Event Horizon....

[Tarlanon]

Hey all.

I was just curious how many events some of you have in your designs so far?

I'm up to over 140 events, and I'm probably only about 1/3 of the way through coding my design.

How many do y'all have in yours?

[manikus]

I have a design that is being beta tested i.e. probably not going to add too many more events, and it's at 241. The design has one bigger level (50x50) and two smaller (10x20) and (15x15).
In FRUA, that's 3 designs worth.
[I have a smaller design (18x32) that uses 106 events]
[Harri Polsa's MJV_game1 has 48 levels, 159 quests and 16475 events!]

This is your daily dose of DC trivia.

-manikus

[Tarlanon]

Holy cow!!! 16,000 Events!?!?!?!?!?
[img]graemlins/jawdrop.gif[/img]

Well, here I thought I was going along pretty good. Y'all have humbled me!

As for Mr. Harri Polsa...

I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy! [img]graemlins/worship.gif[/img]

[Tarlanon]

Ok, here is another questions in the topic of events....

Just how deep do some of your event trees go?

In my design, I have one event tree that is at least 24 events down from the base, and will likely be significantly deeper by the time the design is done.

Which brings me to another point. Can the event editor be resized? Would this be a feature, or am I missing something in the event editor that easily allows this? I ask because once you get really deep into the event trees, it becomes somewhat difficult to track everything in that little event tree box.

Just thinking out loud again.

[SilentThief]

my best advice is to write it out. plan it ahead of coding in the event, and write it out on paper. Then instead of having to process the thoughts of "oh yeah, this is when they decide NOT to accept the quest..." you instead can just copy it out word for word from your paper (and check it as you go).

[manikus]

I didn't write it out for Dungeoneer, and wish that I had. There was a particular event that had five optioins and quests, and was a royal pain in the butt to debug when I messed it up. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Now, I'm writing stuff out on paper first. Then, I am typing it into a text editor as much for easier reading as for spell checking. Then when it looks good, it gets cut and pasted into DC.

It's taking only a little bit longer on the front end, but is going to save me tons of time in testing...

-manikus

[Tarlanon]

I am a kind of 'fly by seat of pants' kind of developer for some of these things, mostly because while I am coding one set of events up I get this great idea (or what I think is great anyway) and sometimes make some adjustments on the fly. I think I am getting the hang of doing it though because the changes are getting easier to make and understand where the changes need to be made.

I have a new tip here too regarding deep event trees. Say you want one location on the map to contain a NPC or something which is going to be visited again and again during the campaign by the PCs. Ultimately in this type of scenario you are probably always going to want to have something displayed to the PCs, if nothing else to encourage them to re-visit the location for more information later. In this type of scenario you are likely to have a very deep event tree. Just remember when planning that your generic 'display this when I don't have anything else to display' always be the last event in that tree. Then you will never have to worry about the generic message firing before the meaningful ones.

For a lot of you that was pretty straightforward, for others it might be a helpful hint.

Keep on 'craftin!

[SilentThief]

Believe me, I understand that... I was a flying mod developer, too (The move to PnP has been necessary with this terrible amount of down time I've had, but I've got some crazy mod plans to surprize y'all when I get back up).

Anyhow, with all your talk about event trees and coding tips, mebbe you oughtta talk to Manikus about writing some helpful tips for future event builders.

SilentThief