This is the next version of the popular Overland Travel and Random Encounter system (OTRES). It simulates long travels over various customizable terrain connecting your areas of interest, randomly generating encounters on generic maps, similar to the user to Baldur's Gate overland travel. OTRES 2.8 is even easier than OTRES 1 to set up - the conversations handle themselves! All the travel information is contained within the trigger's tag, so you can set up travel between maps with ZERO scripting knowledge. EXTENSIVE documentation included. Thanks for trying OTRES, and if you try it out, please vote! That is my only reward. See text below for more detail. Note: 2.8 fixes some minor problems - see posts below to apply fix without downloading.
Accerak, Well, that is weird! I can't think of anything that would change based on multiple players. Let's troubleshoot... Are you transported to an area with an OTRES arrival waypoint (i.e. a random encounter map or end point) or just some random location? Does this happen at all OTRES area triggers or just certain one(s)? Do other non-party players get teleported at the same time, or just the one initiating the OTRES conversation? Can you try it in the demo mod and see if it replicates? That will give us a clue as to whether it is something in the coding, or specific to the mod. The PW flag stops time from advancing when you travel and turns on a system to prevent more than one party from arriving in a random encounter map. By the way, if you are using HTF in HCR, I have a little snippet I can post so that you use food during travel.
Posted by Accerak at 2004-05-2219:49:00
I've been using your system to set up a PW and haven't had ANY issues whatsoever while testing with a single player in. I ran into a snag though as soon as I put multiple players into the works. What happens is that the conversation comes up when you enter the trigger, and then, you're randomly teleported to another area of the mod. It only happens when there is more than one client hooked into the server. I tried it having everyone in the same party as well, and got the same result. Any ideas on what's happening (I made sure your PW flag was set to TRUE as well)? I'm using HOTU 1.62 with HCR. _________________________ "Victory is built from the ashes of your enemies." - unknown
Posted by S. at 2004-05-0814:20:00
Oh, +blocked+. I used angle braces in the last post, and now it looks weird. Dunjon, your questions don't show up now, only my answers, and the code block doesn't make any sense. [code]test[/code]
Posted by S. at 2004-05-0814:16:00
@ Carlo - Verrry interesting - I had not known about that. Now, most of my triggers are pretty small (just covering the edge of the road off the screen) so I woldn't have even seen it. I will add that to the docs. @Dunjon: Thank you for the questions! That is how I learn what others are experiencing, so I can add workarounds or more explanation in the docs. Here goes: 1) I ran into Morgan's "disappearing dialogue" issue but figured out that it was due to painting down the 'leading edge' of the trigger along the border rather than where a toon would first enter said trigger. As soon as I redrew the polygons, orienting the first drawn line to be where a toon would cross the problem disappeared. Maybe I just cured the symptom rather than the root problem but I'm not complaining! >>Let me know if this continues to work, and consider Carlo's solution below.>Ouch! I loop through the trigger tag name to get the OTRES info, and the indicator of each info block is the underscore, so as long as you avoid underscores and spaces, you should be good. I'll mention that in the docs too. However, see my last comment below too.>Yep, the number needs to be a floating point, so if you change that 5 to a 5.0 you will be fine.>OK, all the encounters have to be painted in each random encounter area. They are all disabled by default. The script will select one of them to activate each time a random encounter is selected. If no encounter is indicated, you will not go to the random encounter map - you will end up at your destination. If an encounter is indicated, you will go to a random map, and an encounter will happen. If the random number for the encounter in the encounter table is not listed, or is listed but the encounter is not present on the map, there is nothing for it to activate, and you will appear on the random map with nothing to do but walk to the trigger and continue on. (I had this trouble early on when I messed up the numbers on the if statements).>The bandit encounter is usually pretty tough (the toughest is the "evil mercenaries" encounter - harder than the dragons I think). They are Aurora encounters, so if you find a couple that are too hard, you can add some low-level critters/NPCs to the encounter so that they can be selected. Make sure you click the "Update all instances" button when you edit the encounter - and be prepared to sit around for a while while it does that!>Yah, I put the table together in a way that makes sense mathmatically, but not to humans. :oP I used "" for the two-sided if statements, so the matching statement on the other side has numbers that overlap, like so: line 1: if(iRoll>10 iRoll19 iRoll29 iRoll10 iRoll20 iRoll30 iRoll>What is interesting is that you could create one mongo set of encounters, then cut and paste those into any terrain. The encounter script will choose which of those can be activated, so you could have a bunch of encounters that are unused in certain terrain (for example badgers in a swamp) but the encounter triggers are there. Or you could just create the encounters you want for a terrain and just paste those in (will help with loading times, I suspect).>It would break something. I think that you can have 255 characters in the tag at this point. If not, it would be straightforward to change the terrain to a number and do it that way. BUT, you would only be making a unique terrain if something was changing in either the encounter frequency, rate of checking, or the encounters themselves. So you might have the following terrains: Forest, Swamp, Plains, MagicForest, etc. Whether you use custom tilesets or not has no bearing on the terrain name - you can name it whatever you want. You could have one tileset for "swamp" or whatever, or more than one tileset. OTRES only cares about the tag of the destination and random areas. When you build those destinations and random areas, you can use whatever tilesets you want as long as the tag doesn't have spaces or underscores. Hope that helps!
