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Unread 10-11-2017, 12:29 AM
Interitus Interitus is offline
The Indomitable
 
Join Date: Oct 2017
Posts: 11
Quote:
Originally Posted by Garan
This is a neat idea. It is possible to work around the limit on the location (Lua has no programmatic access to location, only the chat response to the /loc command) by adding a "Look around" button that allows the player to test the location they are at (by issuing the /loc chat command) to see if they are in the correct location.
That's a solid workaround, and hadn't occurred to me. I think the most important part of knowing the location would be when players are supposed to do something in a specific location (such as look). Or when they're supposed to "say" something to an NPC. That would work for both, but I guess another workaround for when you're supposed to "say" something to an NPC, is to have another objective where they're supposed to emote "Hi" first (since that would tell us they're actually at the NPC.

If they're doing an objective where they have to kill a mob, then LOTRO has done a good job at giving mobs a ton of different names, so I don't think the location matters that much.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Garan
As to repeating an objective and having optional objectives, there's no reason that couldn't be included - it's just a matter of planning the plugin so that objectives can contain multiple conditions. Also as you already guessed, this is VERY similar to what LotRO Alerts already does and isn't really that much more complicated than having an alert with multiple triggers (which is actually possible - in fact, using code snippets, you can have one alert that dynamically generates the definition of another alert).
Honestly I wouldn't have even guessed that was possible, but I'm happy to learn it is. That opens the door to a lot.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Garan
I'll have to give it a bit more thought, as the plugin needs an 'Author' mode and a 'Player' mode and some way to communicate the script to the player(s) - actually very similar to a plugin I wrote for synchronizing horse back riding for a group practicing quadrille (not publicly available as it was specific to that kinship) combined with the multi-player version of Cards where a dealer controls the deck for a group of players (also not publicly available... yet... ).
Honestly if I were "writing a story" I wouldn't mind doing it in a text editor and using a specific format. I imagined it (in my mostly programing illiterate mind) working somewhat like the abc files work. Actually, there's a quiz game I downloaded once that used an xml file and tags to parse the information if that type of format could work.

e.g.
<Title>This is the title of the story</Title>
<author>This is the person who wants credit</author>
<Intro>This is the dialog that starts the adventure. Perhaps it's supposed to be from an NPC, or perhaps it's supposed to be a letter, regardless it gives the players their first objective<Intro>

<objective>
<chatboxtext>This is the text the plugin monitors chat for<chatboxtext>
<count>Number of times the text above needs to show up to trigger the "dialog" for the next objective</count>
<loc>location requirement for the chatboxtext to count</loc>
<dialog>This is the text that opens in a window when the first objective is complete which gives the players their second objective<dialog>
</objective>

Of course, I could be way off in thinking this type of thing could work, but if it could, then I don't think it would be too much to ask for story writers to follow such a format. Also, it occurs to me that doing it this way would probably limit the storyline to linear or branching (choose your own adventure type).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Garan
EDIT:
I was just considering another trigger event could be having an effect placed on the character or having the character target an object or character (we can detect changes of target as well as the effects list on characters). Also, perhaps equipping a particular item could be a trigger as we have access to the equipped items list. Hmmmm, lots of potential...
Hmmm... I didn't realize that. Maybe I should compile a list of everything that shows up in the chat boxes.

Part of what gave me the idea was LOTRO alerts, another part was we used to play a LOTRO RPG game, and people wrote a bunch of stories for it that are probably still online. Another part, was that I would like to see LOTRO continue after SSG stops writing stories.
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