New to EQEMU

[knowom]

I'm not sure on my zone_points yet, but I have the general zones themselves mostly narrowed down.

[knowom]

This is the current zone list I plan to go with I believe I probably missed a few starter cities, but shouldn't be that hard to add them back. (I purged the zone table in my server db to just these zones)
__________________________________
Cities
==================================
East Cabilis
cabeast

West Cabilis
cabwest

Erudin
erudnext

Erudin Palace
erudnint

East Freeport
freporte

North Freeport
freportn

West Freeport
freportw

Grobb
grobb

Halas
halas

North Kaladim
kaladima

South Kaladim
kaladimb

Neriak Foreign Quarter
neriaka

Neriak Commons
neriakb

Neriak 3rd Gate
neriakc

Oggok
oggok

Qeynos Aqueducts
qcat

South Qeynos
qeynos

North Qeynos
qeynos2

Mountains of Rathe
rathemtn

Rivervale
rivervale

Shar Vahl
sharvahl

Thurgadin
thurgadina
__________________________________
Mines
==================================
Black Burrow
blackburrow

Temple of Droga
droga

Mines of Nurga
nurga

Splitpaw Lair
paw

Temple of Solusek Ro
soltemple
__________________________________
Outdoors
==================================
Beholders Maze (Gorge of King Xorbb)
beholder

Burning Woods
burningwood

Butcherblock Mountains
butcher

Dagnor's Cauldron
cauldron

Cobalt Scar
cobaltscar

Dreadlands
dreadlands

East Karana
eastkarana

East Commonlands
ecommons

Emerald Jungle
emeraldjungle

Everfrost Peaks
everforst

The Feerrott
ferrott

Field of Bone
fieldofbone

Highpass Keep
highkeep

Highpass Hold
highpass

Iceclad Ocean
iceclad

Innothule Swamp
innothule

Jaggedpine Forest
jaggedpine

Kithicor Forest
kithicor

Lake of Ill Omen
lakeofillomen

Lake Rathetear
lakerathe

Lavastorm Mountains
lavastorm

Lesser Faydark
lfaydark

Misty Thicket
misty

Nedaria's Landing
nedaria

Oasis of Marr
oasis

Paineel
paineel

Southern Desert of Ro
sro

Steamfont
steamfont

Toxxulia Forest
tox

Trakanon's Teeth
trakanon

Western Wastes
westwastes
__________________________________
Dungeons
==================================
Cazic-Thule
cazicthule

Chardok
chardok

Chardok, Halls of Betrayal (Chardok B)
chardokb

Tower of Frozen Shadow
frozenshadow

The Ruins of Old Guk
gukbottom

Upper Guk
guktop

Plane of Hate
hateplane

Kael Drakkel
kael

Karnor's Castle
karnor

Castle Mistmoore
mistmoore

Najena
najena

Dragon Necropolis
necropolis

Plane of Justice
pojustice

Old Sebilis
sebilis

Skyshrine
skyshrine

Kerafyrm's Lair (Sleeper's Tomb)
sleeper

Solusek's Eye (Solusek A)
soldunga

Nagafen's Lair (Solusek B)
soldungb

Ssraeshza Temple
ssratemple

Temple of Veeshan
templeveeshan

Icewell Keep
thurgadinb

The Estate of Unrest: The Curse Begins
unrest

Veeshan's Peak
veeshan

Velketor's Labyrinth
velketor

Vex Thal
vexthal
__________________________________
Underwater
==================================
Kedge Keep
kedge
__________________________________
Arena's
==================================
The Arena
arena

The Arena Two
arena2
__________________________________

[rencro]

Sounds like you have a vision, I actually enjoy building more than I do playing, so have at it.. Just want to let you know in case you're not sure, but you don't "need" a static zone for every zone you want to have up, if its only you and your family playing you may be fine with the default 5 "dynamic" zones..

If your server gets busy then going static on the "hub" type zones or popular zones is probably a good idea, even giving players the option of creating their own "private" dynamic instance of a popular zone...There is an exploit with dynamic zones though where when it first boots up and say there is a rare spawn that has a chance to spawn, well you can just exit and re-enter until your said "rare" spawn is up. Of course you can set a timeout for how long a dynamic zone stays up when there are no players in it...

Welcome to the forums, and when you get your server going, be sure to create a new thread in the server section to announce it..

Good Luck!

[knowom]

Yeah I'm trying to make goals for myself step by step to accomplish.

I got rid of the doors for a selection of races I simply didn't want having them in their home cities and also got rid of all the excess ones in the table for zones not in use on the server.

