What's a good looking city?

[Ut0pia]

I'm just wondering, What cities compare to the Plane of Knowledge? I'm looking for any city/zone that if all the npcs were removed, the zone would be a good example of a well built city during or after the luclin release. The only ones I can think of are Katta Castelleum and Sancus Seru.

Katta is a little dark though and has that big pit
Seru is crowded and difficult to navigate with it's huge walls.

[trevius]

Shadow Haven isn't a bad one.

[Ut0pia]

yeah, but it's not ideal for what I had in mind, I was thinking of a zone that can be made into a central hub. Katta has potential but the zone is so dark. Is there anyway to change the lighting. In addition, is there anyway to make it part of earth so the /time works?

[MNWatchdog]

I assume you can connect your zonelines any way you see fit. Just have to edit the appriate settings.

[ChaosSlayer]

Erudine has that feeling of the capital and its all laid in marble +inner palace.
you have 1 zone line exist, and a sea port, + you can add teleports to other locations

Barindu has some amazing architectures, but it is partialy in ruins

RE: day and night chages - I asked this question before, and atm the devs do not know how to do that wihout hacking the client code

[Ut0pia]

Erudine was sudjested by one of my interns, but pre-luclin is just so blocky. I couldn't trade POK for Erudine. I'll check out Barindu.

Katta would make an excellent zone, if only it was better lit.

[Ut0pia]

I checked out Barindu, for the second time. I forgot it's name the first time I went. It's nice and bright, I'll give it that, but there just isn't enough buildings and objects for a central hub. Most of the objects are ruins liked you said.

[trevius]

You can change the sky settings in the zone table. You can also change fog settings. If you remove all fog and set sky to something bright, it should work well for you. And if you want it set to earth time, I believe there is a field in the zone table that lets you set which type of time you want. I think it is 0 for earth and 1 for time. Just compare 2 zones with one being Norrath and the other being on Luclin. If you can't find the field in your zone table to set which time you want it to use, I will check it when I get home and reply back. I haven't tried messing with that yet, but I think it should work. I have verified that the sky changes work and I imagine fog does too. You can change the setting then leave the zone and do a #zoneshutdown on it if it is still up to reset it. Once the zone resets, it will come up with the new settings you chose.

Highlight the whole row in Navicat for the zone you want to try this on and copy and paste it into notepad. Then if you mess anything up, you can just delete and paste the row back in.

[trevius]

A common zone people use for central base of a server is Nexus or the Tutorial zone. One nice thing is that they are small zones. Small zones can feel well populated with very few NPCs. One thing I think that is important when making a base zone is to make it have the least amount of NPCs possible. You don't want to use a fully populated PoK for your home base. The reason why is many people will gather and AFK or ghost there. The server has to send NPC locations to every person in that zone (I think) quite often, so heavy populated zones with lots of people in them will quickly bog down your server and cause major lag issues. I have seen a couple servers that use PoK as their base city and they seem to be plagued with lag problems. If you despawned the entire zone and only populated some of it with the NPCs you want, it might not be too bad, but you definitely don't want a couple hundred NPCs all standing or walking around the zone. That is a lot of info to have to send to 20 people or so.

[Ut0pia]

You can change the sky settings in the zone table. You can also change fog settings. If you remove all fog and set sky to something bright, it should work well for you. And if you want it set to earth time, I believe there is a field in the zone table that lets you set which type of time you want. I think it is 0 for earth and 1 for time. Just compare 2 zones with one being Norrath and the other being on Luclin. If you can't find the field in your zone table to set which time you want it to use, I will check it when I get home and reply back. I haven't tried messing with that yet, but I think it should work. I have verified that the sky changes work and I imagine fog does too. You can change the setting then leave the zone and do a #zoneshutdown on it if it is still up to reset it. Once the zone resets, it will come up with the new settings you chose.

Highlight the whole row in Navicat for the zone you want to try this on and copy and paste it into notepad. Then if you mess anything up, you can just delete and paste the row back in.

I've already exported the entire row to a .xml file and backup the server daily anyway. So no worries about lossing the data.

As for the sky column. The default for Katta is 7. 0 is blank and 1 through 7 are all the same with the earth way off in the background.

I set all fog columns to that to plane of knowledge. With these settings set, there was virtually no change to how Katta looked.

ztype I honestly have no idea what it does. Katta by default was set to 1. POK was set to 255 so that's what I set it to with again no change.

time_type column for katta by default is set to 2. So are other zones such as poknowledge and crushbone. I'll try 0 as you recommended and will go see what happened.

