Suggestion for perl quest system

[mystic414]

Naming quest files by npc name rather than npcid has been supported for a while now and that is very helpful...

Along those lines, would it be possible to make it so that we can use item names, spell names, faction names, etc. in the quest files instead of their numbers? Seems like that would eliminate a lot of problems with database compatibility.

[fathernitwit]

this dosent exist for a few reasons...
1. theres nothing saying items, spells, and factions have to have unique names, and the frequently do not.
2. The query to pull an item by name is not really fast, expecially if your doing a lot of them. Spell lookup would be even slower, since they arnt in the DB.
3. This would involve making quests a lot more complicated since you would have to call subroutines to resolve items every time you used them.


The only suggestion that would be possible would be factions. I will think about it, but I doubt it will happen.

[cavedude]

In addition to fathernitwit's 3 points, your suggestion really isn't needed except for factions or for a custom database. Spell IDs are pulled right from the two spell files in your EQ client's dir, and item IDs are collected right from live. As long as you are using an item databse collected from Live data, you are fine.
My belief is this project is about creating software that closely resembles Live. Adding this change will not help with that AND may cause the server software to slow down which is never good.

[mystic414]

Thanks for the follow-ups. I didn't realize looking up things by name is so much more database-intensive than looking them up by id number.

I had thought that databases from live avoided using the same name for multiple items--I'm thinking of the Circlet of Shadows item that pre-nerf allowed an instant-cast invis spell, but post-nerf had a normal casting time... the post-nerf item's name was Circlet of Shadow (or vice versa, can't remember which), because they were leaving the original item in game and presumably didn't want to have a duplicate item name. Anyway, it's a moot point if identical names are, in fact, used.

Ease of writing quests was my main motivation for this suggestion... it would save an extra step of looking up the id number for everything when writing a quest, and would make checking quests for errors 1000x faster. But if it's not possible, it's not possible. Thanks for the replies. :P