Launcher and Launcher_Zones tables I didn't do too much with for now I added a extra launcher for static zones and upped the base dynamic 5 to 6 zones. I added a few static zones themselves, but they are just temporary at present time I couldn't get them to start when I tried though I'm thinking it had to do with the port setting which I don't know if I can have static zones w/o that that set and port forwarded or not a LAN though I understand and know how to change that with my router if I have to fix that at a later time.

[knowom]

I basically organized few different tables and exported them into sql source folders according to categories and named organized them in a way I can pretty easily understand should I need to revisit any of them. I have 3 folders one for create sql files, one for drop/create, and another for drop sql's though I haven't made any drop sql's as of yet other than ones I copied over from the SQL installation folder, but figure I will at some point.

[knowom]

Loading please wait....not sure if what I'm doing is right or my methods are sound or not, but hopefully all is well with my server.

[knowom]

I trimmed down the 483 zone id rows in my zone table to 108 which is more zones than I had planned on, but nothing is concrete finalized as of it yet I might in turn trim them down further this is just my rough draft.




For quests I'm thinking of having tiered collection task quests for each race every 5 levels in each home city that give some kind of xp and or loot reward maybe unlocks content, but more importantly triggers spawns else where within the world.

Now I'd like to make it so the player has some choice they can do something to one of the other 14 races to impede or deter on there personal progression in some form or another spawning annoying roamer mobs and such for example and or mobs blocking off dungeon access from lower level players for example.

I'd also like to have quests in place to reward players or races as a whole from helping eliminate the threats to themselves.

I want some quests options to also help other races in like a gesture of good alliance type of thing so you could have both some acts of good and bad will depending on what the individual players decide upon.

Now if you could create quests to form pvp alliances within the game that would be neat as well maybe 3-5 separate alliances to pick from that all war against opposing ones.

For example for the different alliances you might have

Ogres, Barbarian, and Half elf
Gnome, Vah Shir, and Wood elf
Iksar, Dwarf, and Human
Erudite, Froglok, and High elf
Troll, Halfling, and Dark Elf

[knowom]

I've trimmed a bunch of unneeded stuff my server won't be utilizing from the source peqdb_rev2506 db sql base template that my db is smaller in size overall atm so that's a plus I suppose hooray for minimalism. It's quite a bit less cluttered to navigate what I want or need as well which is nice. Also it's quicker to reload the db itself this way which is a nice plus and probably quicker to start and boot it as well I'd imagine. It didn't really shave off that much though overall in size still anything is better than nothing I guess.


I tweaked the variables, chat channels, rule_ values, and block_spells marginally. Basically I boost group xp a little bit set max level 99, death xp loss level 65, item loss level 0 to prevent item loss from death, item damage shield cap 50, and item shielding cap 50. That's it for now, but I can tweak stuff more easily enough and feel a bit better familiarized with some of it at least.


I still need to figure out how change and alter the zone_point destination paths as I believe that's how I'd make a change like for example switching grobb exit into innothule over to something like grobb exit into feerrott as a example instead which I'd like to figure out how that works.

[knowom]

Done for the day, but I slimmed down my zone_points table to just the zones I have in use on the server like I did some other tables in my db for the server. I'll likely want to do the same for some other tables in the future to remove clutter and just trim down my db to bare essential for more minimalism and organizational purposes.

I'm curious if it's possible to make Mario/Zelda/Gauntlet style zone_points mazes for example as that would be a neat idea. Even better would be if you could do it with the entire server world with say 3 different versions of the same zones loosely based around each other, but slightly different and with slightly differing loot parallel universe worm hole type of thing.

I know for a fact you could do something like Kithicor Forest on live, but rather than having them spawn daytime and nighttime mobs just make zones spawn marginally different spawns with marginally different behavorial tendencies like roamers roaming paths being different at day and night for example is one idea another is inverting named spawn locations and loot tables warrior loot during the day caster loot at night for example from certain mobs and vice verse for others.

Now if you could also make it so the zone_points change during the day and night that would be extremely cool as well a lot of conceptually interesting ideas basically I have in mind going on right now. Hopefully it's all relatively plausible concepts to implement on a custom server.

Anyway that's it for tonight with this so called project EQ

[HeyJudd]

set max level 99

You should try to level to 99, you are in for a surprise.

I would also highly recommend against removing large sections of the DB you aren't planning on using because plans change and you are just setting yourself up for a lot of work, reimporting shit you thought you didn't need.

[knowom]

I'm not worried about the XP it takes to reach level 99 right now that can be adjusted in various ways anyways such as through more solo and group experience rates along with zone xp modifiers.

As far as removing certain portions of the DB I don't see a problem with it it's all quite easy to control I have SQL's for the individual tables and it's easy to grab things and add them back from the source db tables if I actually need to do so for whatever reason at any given point.

