... My worry right now is that if a new limit is set, will my current data get clipped?
... Honestly, I had teleporting problems before this patch, and I assumed it was something I was doing wrong. ...
It's hard not to be discouraged. I just wish there was a way to get my script out of the program. ...
Nothing should be clipped from your quest. If you went over the limit, it should just give you a "task" (yellow triangle) to do.
Teleporters have never quite set right. Their coordinates were off, so we had to move them around a lot to get them to work right. This patch was supposed to fix that, but something went wrong still.
Once the editor is back up, you can copy/paste your dialog from the tree onto another program. It is a pain, it will take you a long time, but it can be done. You will have to do it one dialog prompt at a time.
Huh. So apparently my one quest affected by this got bugged. A SLEW of 'invisible walls' gained a '.' contact dialog.
And... I can't change it.
When I unselect 'contact,' it says 'you are still over budget. Delete more items.' ... and then it resets the contact to flagged.
What a mess.
I'm done. No, you can't have my stuff ( I dropped most of it in guild bank anyway, not that I think anyone's still around from it)
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
0
canadascottMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 121Arc User
"Cryptic chief creative officer Craig Zinkievich said that wordy Dungeon Masters could ostensibly make their own full-length text adventures, with enough time and patience."
Also, Craig's words on a recent podcast:
"Go wild."
Find a way to circumvent the server issues that don't involve a dialogue prompt limit or force authors to make arbitrary divisions in quests, okay? Or at least safely increase them to the 800 prompt range. You're smart. You can do this. If an author wants to write the next Planescape Torment in game, facilitate it for him.
Teleporters have never quite set right. Their coordinates were off, so we had to move them around a lot to get them to work right. This patch was supposed to fix that, but something went wrong still.
Once the editor is back up, you can copy/paste your dialog from the tree onto another program. It is a pain, it will take you a long time, but it can be done. You will have to do it one dialog prompt at a time.
Thanks for the info. The Foundry is up! This was the first time I got to play it from the beginning and not fall to my death. I finally got to see the interior of the first little scratchpad quest I made.
Thanks devs + mods! Go get some sleep (and please, please let the Foundry work this weekend!).
So... I can't even split my quest up into two parts. Every time I try and duplicate the quest, the Foundry crashes.
Nice job, Cryptic.
duplicates are named "Copy of..." if "copy of questname goes here" is too long to be an acceptable quest name, it will crash. Rename your quest something short first, then duplicate, then rename back to what it should be.
I got it to work eventually. Quest name wasn't too long - It gives you a warning when the quest name is too long, and I wasn't getting that warning.
I had to duplicate the quest twice, really, so I have 3 copies of it. One to turn into part 1, one to turn into part 2, and one to keep for posterity's sake as the full thing, the way it should be, Foundry limits be d*mned
The only way I could get it to work was to take each dupe as I made it and then hack out the offending maps and dialogue. Then and only then could I save the new dupe quest (after changing the title)
Duplicating quests has always been as buggy as hell anyway.
Oh yeah, and why does the system automatically take you into the editor when you press duplicate? When I duplicate a file on my PC, my PC doesn't open it. It just copies it. If I duplicate an entire directory tree, my computer doesn't open it, it just copies it.
I'm mean like that. Honestly, I was about to give up last night when they finally worked.
Duplicating quests has always been buggy. The only way I've ever gotten it to work is to hit the duplicate button, then the Foundry takes you into the editor. (I've never been sure why it does that. When I duplicate a file or a folder tree on my PC, Windows doesn't launch an application to let me look at the file, or open a new instance of Windows Explorer with the folder tree). Anyway. You're in the editor. Everything looks fine. However, if you log out and log back in, the quest will be empty.
So in order to make everything work, you HAVE to "re-save" (as it were) your new quest. But before you can do that, you have to edit it, to trigger the Foundry's "you've made a change, do you want to save?" thing. No changes, the Foundry won't let you save, even if you try and force it with ctrl-s.
But since my quest was overbudget with dialogue, any change I made made the stupid "You have too much stuff. Delete some things" error message come up - I'd click "yes" to that (yeah, the one and only button is labelled 'Yes', not 'OK'), and then the Foundry would crash before I got to save. Yay, fun.
So very annoying and frustrating.
