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Title   Demangels Dragon riding system! Author   Demangel Submitted / Updated   01-24-2004 / 11-22-2006 Category   Travel Expansions   HOTU-1.61 View Code   True Dragon Flight Since NWN came out people have been trying many creative things to Achieve the effects of riding a dragons and other beast around there worlds. It has required hak packs, tricky polymorph scripts, even modeling. I personally have always wanted to have ridable dragons that could realistically give an impression of their scale, and be used for long distance travel, and even truly �big game� hunting. As a fan of the upcoming World of Warcraft, I loved the idea that you could rent flying mounts for long distance journeys, and thought it would be cool to put something similar in my NWN modules. But in my modules you would be able to guide your mount wherever you wish to go, and could battle other dragons, and dragon riders, as well as other colossal sized enemies from the back of a dragon in flight. When the two new expansions came out, I realized I now had the minimum number of components needed to attempt such a thing on a scale that would make a LOT more sense than polymorphing into a full sized dragon using a custom flying model. The three basic components: 1: Miniature dragons. 2: The ability to polymorph into wyrmlings and possibly other creatures that fly, that are fitting in a fantasy setting. 3: A few more placeables that would be useful for making miniature landscapes. With the two new expansions each one of those three requirements was added or improved upon. We now have flying wormlings, which are literally at a perfect scale for what I had in mind. Through a simple script you can easily have a player polymorph into one of many different shaps, and through other means (.2da editing, or change appearance), you could in theory make the player polymorph into anything you want. A few new placeables have been added that make creating miniature landscapes much much easier, such as: The loaf of bread (sounds silly I know but if you place it just right, and surround it with the right objects, it will more than pass for a building!), The mini Pine Trees, More small rock formations, and a slew of other objects when used creatively pass for all manner of landscape miniatures. If you viewed the screenshots I supplied with the module and scripts you will see just how effective this technique can be to simulate realistically scaled miniature landscapes for your dragon riding Players to explore. By adding in a few placeable haks, and perhaps a good tileset hak, there is almost NO limit to what you can do for your landscapes. Do you want clouds? Simply use an arcane space placeable set, and paint them in, or use a flat ground fog emitter placeable to make broad thing veils of mist that surround your mountain peaks. In fact unless someone can make a simple placeable set of miniature buildings, and such, the system could not get much better. How this system works: Simply import the ERF into your module, and do the following. Create an NPC, and an area that could pass for a stable or place where dragons might be housed. Paint in some dragons, and unless you want the PC�s to ask the dragons themselves for rides, paint in an NPC that is suitable for your world that will sell the player a ticket for a ride on a dragon. You can even sell bridals if you want the PC to be able to permanently own one of these mounts, that is a slightly more complex system and will be released later as a supplement to this system. Keep in mind that a single ticket should be affordable to most level 4+ players but make owning a dragon be expensive for anyone below level 10-15. Put a script on the actions taken tab of a dialogue in the stables to teleport the player to a waypoint in another area. In this new area place the Polymorph script into the on enter slot of the area events. And SummonsOK in the Area exit event slot. Use the landing site object from the module and put your own custom dialogue into it. Make it so that the second to last line of dialogue is something the PC will say. On this line place the unpolymorph script. On the very last line (should be the NPC speaker), place a teleport script to teleport the PC to the landing site. If you want to spawn in a dragon before the Pc gets there, do so in the teleport script or before. However this can lead to issues where multiple dragons can be spawned which can be bad. To avoid this use a variable in the dialogue perhaps to set when a new dragon should be spawned, and also have the script check to see if the Pc is carrying the dragon harness. If either is true, no dragon should be spawned. Make a waypoint tagged: WP_Holdingpen, and place it in an area that players Cannot ever get to. This is where the henchman and familiars will go while your flying to keep them stored for safekeeping until you land. In role play terms they are thought to be riding the back of the dragon with you. These associates should all return to you when you next zone into an a new area as it is hard coded into any new area transition (transition that takes you to a completely new area, be it by teleport or trigger or door.). To find out the name of the waypoint, simply refer to the polymorph script and look for the lines that describe where henchman and associates should be sent to. To use the harness in your module, simply grab it from the example module (it uses the Tag identification method for firing the on used script, if you don�t know how to make these things, use the one I provided), as well as the befriended dragon (if you�re unable to make your own on use item and scripts) as well as the dragons conversation from the example module, and give the harness to the players however you like. You may also alter the conversation of the dragon to something more fitting, and even make the dragon more or less powerful ETC. This takes a bit more work but it can be rewarding. One limitation for the time being (with the supplies system that is), is that I do not yet support ways to improve the dragon your actually riding, as the system uses a simple