I am proud to present my Cookery System. Its a versatile crafting system of sorts, with an emphasis on fun and ease of use. Its also extremely easy to customize.
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TCOAH-CS V. 1.0 Public Beta - Information:
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What is TCOAH-CS?
TCOAH-CS is a crafting system developed for the total conversion mod project "True Colours Of A Hero". It was made for use in a low / no magic world to replace magical potions for healing, but it grew into something much more fun and entertaining.
Explain a little about how it works:
A player must possess a Cooking Pot (which can be used to "cook" anything at all) or they can use placeable cooking implements (in the demo module there is a cooker - it can only grill or roast). You must place ingredients into your cooking implement and choose your cooking method. If you match a recipe and you pass a skill check you create a meal.
You can also create compound ingredients - ingredients that are made out of others (an example - Butter - is made from cream). These are prepared using the Cooking Pot or using a placeable.
An important thing to note is that the difficulty is not completely focused on the amount of ingredients used. Each ingredient has its own difficulty and these stack up to influence the overall DC of creating the dish. For instance, herbs and spices are harder to use than milk or flour.
What are the main features of TCOAH-CS?
- Easy to use (very important).
- Non-tedious.
- Extremely easy to customise (this was perhaps one of the most important design considerations).
Now, aside from how easy it is to make a new recipe, or the range of recipes and ingredients available in the core system, theres a few things that make this stand out.
Recipe books, whilst useful in theory, don't work very well in Neverwinter Nights as the "recipe" is contained within the item's description (and this can be read without purchase). Plus...aren't there just cooks who are naturally good at what they do? I know when I make a dinner I usually have a go at "I think these flavours go together" or "I remember eating these ingredients together in a restaurant once". Cooking can afterall be a creative pursuit. So I introduced the Tasting Spoon.
Using a Tasting Spoon, the player can make a skill check versus the DC of any manufactured ingredient or meal (player made or shop bought) and try to discover what ingredients are present in it. This allows a player who focuses on the Cookery skill to learn recipes just through taste (though, remember to write them down in your Journal!).
What options are there to customise the system?
Theres allsorts. Really, whatever you'd like to do, you can do it. Don't want to use any core ingredients / recipes? Then dont! Just follow the steps in the manual and set up your user recipes. Create your own generators (placeable / creature / trigger). Each generator can generate any number of ingredients in a range of different amounts. They can also require the possession of an item. The great thing is - its variable based, so you can intergrate any existing creatures into the system very easily (in the demo module, I literally just copied the nwn default animals and added variables to them and a special death script).
By default the system gives XP. There are certain steps put into place that should stop exploitation of the system by people who do not invest in the Cookery skill, but if you still feel you don't want XP at all, just set a module variable and it won't be given out.
Thanks for the comments. I was sortof in the process of converting this to work as a universal crafting system. :)
It only requires minor adjustments, and I was going to tidy up the system by streamlining the code and also making it work with the database systems (bioware and NWNX).
I might have a crack at it this weekend - it'd be nice to leave this system in a nice shape.
Design-wise, you'd have a very similar setup to now i.e a database of all your recipes which you can contruct / modify during the game / running of a server, but which won't require any coding knowledge at all to setup. Plus you'll be able to have as many crafting systems as you like, all running off 4 - 10 scripts (or less)! :)
Wow, I was trying to wrap my mind around doing something similar. This is truely wonderful addition to neverwinter nights. I might try to apply this to other crafting systems as well, though I'll wait for the 1.69 update before beginning any such activity.P.S. my wife is going to love you. ^.^.(She -Loves- baking.)
I have very very little time at the moment, but I am working on the non-beta release of the Cookery Skill. It will have a lot of improvements (and a few fixes) and will be even more user friendly. :)
Awesome, just awesome! Very creative, and nice to see a world out there with virtually no magic. Looking forward to the first module release of TCOAH! _________________________ "Smoking. It's religious. Something about seeing your breath, breathing fire, feeling like a dragon or sinatra. I think sometimes I'll smoke myself new octaves...and dreams."
