VectorStorm Blog

Today:

New-style single-stage quests are now in place.  (multi-stage quests are still TODO, probably for post-MS1)  The screenshot here is of a very simple starting area;  a graveyard on the far left (needs a model), a spawn area in the background on the left, an inn in the middle (with an NPC quest-giver standing in front of him), and a grinding zone on the right.  The blue boxes represent subscribers, the red ones represent monsters.  Needless to say, all the graphics are still placeholder.

When you place an NPC questgiver, the quest giver now automatically creates five randomly generated quests, and begins to hand them out to any subscriber who requests them.  My task for tomorrow is to allow the player to modify those quests (and perhaps add extras).  But for right now, those quests are all generated by code.  Subscribers take a quest, finish it, then go to collect another quest and repeat (until they get bored of doing quests and decide to do something else instead).

Each quest consists of directions to go somewhere, and (optionally)  kill some monsters there, and then awards XP to the subscriber for completing the quest.

A few seconds after the screenshot above, for the very first time during my development of MMORPG Tycoon 2, a subscriber reached level 2.  I’m pretty thrilled that the systems have all survived the switch from 2D to 3D well enough to have the level progression still working properly!

So my tasks for the near future:

• GUI for editing quests.
• Subscriber AI improvements allow more than one active quest at a time.
• Show more subscriber AI data, so players can easily see what individual subscribers are doing.