message, but I can't get it to display a failure message. Anyone out there have any success with this? It seems like the core game quests just don't use the failure class much at all.

Could really REALLY use a data dictionary for the quest related XML stuff. I get the impression that its very powerful, but I'm struggling with it.

 

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top


I have been working on a line of level 1-10 quests that focus on a Cirlcle of very powerful and evil beings, hell bent on returning the realm to its former, rampant evil, state. I want to do a lot of things with the questing system, but I am unsure of its capabilities. Right now I am thinking about making one quest remeber a choice I made in a previous one.

Example: If "Choice0" allows me to gain a hero to fight for my cause, can the next quest or thirty quests later remember that he is:

Instance0- alive and in my party.

Instance1- alive but in a different party.

Instance2- dead, because I never let him join me.

Instance3- dead, becasue he died in service to my throne.

I wouldn't mind putting this on hold until we get the python exposed so I can just add the qualifiers to the game, but is this something that can be done now? It seems a vital aspect of long arching plots.

End of quote

 

The quests can't remember whether he died or not, as far as I'm aware. Such a thing is currently not done by SD in the Quests, and that's really all we have as baseline reference.

You can make a unit join you however, and he will function as a champion. But there's no way for a quest to check whether you have "Billy The Slayer" in your party, as a check. Or if it is, again it's there's no reference to such.

Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Could you show me your xml. Maybe I can help. For one, I think the <Flag>RevealTarget</Flag> is simple function to show the goodie hut on the map and have it be revealed as if it were a part of your territory.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

As to Novaburst, I think it would be pretty easy to use this:

<QuestConditionDef InternalName="Condition3">
    <Description>Don't allow the nobleman to arrive unescorted.</Description>
    <CompletionText>The nobleman's father is furious that you allowed him to make the journey home without an escort and refuses to give any reward.</CompletionText>
    <Class>Failure</Class>
    <Type>ClearGoodieHut</Type> 
    <TextData>QuestEstate</TextData>
    <MoreTextData>EscortSon01</MoreTextData>
    <Flag>DestroyUnit</Flag>
    <Flag>UnitUnescorted</Flag>
   </QuestConditionDef>

If I can trick things into working the way I want, I need only confuse the player with some hints and illusionary descriptions. ;)