EQ Classic mob density zergification (project)

[knowom]

EQ Classic mob density zergification (project)

Anyone interested in collaborating on a public freely made available SQL database customization project?

I have a goal of tripling mob density of the PEQdb classic zones. It's a lot of DB work considering the amount of zones. I'd also skip the friendly NPC mob types and see how it looks and feels then maybe come back to that portion and touch them up after perhaps only doubling those though. I would also skip raid targets as well as it needs to be playable.

The idea is I'd like to foster a more group orientated atmosphere that has a increased emphasis on the importance of it. Additionally this could greatly be in turn used to greatly increase diversity into the game both for loot and mob types. The zones themselves would also feel a lot less barren as a another nice side effect.

If anyone is interested I'd like to start with one of the three classic continents Antonica, Faydwer, and Odus. I feel this is a worth while step towards improve customization to differentiate from live a bit while maintaining it's core aspects as a good base to work around. The more we have things like this publicly available the quicker and easier it can make customizing private servers. Personally I like these broad scale generic customizations that can easily be used in there entirety or selectively quickly to insert some fresh new variances into servers. It's not really a difficult project, but it is a bit time consuming.

On a side note what would happen if I take a mob that paths copy it give it a new ID then tweak it's facing direction or starting X, Y, Z coordinates? Will it still path like it would just from a new X, Y, Z coordinates or facing direction? That could make things quite neat with this if that's the case.

Example - Mob paths 10 feet turns around paths back 10 feet. If I duplicate that mob then change it's facing from 0 to 180 will it path in opposite direction 10 feet as a result?

[vsab]

Originally Posted by knowom

The idea is I'd like to foster a more group orientated atmosphere that has a increased emphasis on the importance of it.

I don't think mob density has any relevance to that really. If you think there are what 10 starter cities? Then think about the number of zones per level range after that. Then think about the quests people undertake- at least at first these are very linked to home cities, and they take you to zones relatively nearby. When you take just that small sample of zones, in order to have a full group in each of them you need a population of 300+.

Currently there's only one server that has that kind of density - P99.

There are different solutions of course - EQLive used the tutorial for newbies, then HotZones so it's massively beneficial to go to a certain zone for your level range. Custom servers quite often have a smaller set of zones, so the population will be more dense, as well as hub zones so you actually get to see other players (I went back to EQ2 for a few months and I actually never saw a single player in the 3 months I played!).

[knowom]

Originally Posted by vsab

I don't think mob density has any relevance to that really. If you think there are what 10 starter cities? Then think about the number of zones per level range after that. Then think about the quests people undertake- at least at first these are very linked to home cities, and they take you to zones relatively nearby. When you take just that small sample of zones, in order to have a full group in each of them you need a population of 300+.

Currently there's only one server that has that kind of density - P99.

There are different solutions of course - EQLive used the tutorial for newbies, then HotZones so it's massively beneficial to go to a certain zone for your level range. Custom servers quite often have a smaller set of zones, so the population will be more dense, as well as hub zones so you actually get to see other players (I went back to EQ2 for a few months and I actually never saw a single player in the 3 months I played!).

I get what your saying and I agree in the general sense and scope of things, but at the same time if grouping is more a prerequisite of progression due to the difficulty of soloing along with group xp bonus's and such they'll be more inclined to do so.

Also a lot of what your saying can be addressed to extent by centralizing races into fewer cities and by utilizing fewer overall zones. A lot of servers cater to EQ from classic up through velious or beyond. This is focus on classic that eliminates a lot of zones in and of itself. In addition to just using classic Odus, Antonica, or Faydwer continents could be eliminated hell even two of them could be if you wanted to be more extreme about it.

Now the other thing is it's not purely just about helping to foster groups which it could and should in theory depending on how it's used it's also about making the world less barren giving it a more living and breathing feeling with more mobs closer together and the increased challenges and unique aspects that can present.

[knowom]

I decided to start on this a bit and see what it's like. I doubled the mob density for "Butcherblock Mountains: butcher" I haven't adjusted the X, Y, Z coordinates yet though so so spawns will be on top of each other currently. If someone feels like trying it out and spacing the NPC's spawn locations apart a bit go for it.

A lot of new ID#'s entries to create for each zone Butcher had 418 rows. For now I'm going to do this for Classic EQ zone by zone starting with continent of Faydwer and just doubling density, but that's going to be a time consuming enough project for the meanwhile. After that I may triple them or look into fixing the X, Y, Z coordinates and NPC spacing a bit if no one else has taken a interest in doing so.

Anyway here's the file to checkout and muck around with it. It's a start I guess more to come as time permits and overall ambitiousness prevails.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1YE...dfM0FZR1E/edit

[knowom]

Tested it out for butcher seems to be work. The X,Y,Z's aren't set and spaced apart so you get duplicates of the same NPC like right on top of each other difficult to notice and detect in game unless you like stun/root/bash the npc or kill one.