[Ut0pia]

I changed time_type and nothing happened.

[Sakrateri]

You could make a whole new zone and replace and original one with it using openzone and have it exactly how you want it. Or you could commission someone else to do it for you :)

[ChaosSlayer]

You could make a whole new zone and replace and original one with it using openzone and have it exactly how you want it. Or you could commission someone else to do it for you :)

ummm, not to sound negative, but Open zone textures are rathly on par with pre-kunark eq - he is looking for post Luclin quality graphics :cool:

Also on cities- have you considered Paineel? Its a bit grim, but compact, and has LOTS of little rooms/shops and even graveyard and palace

[Sakrateri]

Then you have not seen any zones I have made with it I suppose :)

you can see them here ZONE PICS (http://www.kheprigames.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=137%22)

With exception of the TUT pics.

[mattmeck]

Open zone will give you what you put into it, if you are quick and dont take much time it wont look that good. On the other hand if you take your time and do things right it will look better then EQ quality.

[loglos]

Underhill (from DoD, I think) and the Hive (not sure where that came from) are both awesome to me.

[leslamarch]

I have used many of Sakrateri zones and there are exceptional, some of the best zones in game. :D

[Cripp]

for my server i used SSERU for the starting city.. i spawned the whole zone (took me like around a year on/off developing)
here are screenshots.. http://s249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/lordofthenugs/?start=all

the zone is perfect though there are 4 buildings in the middle (4 similar classes start in each building as there guild hall), another huge building in the center which i plan on locking for GM uses or something only, there are 2 banks, and 4 secondary guild taverns, the rest of the zone has many houses / buildings to make shops/randoms/whatever, and to top it off theres an arena.
also whats nice is the zone is symmetrical so once you get the hang of it its really easy to get around.

PS: MY ZONE, RAR.

[Ut0pia]

Trying to make it so the game does not require any player modification at all. Using openzone would mean clients would have to download the map right?

Seru was nice when it came to how well lit it was. But the city is just to crammed for my needs and the huge walls make it difficult to navigate.

[Ut0pia]

for my server i used SSERU for the starting city.. i spawned the whole zone (took me like around a year on/off developing)
here are screenshots.. http://s249.photobucket.com/albums/gg230/lordofthenugs/?start=all

the zone is perfect though there are 4 buildings in the middle (4 similar classes start in each building as there guild hall), another huge building in the center which i plan on locking for GM uses or something only, there are 2 banks, and 4 secondary guild taverns, the rest of the zone has many houses / buildings to make shops/randoms/whatever, and to top it off theres an arena.
also whats nice is the zone is symmetrical so once you get the hang of it its really easy to get around.

PS: MY ZONE, RAR.

I was wondering Cripp, Did you use Seru for any specific reasons. And is there a wide range of objects that can be spawned in Seru?

[Cripp]

first of all i dont use any PEQ or other released databases.. i start everything from scratch.
i chose seru because of the size, because its easy to get around, it has an arena, and a perfect setup for the guilds/starting locations.
also i use the little parks that are on each side as the bind spot for 8 classes on each...
and there are many shops / housing / perfect spot for banks on each side as well... so its actually a city

[Ut0pia]

first of all i dont use any PEQ or other released databases.. i start everything from scratch.
i chose seru because of the size, because its easy to get around, it has an arena, and a perfect setup for the guilds/starting locations. also i use the little parks that are on each side as the bind spot for 8 classes on each.

I agree, it's a nice looking map, but if you are inside the inner city, it's hard to get to the rear of the city. + I want to add portals similar to POK so that it is a central hub. The problem with that is that the city is so crammed, there is little space to add such protals

[Telltolin]

I like Aldwold ;D
http://www.miriscusltd.com/aldwoldgate_3.jpg

[trevius]

If you want a new zone, you can try #zone illsalin or #zone thundercrest.

Ruins of Illsalin - illsalin (looks like an underground evil type city)

Thundercrest Isles - thundercrest (Bright and clean looking city type zone with an asian sort of theme to it)

From what you have specified so far, seems like you might like Thundercrest.

[ChaosSlayer]

thundercrest seems to godly to be used as home town - since its basicly like Plane of Sky 2.0

I will once again sugest to look at Paineel =)