Hello,
I thought of a potential feature, and I was wondering what you guys thought about it. This was inspired by the ldon level segregation thing, but is a more general, broader solution. There is a certain overlap with the current quest system, and thats one reason I am asking if it might be useful.
What I am proposing is the idea of 'spawn conditions'.
This is basically where you are able to set a conditional which is checked before a spawn is even consitered for spawning.
Potential uses:
1. LDoN level segregation. Setup all the possible spawns, tag them each with a conditional, so only one spawns.
2. progressive spawns. Kill one mob (or several), it sets a conditional which changes the spawn pattern of the zone to spawn bigger mobs.. for example, kill over a set number of craig chicks, cause the momma craig to spawn. etc...
3. zone 'plots'. A quest can alter a zone, such that camps spawn different things, aka one group of NPCs 'takes over' another camp, etc..
there are prolly more, post them if you can think of them.
The way I propose to do this is:
- there are a fixed set of conditions avaliable:
e.g. == x, != x, < x, > x, > x > , etc...
- each entry in spawn2 gets extra columns which represent the conditionals, something like:
- variable_name - name of the variable
- condition - which condition to apply
- arg1 - one arg to the condition
- arg2 - another arg to the condition, if it needs it
- code to check these conditionals at the same time the 'chance' to spawn is checked.
- perl functions to get and set these spawn variables.
- Option to set a decay time on a variable, so it fades back to 0, or whatever over time, for things like progressive spawns which need to revert if nobody plays with them
- variables will be global, not per-zone.
Let me know what you think, if enough people think it will be useful, then I will start working on it when I get bored of other stuff.