Posted by Carlo at 2004-03-0213:26:00
I suspect the disappearing dialogue bug others have seen is the Bioware trigger size bug that has been around forever. If a trigger is greater than 1 square in length and has a script attached, the part of the trigger greater than 1 square will not fire the script properly. I was able to replicate this (much to my annoyance) in my implementation of OTRES into a custom campaign module. I'd forgotten about the problem, it'd been a while since I'd had larger outdoor areas to work with. The best way around this is to create a one-square length trigger and copypaste it along the edge you need the triggers to cover. If you do full-length area transitions, suggest creating a single template area with all the transitions in place and then editing that when creating new areas.
Posted by Carlo at 2004-03-0213:25:00
I suspect the disappearing dialogue bug others have seen is the Bioware trigger size bug that has been around forever. If a trigger is greater than 1 square in length and has a script attached, the part of the trigger greater than 1 square will not fire the script properly. I was able to replicate this (much to my annoyance) in my implementation of OTRES into a custom campaign module. I'd forgotten about the problem, it'd been a while since I'd had larger outdoor areas to work with. The best way around this is to create a one-square length trigger and copypaste it along the edge you need the triggers to cover. If you do full-length area transitions, suggest creating a single template area with all the transitions in place and then editing that when creating new areas.
Posted by MorganQuickthrust at on03/11/04
Interesting point on painting the Trigger with the leading edge to where the PC first triggers it, Dunjon. I'll have to test and see if that fixes the problem I had back then. :) I'm just about to really extend my use of this system into some of those tilesets you mentioned you had a problem with due to their name. Thanks for the Heads up, I'll have to go in and make those same changes you did (sounds like I'm using many of the same tilesets. lol). :)
Posted by DunjonStomper at 2004-02-2521:20:00
Great system and although I was a bit hesitant about implementing (I'm not a scripting guru) I finally decided to bite the bullet and dive in since I would rather use this than paint down a bazillion areas (I'm using Jaeger's 'Seamless Area Transition' script). You have done an outstanding job recreating a sorely needed pnp feature and the support info (module, documentation) was a big help. Anyway, I've been tinkering with OTRES for a couple of days now and have a few points/comments/questions: 1) I ran into Morgan's "disappearing dialogue" issue but figured out that it was due to painting down the 'leading edge' of the trigger along the border rather than where a toon would first enter said trigger. As soon as I redrew the polygons, orienting the first drawn line to be where a toon would cross the problem disappeared. Maybe I just cured the symptom rather than the root problem but I'm not complaining! 2) I am using many cool community-created tilesets, (Na, Den, Danmar, JXP, and Pasilli to name a few) and I could not get OTRES to work while the terrain name had any SPACES or UNDERLINES. For example, "DC Forest" and "DC_Forest" would not work while "DCForest" worked just fine; my first hint came when I remembered that you cannot enter spaces in tags anyway. To fix the issue I went into the SET file of the tileset and changed the name descriptor. Now OTRES seems to work with no problem where before I could launch the conversation but could not go anywhere (which when combined with problem #1 listed above lead to some real troubleshooting moments - LOL). 3) I tried changing the percentage for encounters to a whole number (like 5) and got and error compiling (some comparison error - I can try to recreate if you want exact syntax) but when I changed it back to a decimal (like 6.5) it worked fine and did give me more encounters. 4) In the documentation provided I could not find a statement anywhere (not bashing the doc, it was INSTRUMENTAL) telling me that I HAD TO paint down all of the encounter triggers but when I did not I only got an encounter one time out of a dozen versus painting them all down and getting an encounter EVERY time. Is this the case? If some encounters are not painted and the randomizer selects one of those non-painted encounters will the system still drop you into a random map and then generate 'nothing'? 5) As long as we're talking encounters, it seems that I've been drawing some real tough ones. For example, my test toon (4th level fighter) against a bandit, two bandit archers, a bandit cleric, and a bandit rogue. Or same toon against a malar panther - ouch. I'm guessing that maybe I should create my own tables since you're using the aurora engine for encounters anyway. 6)Any way to get a more detailed 'how-to' on creating the encounter table? I read through your documentation and looked at the script but I'm still lost since some of the numbers seem to overlap. Help! Please! 7) Again, no statement that I had to create (or at least reference) the encounter script file when using new terrains (rather than the forest or mountains provided); I ended up copying the included forest script and renaming it for the new terrain (DCForest). Also, what if the terrain name is longer than what the script allows for naming? Right now I have no problem with "DCForestrd" rather than "DCForestrand" but what about longer ones like DOA's Builder Base 2.1? Can you truncate the naming or will it break something? Sorry to have been so long-winded but if any of this feedback helps then I hope you'll take it as praise for what has obviously been a labor of love on your part. Thanks!
Posted by Old_Scores_Transfered at on02/20/04
This is a compilation of the old system into a single score. There were 10 that made this score of 8.90 then rounded to 9.
Posted by S. at 2004-02-1520:27:00
Thanks for the update, Morgan! Weird, weird weird. But the cut 'n' paste seems OK as a workaround. I'll update that in the release notes.
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