Considering authoring a foundry, have quesions.

sockmunkey

Ok, Id like to start out by saying, I'm an idiot and not very tech savvy. The idea of doing my own foundry mission seems an intimidating prospect to me. I don't really have the talent or inspiration for these things. But, I got an idea. Id like to think its a good idea, good enough that I'm willing to embarrass myself by trying it out. However, I have no idea if it would even work, or can work. So before all the rage, the sobbing, the cussing, and teeth gnashing. I figured id ask first.

My idea, involves a timed mission. Now, I know that's not possible. But would it be possible to create a sense of pressure and need for action with items? My idea is to start off the quest by giving the player, say, 20 tokens. With each one representing minutes. At various dialog choices or actions id take tokens away. The idea being to finish the quest with at least one or two left, in order to beat the clock. And I have no idea yet how to handle failure, should the player squander all this tokens with willy-nilly choices.

Is it workable, insane, completely insane, sockmunkey is a loon, or even something a player would find enjoyable?

My other question is dialog, I've not delved to deep into setting up dialog trees. But is there any way to provide appropriate gender responses? The story I have is fairly gender neutral. But, I'm a poor writer, I'm not sure I can completely neutralize all my text and dialog. Being able to respond to each player appropriately would simply things. Or I'm just over thinking this.

runebane

sockmunkey wrote: »

My idea is to start off the quest by giving the player, say, 20 tokens.

The idea sounds neat. You wouldn't want to use actual items though. To the best of my knowledge items that we give the player don't stack. So that'd be 20 inventory slots.

sockmunkey

runebane wrote: »

The idea sounds neat. You wouldn't want to use actual items though. To the best of my knowledge items that we give the player don't stack. So that'd be 20 inventory slots.

Yikes, not stacking could be a problem. That could put the kibosh on this whole insanity.

Edited: ohhhh after pondering this by banging my head against a wall in defeat. It came to me, fortunately before I passed out. Would it work If I constantly switched out tokens? You get a 20 minute token to start, do an objective, loose the 20 minute one and gain a 19 minute token, ect, ect, ect.

I expect this would be a scripting nightmare, but would it be possible?

mee2002

There are timers you can make. Check DM's Studio - NW-DHZ5DAV4R it should have examples.

Problem with replacing items like that is every item will be unique. If they have the 19 min timer they can't interact with something that requires the 18 min timer for instance. It would kinda kill the suspense. Also on a side note, you can't actually consume an item through dialogue (Unless that was fixed and I missed it).

avistar001

I think you can do a "timed" mission. Granted I only have 1 foundry under my belt but it seems to me it can be done.


I use timers in my foundry. one has 11 second(ish) intervals, the other has about 6 second intervals, both last over 1 minute.

It cant be an exact time, since the mob kill time varies by level. But you can get some consistency. ( i find if you use only melee sets of both guards and mobs timing is more consistent). If you want long intervals between mob deaths pick evenly matched difficulty groups of 1 guard group vs 1 mob group. If you want short intervals stack several packs of high difficulty guards against single packs of easy mobs. Everything from there is ratio tuning and figuring out how many guards gets your result. Testing on low mid and high level players is necessary.

In this case though I would break it into segments or check points. (If you dont make it to check point 1 or interact with a shiney the thing you fail! or whatever your quest is going to say). Set a chain of mobs vs guards with the new mob pack spawn triggered by the death of the previous mob pack. Safety net your guards as well is guard group 1 dies, group 2 spawns to take over.

Failure: The timer stops when the last mob dies and triggers your failure event.

Success: (player beats your timer) Player interacts with whatever the goal is and that event then despawns the Guards which then prevents the failure because no more mobs die.

so, mob1 spawns at start, mob 2 spawns if mob 1 dies... etc

all Guards are set to despawn @ success trigger

Your Failure event is triggered by death of the last mob.

Id have to test it to see if I could make it work for 5 minutes but I dont see why it wouldnt. the other thing worth noting is your player has to be in the spawn proximity which i think needs to be within 250' through the entire chain or the chain will break.

Im sure others will chime in, if my logic is faulty.
~Avi~