My "RPS Main Quest" System

[jsventor]

RPS Stands for Role playing Story, heres what I'm talking about, please lemme know what you think about my system.

MAIN QUEST SYSTEM

The main quest system is not an average Quest system. It is a series of quests tied into one HUGE quest with a major story behind it. Of course players will also be able to do side quests from other NPC's but this quest is basically like making an RPG online with a story other than the average hack and slash Online RPG.

The Editor: The editor will have all sorts of pieces and parts. It will have these parts:

1. Story
2. Beginning Message
3. Part Editor
4. End Story
5. End Reward

Story
The story can be accessed through a quest panel, the player simply reads qhat the quest is about. Also as they progress through the quest, their quest journal also updates as they progress.

Beginning Message
The beginning message is just an introduction to the quest.

Part Editor
The part editor is the most important part of the editor. There can be anywhere from 1-5000 parts to the quest. The way the quest works is that NPC's are assigned Parts of the quest. The NPC is selected in the NPC editor. NPC's can have multiple roles in the quest, so you can see the same NPC a lot during this quest. The part editor is broken up into a few pieces:
-Begin Message
-Met Requirements Message
-End Message
-Part Type (NPC Event, Go to map)
-Part Type Vitals (Item To Obtain, NPC to kill, NPC to talk to, map number to go to)
-Rewards(Exp, item, +Vitals)

End Story
This shows once the main quest is completed.

End Reward
Things like a lot of money, the best weapon, things like that. Maybe access to a new place with another quest?

Once you complete a Part of the quest, you move on to the next part of the quest automatically after you gain your rewards. This I think would be great because it gives players an actual experience, and soemthing else you never really see in ORPG's.. A STORY, especially one they get to experience.

[Joost]

I am wondering how you will save the quest data. Keep a variable for every quest that follows it's state seems like a lot of data. I think inis have some problem when holding too much data, so that'll be a challange.

[grimsk8ter11]

You will not have to save data like that with a part system in place. Each quest can be one slot and the number gets incremented for each completed part.

Inis can hold huge amounts of data without a problem, they are just slow - especially when they get larger.

[Joost]

If you have one big quest, sure. But, like WoW, if you have 1000 optional quests, it gets hard ;p. And I always thought there was a 32k limit to ini files, and that that was the reason that people use seperate .ini files for banks.

[jsventor]

Well my thought is this, let the server create directories for the quests and then separate .DAT files for the parts.. just like items and spells

server/Data/Quests/MQuest1/part0.dat ~ part5000.dat

Quests would be the main directory for the Main Quests, and it would have folders for all the main quests you want, so if you had 2 of them you see folders MQuest1 and Mquest2 and in each would have all of the parts and an ini file with the things like the story, the name of the quest etc.. all of the part dat files would contain the meat of all of the parts. Could this work or am I just trying to hold hands with jesus?

[Joost]

I was directing more at how completed and unfinished quests would be saved. Also, me being a smart and lazy asshole, I'd move as much text as possible client-side. It saves you from sending huge strings to client when reading quests, and in the worst case, people can edit what a questgiver has to say.

[jsventor]

Well that makes a lot more sense, I'll get rid of that ini file and put the stuff client side, that is more logical. Why not do this, in the Player.ini add:

Code:

MQuest=1
Part=0
Progress=0

Its as simple as that. When the server sees that the player is on part 0 of Main Quest 1 with no progress done, it knows the player is obviously just starting. Lets say the player goes to the correct Quest NPC and talks to him, the NPC would then give him the first instruction of Part 0, there would be a total of 3 instructions of course, the introduction, the work, the end for each part. Anyways, once he talks to the NPC it would change the ini file to:

Code:

MQuest=1
Part=0
Progress=1

And when he does the work to complete the quest it would change to a 1, if it equals 1 then the NPC will reward the player and then the server would then know that the player is ready for the next part, so it would change to this:

Code:

MQuest=1
Part=1
Progress=0

I think it would work best like this because then you wouldnt have one huge file and each player would independently have their own information.