Stage a little drama...

[Rodnoldo]

Hello,

I've been working up a number of quests for our server and having a ton of fun. The quests are mostly dialog driven, with some story, rewards and tasks.

Now, I'd like to push my quests a little more and create something like a little NPC drama. I want to allow my players to view, listen to (read) and possibly interact with the NPCs in the drama.

I can pull many NPCs from other zones to the "drama stage" zone location, as long as the models are recognized in the current zone and I think I can cause the NPCs to spawn and begin a dialog as soon as they pop.

But action is another thing... and timing.

1. Can anyone explain to me what the "flag" quest commands do (cumflag, flagnpc, flagclient), beyond setting a flag?
What will the flag do for me?
Can it be used like the epic quest in LIVE which report certain aspects of a quest have been completed?
Is it saved to the database someplace and will it survive when a zone goes to sleep?
Would I have to add the "save" command to my quest to make it save to the database so the player does not lose his place in the quest?

2. Does the "doanim" command work in all zones?
Can I cycle an anim or series of anims to continue indefinitely while the zone is up?
Perhaps tied to "settimer" and "stoptimer"?

3. Does "settarget" work?
Can I make NPCs attack each other?

4. Does "follow" and "sfollow" work?
I've seen some notes that it doesn't work.
If this works, perhaps I can make an NPC follow another (which would be equivalent to approach the other NPC if the actor NPC is not close enough).

5. I've noticed "sharp_rock" NPCs and other NPCs which cannot be targeted but can be spawned. Would it be possible to cause some interaction with the "sharp_rock" NPC, triggering quest events, dialog, etc.?

6. The whole pathing-grid thing does not gel well in my mind. I see the commands and can see how they would be implemented from command line in the GUI, but I don't understand how to create the grid entries in my database without messing something up that was there. This may require a completely different thread to discuss the pathing. But I added it here because I have the following questions...
Can I set up and initiate pathing from a quest? Like have an NPC pace back and forth... walk around in circles... walk up to another NPC, stand for a few seconds (maybe do an anim), walk away... in effect, cause my NPCs to perform a little drama.
It seems like these actions might be better driven by quest scripts, than by the pathing and grid concept I've been reading about.

I'll play around with some of these things to try to get a little drama working.

If anyone has some pointers or information they can lend, I would appreciate it. The Lexicon and other quest docs I've come across have tons of good information about commands and syntax, but not much on implementation of the commands I mentioned here. I'm not too well-versed in PERL, but I can work with the commands and structure I've seen in quests todate.

Thanks, much.

Rodnoldo