Btw, Cryptic, if you're reading this - that "Delete some things" is a terrible error message, and really smacks of "This is an error message we don't expect any customers to ever see". The fact that the button says 'yes' and not 'ok' is another indicator that you guys didn't expect anyone to see that message, and so you didn't put any thought into the design of it and just used a default modal dialog box.
Oh, and while we're on the subject - Isn't it a fairly simple query for you guys to find out whether or not there are quests that have over 600 prompts in the database? You know, so you'd know ahead of time whether or not anyone would see that error message...
I mean, I don't know what your db structure is, but I deal with cartographic spatial SQL queries that can reach up to 10,000 characters in length in my day-to-day job. You can't tell me a query that counts prompts per quest is anywhere near as complex as the stuff I see flying across my desk on a daily basis.
But hey, like I said.. I don't know what your db structure is. I could be completely wrong.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
0
msrebel1972Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
If you really want to have that many prompts, have you considered splitting your quest up into multiple quests? The highest rated quests are between 20 and 30 minutes, you'll probably get higher ratings if you split your 90 minute epic into three more bite-sized quests.
I have an updated comment on this weighing in on the issue that zahinder raised earlier, that length of quest has nothing to do with amount of dialogue.
The average played time on LLL before the patch was 37 minutes. This is because I included OOC shortcut options to allow players to skip dialogue. So before the patch, LLL was not a 90-minute epic (If you didn't want it to be)
I just spent the entire long weekend cutting LLL in half.
Now, the average playtime for part 1 is going to be .. let's be generous and just cut the 37 in half and call it 19 minutes.
In my new LLL part 1, I duplicated an NPC that happened to have a non-quest Contact dialogue.
I received the "You have too many dialogue prompts" error.
So, thanks for your suggestion, jfinderdev, but LLL part 1 is now a sub-20 minute quest (and that's optimistic, if you speedrun, it's probably half that again), and still butts up against the dialogue limit.
Thankfully, in this instance, I needed a duplicate version of the NPC for objective reasons and so I didn't need them both to have the same contact dialogue, so I could delete it, bringing me back under the limit. However, in order to make pt 1 make sense, I do still need to add another quest objective dialogue, so I'll have to be careful with how I do that.
But frankly, this shows that 600 prompts really isn't enough, at least for authors like me, regardless of quest length.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
0
cipher9nemoMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited October 2013
Necroing this thread since it's in the Foundry and not General forums.
Any news are response from Cryptic on this? I'm working on a quest with a lot of optional dialog/Easter Eggs since Cryptic's model pushes us to target 15-30 minutes quests IF we want to have a popular quest. So my current work is targeted at that, but can much longer for those who want to explore and read those optional dialogs on the side.
I can't remember where the post was, but someone mentioned around 550 as the limit for dialog choices. Thanks for doing that research! It will save me a big headache later.
The limit is actually 600 individual prompts across the whole quest. This limit was added because due to the way the Cryptic Engine handles text resources getting saved, if you had more than about 500 dialog prompts, saving and previewing quests would cause the server to stall about 80% of the time, causing you to disconnect while editing.
The limit is actually 600 individual prompts across the whole quest. This limit was added because due to the way the Cryptic Engine handles text resources getting saved, if you had more than about 500 dialog prompts, saving and previewing quests would cause the server to stall about 80% of the time, causing you to disconnect while editing.
Comments
Nothing should be clipped from your quest. If you went over the limit, it should just give you a "task" (yellow triangle) to do.
Teleporters have never quite set right. Their coordinates were off, so we had to move them around a lot to get them to work right. This patch was supposed to fix that, but something went wrong still.
Once the editor is back up, you can copy/paste your dialog from the tree onto another program. It is a pain, it will take you a long time, but it can be done. You will have to do it one dialog prompt at a time.
[UGC] Kolde Acres (Discontinued)
And... I can't change it.
When I unselect 'contact,' it says 'you are still over budget. Delete more items.' ... and then it resets the contact to flagged.
What a mess.
I'm done. No, you can't have my stuff ( I dropped most of it in guild bank anyway, not that I think anyone's still around from it)
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Also, Craig's words on a recent podcast:
"Go wild."
Find a way to circumvent the server issues that don't involve a dialogue prompt limit or force authors to make arbitrary divisions in quests, okay? Or at least safely increase them to the 800 prompt range. You're smart. You can do this. If an author wants to write the next Planescape Torment in game, facilitate it for him.
Thanks for the info. The Foundry is up!
Thanks devs + mods! Go get some sleep (and please, please let the Foundry work this weekend!).