One thing i've done to reduce the amount of items in the palette is to use the same blueprint for "normal" and "exquisite" meals ("exquisite" being my version of "exceptionally" crafted items).
With the expansions planned for the system, I plan to make as many ingredients optional as possible, and stick to core system updates so that people can benefit from the scripts without having to have a million recipes. However, recipe and ingredient updates will be added as "modules" that you'll just tack on.
Hope the integration goes well. :)
Posted by Barry_1066 at 2007-05-15 07:09:00 Voted 10.00 on 05/15/07
I am voting on the concept. I have so much trouble with some types of scripts integrating well in the Annakolia PW environment I do not know if this will or will not work there, however I will be giving it a try.
One of my concerns is pallet items - as you may/may not know, there is a limit on palet items/blueprints. A large PW needs to keep such down, especially since 1.69 and CEP both have plans to add to the pallet.
Using what I already have is important then *smiles* Thanks for that documentation. My halflings will love this.
I think I should put a note in the Manual or something regarding the cultural differences. Afterall, you'll notice that there's "chips" instead of "french fries" or "fries", "coriander" instead of "cilantro" and "soya beans" instead of "soybeans" to name but a few. ;) It's something that, if there's need for it, I'll put up an itemless hak and an erf so that people can, if they wish, rename the ingredients and meals to suit their own needs. :)
Posted by slink at 2007-05-14 09:59:51 Voted 10.00 on 05/13/07
*smiles* Cultural difference on the bacon then. Over here bacon refers to the cured and/or smoked form of fatty flesh from the sides and belly of the pig. I guess maybe fatback is our term for your uncured bacon. Either way, people can always make a smoker if they want meat cured.
I remembered after I posted that CNR also has a death script to drop the meat and skins, if the person holds a skinning knife while they open the corpse. I remember that it complicated our XP scripting so I removed it, and that is why we now have direct drops in inventory. If I let NESS handle the treasure script, you are correct that I could not do that.
It is a nice twist to randomize the meat obtained. One could even set variables on areas for lean fodder or fattening fodder, and use those in the script. *smiles*
Bacon and Pork both come from pigs, its true. Bacon refers to a particular cut from the pig. Typically in the UK you'll find back bacon, which has come from the back of the pig.
Also, bacon is quite often cured or smoked (smoked being my favourite).
From a culinary point of view, I wanted to add bacon as something different to pork (as in cooking, it has particularly different uses). It raises the question though - what about other cuts of meat? Will pork belly be used? What about trotters? What about different types / cuts of steak?
So far, ingredients are finding their way in as soon as I can justify them being added to the core system (which usually means that they are distinct enough and have enough recipes to be added at this stage).
Thanks for the observation though - I know it may seem a little confusing, but I had to add both bacon and pork. Bacon will have a much wider role to play in V.2.0, when I expand and move on to more European cooking (pancetta and lardons spring to mind).
On the OnDeath question for item generation, I mainly did it that way as I've known a few PWs to use custom treasure generation for dying creatures that will destroy anything in the inventory. Also, I wanted a little bit of randomness to it in places (like cows and other large animals generating 2+d2() meat).
I can see your point in using the inventory, its just something I wanted to avoid in case it stepped on any other scripts toes.
Posted by slink at 2007-05-13 16:00:47 Voted 10.00 on 05/13/07
I love cooking in a game, and it's nice to see a new system for it in NWN. I'm using a customized version of CNR's cooking so I won't be using this, but I think it looks very nice.
A couple of comments.
As far as I know, bacon is a processed form of pork.
I'm not sure why you used a special death script and variables for the animals, instead of placing the items in inventory as droppable. Both methods require custom animals. It seems easier to me to add the items directly.
Posted by Daijin at 2007-05-12 21:41:42 Voted 10.00 on 05/12/07
Wow, just Wow....now to get it merged into Dunjon Legends....with CNR....*gulp* _________________________ Dream Well, Faith, Loyalty, Truth, Honor, Friendship always.....
Daijin Dreamweaver, Leader of the Dream Warriors for 32 years, going strong.
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at 2008-03-12 04:36:47
at 2007-05-15 07:09:00
