So here we are, the first day of the second week of this quest-editing milestone, and my current development roadmap tells me that I’m 93% complete. In fact, there’s only one task left to be done.
No need to zoom in on the image (unless you want to read about the tasks I’ve completed); the last remaining task is extremely specific: “Quest editing needs to not suck.” It’s actually the core thing I want to accomplish in this milestone. Everything else I’ve done so far has either been cleanup from the milestone 4 or rendertech 5 builds (for example, monsters still being drawn when they’re dead), or has been miscellaneous “quality of life” nice-to-have items (for example, the ability to rotate a building when placing it). In fact, a lot of last week went into making road placements more reliable. The game now stops you from placing a road which would cross itself, for example. And it’s much less finicky about joining a short road onto an existing road. And it doesn’t crash if you try to make a road that’s too long.
So the rest of this week will now be going to the quest editing interface. This will be the game’s fourth quest editing interface. The first (seen in the MS2 build) was a window which provided a text area for the quest name, for a quest description, and a button which you could click on to set where the quest should send players. The second (never seen in a public build) occurred in the context action matrix; there were buttons for adding and removing quests, but all quests were randomly generated. The third was seen in the MS3 and MS4 builds; it was similar to the first system, although it used a HUD panel instead of a floating window, and it used a set of powers in the action bar to add and remove quests.
My plan for the new system is to dramatically simplify the quest editing system’s interface. When selecting a Quest Giver, we’ll show a panel which displays a widget for each quest offered by the Quest Giver. Each of these widgets will be selectable, and once selected, will be able to be renamed. Quests will no longer have descriptions (descriptions weren’t being used for anything real, anyway). When selected, the path required for the quest will be displayed using floating arrows in the world, using a very similar system to what was seen in MS3 and MS4. But unlike in those builds, the player will be able to directly click and drag on the arrow’s head to change the quest’s destination(s). Quests will also be able to be reordered, by simply dragging their widgets up and down within the HUD panel. In previous implementations, only the last quest in the list could be deleted, and quests couldn’t be reordered. In this new one, middle quests will be able to be removed, simply by selecting them and hitting ‘delete’.