Nice job, Cryptic.
I had to duplicate the quest twice, really, so I have 3 copies of it. One to turn into part 1, one to turn into part 2, and one to keep for posterity's sake as the full thing, the way it should be, Foundry limits be d*mned
The only way I could get it to work was to take each dupe as I made it and then hack out the offending maps and dialogue. Then and only then could I save the new dupe quest (after changing the title)
Duplicating quests has always been as buggy as hell anyway.
Oh yeah, and why does the system automatically take you into the editor when you press duplicate? When I duplicate a file on my PC, my PC doesn't open it. It just copies it. If I duplicate an entire directory tree, my computer doesn't open it, it just copies it.
*sigh*
Hope things start to smooth out Raph. For you and all authors.
Duplicating quests has always been buggy. The only way I've ever gotten it to work is to hit the duplicate button, then the Foundry takes you into the editor. (I've never been sure why it does that. When I duplicate a file or a folder tree on my PC, Windows doesn't launch an application to let me look at the file, or open a new instance of Windows Explorer with the folder tree). Anyway. You're in the editor. Everything looks fine. However, if you log out and log back in, the quest will be empty.
So in order to make everything work, you HAVE to "re-save" (as it were) your new quest. But before you can do that, you have to edit it, to trigger the Foundry's "you've made a change, do you want to save?" thing. No changes, the Foundry won't let you save, even if you try and force it with ctrl-s.
But since my quest was overbudget with dialogue, any change I made made the stupid "You have too much stuff. Delete some things" error message come up - I'd click "yes" to that (yeah, the one and only button is labelled 'Yes', not 'OK'), and then the Foundry would crash before I got to save. Yay, fun.
So very annoying and frustrating.
Btw, Cryptic, if you're reading this - that "Delete some things" is a terrible error message, and really smacks of "This is an error message we don't expect any customers to ever see". The fact that the button says 'yes' and not 'ok' is another indicator that you guys didn't expect anyone to see that message, and so you didn't put any thought into the design of it and just used a default modal dialog box.
Oh, and while we're on the subject - Isn't it a fairly simple query for you guys to find out whether or not there are quests that have over 600 prompts in the database? You know, so you'd know ahead of time whether or not anyone would see that error message...
I mean, I don't know what your db structure is, but I deal with cartographic spatial SQL queries that can reach up to 10,000 characters in length in my day-to-day job. You can't tell me a query that counts prompts per quest is anywhere near as complex as the stuff I see flying across my desk on a daily basis.
But hey, like I said.. I don't know what your db structure is. I could be completely wrong.
I have an updated comment on this weighing in on the issue that zahinder raised earlier, that length of quest has nothing to do with amount of dialogue.
The average played time on LLL before the patch was 37 minutes. This is because I included OOC shortcut options to allow players to skip dialogue. So before the patch, LLL was not a 90-minute epic (If you didn't want it to be)
I just spent the entire long weekend cutting LLL in half.
Now, the average playtime for part 1 is going to be .. let's be generous and just cut the 37 in half and call it 19 minutes.
In my new LLL part 1, I duplicated an NPC that happened to have a non-quest Contact dialogue.
I received the "You have too many dialogue prompts" error.
So, thanks for your suggestion, jfinderdev, but LLL part 1 is now a sub-20 minute quest (and that's optimistic, if you speedrun, it's probably half that again), and still butts up against the dialogue limit.
Thankfully, in this instance, I needed a duplicate version of the NPC for objective reasons and so I didn't need them both to have the same contact dialogue, so I could delete it, bringing me back under the limit. However, in order to make pt 1 make sense, I do still need to add another quest objective dialogue, so I'll have to be careful with how I do that.
But frankly, this shows that 600 prompts really isn't enough, at least for authors like me, regardless of quest length.
Any news are response from Cryptic on this? I'm working on a quest with a lot of optional dialog/Easter Eggs since Cryptic's model pushes us to target 15-30 minutes quests IF we want to have a popular quest. So my current work is targeted at that, but can much longer for those who want to explore and read those optional dialogs on the side.
I can't remember where the post was, but someone mentioned around 550 as the limit for dialog choices. Thanks for doing that research! It will save me a big headache later.
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Thanks! Yeah, I missed that post buried in here.
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Thanks for the info. Now just need to watch the prompt count.
Video Review: http://www.twitch.tv/zovya/c/2671017