The City

[Uatu]

15-20 is a good number

I will have to make a town of blobs or something (blobs are easy to draw, you know!). I will at least give the blobs eyes...

[manikus]

What about a city of glowing orbs? You could do spheres of various sizes and colors/patterns. Maybe making like three of them and then recolors...

Or, maybe Manshoon has gotten loose in your ward and everyone is a clone of him or his sister.

[Uatu]

Hey, orbs would be even better (easier)!

Manshoon is a good idea, too

[manikus]

There is even a manshoon icon already on the Ironworks site. (You would want to do your own, but until then, you would have one to use.)

[Dinonykos]

I would like to build ward Q!

However, I have a few (perhaps dumb) questions:

1. If I understood it right, everybody who wants to work on the city gets the recent version of the Design and then designs the 4 levels of his/her ward. Can you, Manikus, easily add those levels, even if another worker changes 4 other levels at the same time? I have never experimented with exchanging levels between designs, therefore I ask...

2. Could you (Manikus ) perhaps - together with the 4 levels per ward - give a certain number of quests (e.g. 64) to everybody? To make clear which quest is used by whom, the quest names could start with certain praefixes, e.g. sth_1, man_1, man_2, din_1, uat_1 etc. I think this would make the quests more clear, otherwise you would have the risk of similar named quests by different city builders.

3. What about special keys? I am not sure, but isn't it that way that only 8 keys are present in one design? How should we handle that? One key per city builder?

4. It is probably clear that we will use the default races, classes and so on, right?

[manikus]

Actually, Dinonykos, wards g through q are not open yet. B, d and f are still open, however. I'm waiting till they close up before opening up the next ring. (I'll be handling hte next ring differently when the time comes. The only exceptioin to this will be if someone has already claimed a ward in the inner ring and has uploaded some work on it (not finished, but enough to show a move in that direction).

As for point number 2, I am going to allow up to one million quests per ward. There are 268 million and change avaliable. As for special kys, I am far from home at the moment and the computer I have with me is linux so I can't check this out. I seem to recall there being different limitations. If it is tight, I volunteer to not use any as they can be mimiced with quests. I like your naming scheme idea.
Everybody, please name your quests with a 3 letter or longer header so we can keep track of these, and make the header similar to your name.

As for races, classes and so on, this is really up to us to decide.
I am using humans, elves and dwarves so far, so we will need to keep those, but we can change the others, keep the others and add on to them or whatever. I might have the most experience workig with adding classes and races, so I think it's doable, but as things come up, I'll let you know. The editor and engine are kind finicky and while I have the skills to add coding, I would like to avoid this, as I don't want release new code that falls outside of the stated DC goals of getting to version 1.0.
We should also differentiate between PC and NPC classes and races. It is possible to add "stub" entries for the sake of NPC use, that allow the race to say whatever we need for combat and event purposes. Drow? No problem. Dragon? No problem, you get the idea.


All right, let's discuss.

[Dinonykos]

Originally Posted by manikus Actually, Dinonykos, wards g through q are not open yet.

Hm... I would have liked to be a little farer from the city center, but anyway, why not F then...

Originally Posted by manikus As for point number 2, I am going to allow up to one million quests per ward.

Okay, that may be enough...

Originally Posted by manikus We should also differentiate between PC and NPC classes and races. It is possible to add "stub" entries for the sake of NPC use, that allow the race to say whatever we need for combat and event purposes. Drow? No problem. Dragon? No problem, you get the idea.

Do I understand that correctly? Although you cannot add more than 6 races right now (as far as I know ), you can add "pseudo-races" for NPCs?
Really? Sounds good. Right now, I am not aware of how this works, but anyway, good news!

Anyway, it might be reasonable to use the 6 standard races. Do I remember right that the "traits"-file is not working correctly at the moment? Are the traits still hard-coded?

[manikus]

DC is not using the traits file. And some of what is in their is hard-coded, some is not implemented at this time, nor will it be until after 1.0

As for races, I've successfully used 8 in a design. I think Steve McDonald go the number a little higher. I don't know off the top of my head, but I think that there might be a max number that DC will read, but I don't know why it was set up this way. It shouldn't be too hard to change at some future date. But, as it is, I think we could have upwards of 48 races if we didn't mind them being different only in name.

Classes are a bit trickier. They are hard-coded into DC, so we can change the name but not the function and anything we add after the original group will have weird level issues, in that some of them may not have any levels at all. This is not good for PCs but it is fine for NPCs, as we can manually set HP, stats and THAC0.

After the inner band of the city is filled, the rules will change. Then, the rulle will be if it is your first ward, you must be in the second ring, but if it's your second or subsequent ward, you must be connected to at least one other ward, but it will need to be in an available ward of which the map will show. At first this last part won't matter, but if everybody wants to build south, I will need to reshape the city as city's generally grow in a ring fashion unless there is some barrier to stop them from moving in a direction.

I'll update the map, Dinonykos, as soon as I get home in a couple of days and then hopefully update the site the same day.

[Uatu]

Woo hoo! Welcome to the City, Dinonykos!

[manikus]

The City:

Name - Erraxy
Location - Forgotten Realms
Size - Large City
Races - humans, dwarves, elves
Classes - fighters, thieves, clerics
Items - ???
Monsters - ???
Spells - ???

====================

- each ward comes with 5 levels total
- 1 million quests reserved for each ward (quests also include special items)
- special keys must be gotten from the mayor (there are only 8 )