The whole point was to remove stuff I won't use or at the very least don't plan on using. If I end up needing some later so be it, but this makes it a lot simpler to work with my server DB by removing the clutter I don't need so I can find what I do need or want more quickly.

There is certain stuff I kept in tact for the time being as I don't know what I'm going to do with them for now, but stuff I know I can remove and won't miss I'm gutting along with stuff I'm certain enough I can start modifying to my overall target goals I have in mind.

I'm learning as I go here and I'm bound to make mistakes in the process that I'll have to look into later and correct, but I've got to start somewhere.

The EQemu server setup guide only takes you so far. In terms of the actual server modifications beyond the base starting template I've pretty much been learning through pure trial and error.

They do have some other areas that are helpful scattered through the website and on the forums that have been helpful, but it's pretty cut and dry in some cases when you've had no first hand experience with any of it.

I'm just doing the best I can with the knowledge I do know about computers and with the information I have been able to find and interpret through trial and error.

It's a lot of work no matter what in a lot of cases regardless from what I can see and gather thus far if your not planning on just utilizing the base source server setup mostly unaltered and I haven't even gotten into much of the real nitty gritty aspects yet.

[knowom]

Decided to remove East Karana zone because it didn't make sense w/o North Karana also which slipped my mind and don't want to have both I might have more maps as it is than I intend for the time being.

Paineel zone was removed as well for the same similar reason don't feel like adding the Hole and can't think a practical way to fill that crater zone line void with another zone in place of it just generally not worth the aggravation I figure.

In other news I used the #zone command just to check and ensure if I could zone load to all the different zones my dynamic zones seems to be working properly in testing.

I'll have to figure out how to fix the zone_points though as a lot of the zone lines will bring you into a infinite loading loop for the time being fun right...not exactly, but if I can figure out how to alter the zone_points that should be pretty fixable.






I just finished working my static_zones conversion for my Launcher_Zones. Now all 109 zones I'm using on server should be static_zones. Unfortunately it pretty much maxes out all my server ram it went up to around 3.84GB roughly by the time every zone had loaded with 0 clients connected.

The tables for anything that directly correlates with the zones spawns, quests, doors, ect all seems to impact the ram usage in practice though from my quick testing of it by dropping said databases. So the size could shrink with careful coding I guess you could say with extreme examples table dropping of few different things like mentioned I shaved off about a solid 1GB so there is defiantly wiggle room in terms of static_zone count and overall content within said zones.

Now of course the easier route is just to use less static zones overall in favor of more dynamic zones so you can save on some of the ram usage and in turn have more room for content within each zone, but then that has it's own tradeoffs I imagine. Basically as I suspected minimalism has it's merits and wins at the end of the day as usual from a technical standpoint.

I kind of wanted less zones anyway for a variety of different reasons though so I think I'll first look into shrinking my zone count total further. It just makes more logical sense to me and builds a better closer knit community which is a good thing. Plus with less overall zones each zone that is in game should theoretically be better or at the very least have the potential to be because you have more time to devote to developing content tied to the zones so condense further I shall I think.

Another side benefit is I absolutely loath too much unnecessary travel in MMO's one of the things the first MMO I had the pleasure of experiencing UO did nicely was allowing you to mark runes to port/gate to and it was a splendid feature to have it gave the overall game a much faster pace feel because you could go through 5 or 6 dungeons in a relatively short time period as opposed to walking to each first which would probably take you a whole day to accomplish the same thing.

[knowom]

I'm thinking of taking my zone layout in a entirely different direction to start with to make the whole process more sensible and easy, but more importantly actually feel more proper rather than too out of place certain parts of my zone setup wouldn't have meshed seamlessly in a good way. My new concept shouldn't feel so out of place to the players themselves if I can get it all to work and have a plan in place on what zone connect to where ahead of time.

I feel I'd be betting off using using the entire continent of Antonica and then making more subtle changes like replacing Splitpaw Lair with Black Burrow for example and using it a quicker travel connect to Everfrost from Karana area for example like the warp whistle in mario 3 kind of, but this time I'm planning the whole map and zone to/from locations ahead before doing any work on my tables so I'll have a concrete guide to go by and work toward as oppose to just winging it on the whole idea.

Anyway that's what I'm going to try to figure out tomorrow if I can I want to try and figure out if I can connect the entrance point of black burrow to the entrance point in Karana's that normally zones into split paw. I think this idea is for the better ultimately. Luckily I've learned a bit from this experience to do with different parts of the DB though the last few days and nights should really bit a fair bit easier this time around.

[knowom]

I've decided on the server name "Aswaria Sul'vor" I think it's got a name sound to it used a few fantasy name generators to come up with the name.

This thread can be deleted I guess I'm going to make a General::Server Discussion post for the server and my overall hopes and plans for it.