Real Instancing

Secrets · #1 05-06-2009, 10:10 PM

I like the idea of having spawngroups for their own instances, however, the point of instances in EQ at least is to scale NPCs based on their existing info versus the players going into the instance, at least what I think this is for in LDON.

It would be MUCH better to add a field in npc_types that can be enabled to scale that NPC to level of the clients entering the zone when the NPC is loaded from spawn2, rather than having a bunch of multiples of the same NPC for the same zone. This way, we don't have to populate each instance by hand and place them, and do a lot of unnessesary copy & paste. For the instances where we don't need level scaling, the flag can be turned off, but the zone can be flagged as an instance as well. If the zone is *not* flagged as an instance, and the field in npc_types is turned on, they will still scale and this will add another feature for server OPs to use. This eliminates the need for any kind of un-needed tables.

The problem would be basing it off of the client. I suggest using the first client that goes into the instance, just like SOE does.

Lemme know what you think, and if it would be feasable, especially the client part.

**trevius** · #2 05-07-2009, 12:45 AM

NPC level scaling actually wouldn't be too hard to handle with Scripts using the modifynpcstat command that KLS put in a while back. Real instancing would be cool for special events and such. Though, I think their main potential would be for LDoN zones.

**KLS** · #3 05-07-2009, 01:08 AM

Well a lot of raid and adventure dungeons past LDoN are instanced as well. It's a piece of missing functionality that if we don't get we we honestly start hitting a wall with on PEQ soon because PoP was the last real non-instanced expansion(minus potb of course).

I've got a very basic functionality working right now in that the world server is able to track servers by both zone and instance id, it had it's share of annoyances but it was easier than I thought it'd be... still a lot more than that though.

Andrew80k · #4 05-07-2009, 11:50 AM

I love the idea for real instancing. I spent a lot of time in both the DoN instances and the DoDH instances on live. It was nice to have scaled content. It would be nice to be able to scale both mobs and loot inside these instances.

**KLS** · #5 05-08-2009, 03:06 AM

I've got creation of basic instancing and loading into an instance working. A lot of the lockout stuff is pretty preliminary atm and I'll try to get that entire system sorted out after I work zoning into instances out next.

It's still a mountain of work ahead but it's actually going a lot more smoothly than I thought it would.