I plan to space them though I could see situational instances where you might want to put them to trick players thinking it was a single pull when in reality it was multiple spawns! Anyway should look pretty good once the coordinates are fleshed out when I have time to do so. I'm pretty excited about this spawn density stuff and have a lot of clever ideas on ways to utilize it to give EQ a lot of variety.

Example take night and day spawn cycles like Kithicor uses and apply that philosophy to mob density for a zone day time you have 1 zone night time it bumps up to 2 or it could scale up at 1PM game time for a given time length by X number of mobs! Suddenly that single rat spawn is a full camp of plague rats on it's next spawn cycle ready to eat you! (NPC SHOUTS YOU DIRTY RAT!) I digging the custom potential of this and increased variation and challenges it can provided.

[knowom]

Got a chunk more done on this, but will upload a bit later. The X, Y, Z coordinates still need fixing and bunch of renaming as well in certain cases depends on the mob generic types can keep same names. Most of Faydwer is complete at least for x2 density chipping away at it a bit at a time.

butcher
gfaydark
crushbone
lfaydark
steamfontmts
cauldron
kedge
unrest
mistmoore
oot
akanon

[knowom]

I got the density doubling portion of Faydwer completed including "cities" which I wasn't initially planning to do, but decided what the hell won't hurt. Next in line Odus which is probably like a 1-3 day job depending on my ambition. Anotica will take time it has a lot of zones so will do by sections East Antonica, South Antonica, and West Antonica.

[knowom]

Never got around to uploading it, but I doubled the spawns for Faydwer and Odus. I didn't get around to fixing the coordinates though so the NPC's are literally stacked on top of one another. I was going to do Antonica as well, but it's fairly time consuming and came to the conclusion I'd rather just skip it if anything I'd probably drop that continent all together anyway if I turned this into some kind of server and would probably add Velious and or maybe Kunark with the other two continents.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1Y...ew?usp=sharing

I don't know if anyone will use it or not, but it's something to toy around with maybe someone could flesh out the coordinates with one of the zones and see how it looks and feels. I really felt this was something that could spice up classic game play in lots of ways. My initial idea was by adding enhanced challenges bigger pulls more, more mob and loot variety, day time and night time spawn cycles which could also be used to have NPC's give out different quests at different in game times.

[knowom]

This ended up turning out kinda neat looking. It is quite easy to adjusting the X, Y, or Z coordinates by via increasing or decreasing them to separate the new NPC spawns and tweak them to taste. For testing purposes I decreased all my new spawn ID's X coordinate values by -1 for Erudnext just to see how it would look. They are still a little bunched together, but aren't stacked right on top at least it gave me a rough idea at least. Ideally you'd tweak each by hand, but that would be more time consuming, but I just wanted a rough ball idea of how it can look.

Now the cool part is pathing worked as I suspected it would. Basically it means it's very easily modify and manipulate pathing say you want to spice of pathing in a given area further. For example say a simple path route in one direction say 100 feet turn around and comes back you couple duplicate it 5 times change the coordinates a bit so they are spaced around in a circle and facing each other then turn they turn around and path outward 100 feet and turn around and converge back into the tight circle again pretty neat effect for not a ton of effort. Now a different idea would be space them in front of each other so they path behind each other in a line kinda cool. How about making a bunch meet in the middle or crossing each other on a set path? Lot's of potential and it's not super involved.

I kinda wish I had a better way to modify and tweak the actual coordinates and facing direction out of game w/o having to hodgepodge it at random. You can really alter and enhance a zone in cool ways with this fairly quick and easy on a mass scale.

[knowom]

This begs to raise the question though just how many zones are important to players? Would you rather have more zones spread out or less zones that are more densely populated with mobs or perhaps a mixture of both?

I see this as a way to revitalize classic EQ. Honestly I don't see much need for more zones than classic EQ provided how many do players require? Quite frankly bigger isn't always better. More zones means more sprawl and in turn more time navigating rather than interacting with other players.

A lot of classic zones could become a lot more intriguing if they were enhanced with this type of modifying since you can add variety and challenges along with more loot and more specially enhanced in depth questing. You could tweak things to be a mixture of familiar yet different and intriguing, but ultimately nostalgic yet exciting and new again.

I just thought up something neat that could be done by duplicating spawns you could change the new duplicated spawns into opposing factions that fight each other so you could effectively turn the different cities into a constant or semi constant power struggle over control of it. It would be a rather ingenious new twist on a faction vs faction server.

[knowom]

I tried to add Lady Vox to erudnext and was hoping it would aggro the NPC's in the zone, but it showed up as a human model and didn't aggro the mobs either though the later I think is something I just didn't tweak in DB. I'm sure not sure it showed up as a human model though it's probably something to do with my DB.

I was just trying to test some stuff out. Creating a power struggle over control of a city that players can contribute toward one side or the other gaining a upper hand in besieging a city which would be very interesting in a PVP faction server and really a bit reminiscent of DAOC style game play.

[vsab]

The lady vox model won't be in erudnext's chr file, and I doubt it would be in global load so you may need to add that model - the EOC has a feature that generates the lines needed to add to the chr file.