Worldbuilding - How can I help?

[scatter]

hey, i'm new to this project (having discovered it only 2 days ago), but i'm already totally hooked on the idea (i used to design zones for some old "dikumuds" and this type of World Building has me feeling all nostalgic)- and i want to help.

however, i only played EQ to about 58th lvl - through Luclin but not PoP or Ykesha and i haven't played heavily for almost a year. my programming skills aren't terribly developed (took several C/C++/SQL classes a number of years ago), but i'm pretty sharp and tend to pick things up fairly quickly. i also have lots of free time at the moment. :)

so what can i do to help? i'd be happy to do the boring editing, fact/error checking, etc. work or work on some basic non PoP or Ykesha zones that still need to be put together.

in the same vein, does a database building tutorial exist anywhere?

scatter

[IADrako]

your 1st lesson is that the vast majority of people here will ignore you and any question you have, most of that remainder will be rude with you, and only a few people will actually be helpful. usually the few rare people with paitence that day, and most of the Admins of EQEmu.

[gej302]

I figure that the majority of the people here are looking to get answers to questions, as I am sure that the users outnumber the developers by a large margin (10 to 1 or so at least). So yeah, the majority will ignore you... the rest will too, if it appears you haven't done any work on your own to find the answer, and even then they may help you out with a link to the FAQ that answers your question.

Other than that, I've found that most people are as helpful as they can be.

To my knowledge there isn't a world building tutorial per say, but there are several how-to's that apply to world building, I'd recommend you check the tutorial/how to forum.

[loudent2]

Information on the databases exist around somewhere, but your best bet is to just follow the readme(located on the home page) on installing a server. You'll then have access to the database.

To help I suggest you pick a zone and popluate it(using ID's that are beyond the bound of what Drawde uses). Then submit an export of it here. If everyone picks a zone and makes it near perfect then we'll have a near perfect world :)

A lot of the zone work has been created using automated means which leaves a lot to be desired so you also have the option of taking a zone created with these means and cleaning it up.

For example The lost temple of Cazic-Thule(uses old mobs) has like 50 mobs lined up near the entrance because the spawning code in EQ allows for some small changes in places(or so I guess). So going in, removing those and other superfluous mobs and submitting that exported can also help.

To help with the coding go to the development forum. Honestly though, unless you kept up with it and have a fairly expensive compiler, I doubt a class or two in c++ will allow you to help much(to be truthful that's all I have as far as academic credentials but I have been a C++ developer for 7 years and a C developer for I believe 4 years before that.)

The biggest asset you have is time. :D

[Mortenson721]

Come by and see me sometime,