Overly Ambitious Newblet - World Buildin' Questions

[MajinCry]

Mornin' lads, 'tis the lil' ol' me again.


Having finally gotten a working client and finished the server setup guide, I've got a load o' questions about what's what, how to do what, where to find what, so on and so forth.

Of course, I did do a bit of searching, but nothing came up that was entirely relevant to me musings, so dinnae worry about that.


1. How would I compose a zone mostly (if not entirely) out of already present resources, such as houses, chairs, trees, etc.? The wiki has a half-finished guide on faffing with 3DS Max to make custom models, but doesn't go beyond that in any shape or form.

Surely, since Everquest has such a wide breadth of content already created, it would be best to just pool those resources, and place them on a custom-created terrain model, much like what's done in Bethesda's Creation Kit for Skyrim.

I've also done a bit of lurking, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is it true that all the 3D models used in a scene (terminology issue here. Map? Zone? There's no clarification that I can find) are actually just one big mesh? If that is the case, I absolutely wish to avoid doing that.

My reason being, is that if I wish to change a house, for example, to be burnt and falling apart due to some in-game event, I'd have to create a completely new zone to accommodate the single mesh that changed, whereas games typically just replace the current model with the new one using the same 3D positioning.


2. What is the difficulty of, and how would I go about, implementing the other races of Norrath to be playable? For example, the Gnoll race; the combat and locomotion animations are already present, sound effects already exist, etc. Would I just have to make an NPC that the player talks to, and invoke some sort of SetRace(PlayerConversationPartner, Gnoll); function?

Or would it involve hacking away at the source code for months on end?


3. The stock player character voices and sound effects are atrociously bad; the footsteps are out of sync, the vocalization made when jumping...Eugh. How difficult would it be to give each player race, and each gender of each race, their own voice files, replacing the vanilla ones?

I'm also going to go out on a limb and assume the same running sound effect is used for every character, even though the animations differ by race? Luckily, I already have locomotion sound effects, and have the know-how to time them, so that isn't an issue. But what tools would I need, and which files will I have to modify, to make the game use the sounds for each race and gender?

I've also got voice acted sounds and dialogue, so that isn't a problem.


4. Is there any great effort involved in making NPCs traverse zones? Once I've got the hang of replacing assets, creating custom scenes, utilizing existing Everquest 3D architecture, etc., I do indeed plan on giving the game some life.

For example, say I want to have a pack of Gnolls go from SceneA to SceneB, where they will then raid (well, move to a bunch of pre-defined points and wait for something to happen) a village, where they then do battle with the inhabitants.

What's involved, or even better, how would I go about implementing such a thing?


5. By default, due to following the server setup guide, the database present with the server is filled with a huge amount of items, NPCs with stats tailored to certain game systems, grinding spots and the like.

What I want to do, is remove the dependence upon grinding for stat points to progress a character. That is to say, I want everything to hinge upon the class a player selects, and the gear that they are wearing. Grinding does not come into the picture, unless you count gathering and bartering resources for crafting said gear.

I also wish to make the divide between low-end gear and end-game gear much smaller. A bronze sword may hit 5 points of damage, whilst the super-awesomely-sharp-katana-from-the-eastern-lands-of-the-north will hit 12 points of damage on a good day. The idea here, is to put a much bigger reliance upon minor buffs and sheer numbers, rather than who spent 8 months grinding to get some antiquated set of equipment.

So, uh, my question is, how would I go about clearing up the database? Removing the vast majority of NPCs, equipment and whatnot already present, so that I do not have unused data clogging up whatever editor's interface will be used...That sort of thing.


6. How dynamic can an in-game scene become? As it stands (with most MMOs, actually), a tree that is present in a scene will not change; it can't be cut down. You can't place barricades, you can't build a house on a non-instance, etc.

But what would be involved in making it so that a player could, say, cut down a tree, with NPCs and whatnot taking that into account (line of sight, pathing, etc.)? Or making a fort out of wooden boxes? And if such a thing is possible, is there a guide on the best practices on designing a map to accommodate such dynamic gameplay?



So aye, that's all the questions I've got at the moment. Tah in advance, milawds.