polymorph script. You could however make a more complex system for the harness that gives the player added effects for better dragons you might acquire. Things like damage reduction ETC. But also be warned that some aspects of the player will shine through the polymorph such as their base hit points. If your using harnesses, make sure that you use teleportation scripts that create and store location info for the player to use while getting on their befriended dragon. This will streamline the process of teleporting the player around if they own their own dragon. To see how this works simply look at the teleport script in the befriended dragons conversation file, as well as the teleport scripts used in all the landing sites in the example module. KNOWN ISSUES: Currently the scripts that stop summoning are buggy and don�t fully work as intended. Things like familiars can still be summoned while on dragon back. This will hopefully be fixed in the near future. Until then if you can fix this, please send me the scripts so I can add them to this system. I will give you full credit of course. Known issues with the module: Some teleportation�s can get buggy, at least after you die. They should be easy to fix. You can spawn literally hundreds of dragons in the port city if you don�t talk to the one that is made and ride it. This is not a big deal and easily fixed. I havn�t addressed these two issues in the example module because the teleport scripts are largely meant to be created by the user of this system, not imported from this example module. The teleport scripts I use are for basic reference and example only! And thus are not fully perfected/bug fixed. MAKING THE MINIATURE LANDSCAPE (includes tips on making the mini world landscape) Now you need to make a suitable miniature landscape for your players to fly around. Here are some tips for how to do this properly. First things first, think big. Dragons are large creatures, and even though we are using wyrmling polymorph models which are very small compared to real dragons, they do in fact look perfect when used with the right placeables and terrain. I recommend that you create areas using the rural tileset or something similar (desert and glaciers look good too, if you have a hak pack that allows for the creation of gentle hills and small mounds of earth USE IT! It can REALLY add to the effects if you�re an artistic area maker!) that are 10X10 or less in size for these miniature landscapes, as you will be using a LOT of placeables to create the effect of forests, grasslands mountains and other such visual details. If the area is too large and full of placeables the area will take longer to load and you can get nasty screen stutter problems. Since your so large and flying high you can decrease how far the player can see, and not make him feel boxed in. Turn fog clipping to about 50-80, and make the fog slider so it�s placed about halfway between min and max to give the horizon a nice haze effect and clip the more distant objects to save on framerate (remember if your doing this right you�ll be using a lot of placeables). While we�re talking about the fog effects, make sure you choose a color that properly suggests the kind of haze you would see from such an altitude. I personally use a very light blue, that sometimes has just a touch of green in it. For some clues look for pictures of landscapes taken from mountaintops. Now Ad in a skybox if you want, just remember that it will make the area run that much slower for people with low end machines and skyboxes turned on in their video options. Also if your area has thick fog options, you might not even see the skybox, but if you followed my directions to the letter it will look fine. While we�re in the area properties, pick a music style that fits your area, and MOST importantly, Look in the advanced tab and check the box that says no rest so the player can�t rest and loose the polymorph effect. Now Think about how your area looks. Try to imagine that each tile represents ten or more square miles of real life terrain, and your off to a good start. You can literally fill an 8x8 area with places to go and visit, and still retain a good sense of scale. If you need more room, then simply make another area and link it to this one. Now I generally paint my points of interest first, towns villages, mountains, roads ETC. Then I fill in the landscape with trees. The simple method: simply pick a set of placeables that you can use for icons to represent different things. Maybe three loaves of bread will be a town or village, and a pedestal will be a city, and a scorch mark might be a cave ETC. The more tedius but better looking method. To make a small town simply place two or three of the Loaf of bread placeables somewhere and to really make it look good place a few of the tiny dirt patches in the parks and nature palette around it to look like dirt. If you want the players to be able to land there, simply place an invisible object in the same location and have it start the landing conversation (note you will need a new conversation made from the landing template for each landing site! So use the landing site placeable I provide, and paint it into place, then copy the dialogue file and change it�s name and it�s scripts accordingly.) To make a city, you have to be a bit more creative: Look for the Stone trapdoor placeable and place it on the ground where you want the city to be. Make it either static or non usable, and then sink it into the ground just a tiny bit using the adjust location feature on the right click menu (don�t sink it too much or it will vanish!) Now paint some loaves of bread onto it, and any other building looking structures you can find onto it. That should be pretty effective. Now simply duplicate this process a few times if you want the city to be big. For example the city of neverwinter might require 6 or more stone trapdoors, and a dozen or so loaves of bread ETC. To make mountains be creative with the various rock formations that appear on the tiles, and also use a lot of rocks, stones, rubble, desert stones ETC from the placeable palette. To make a road simply use the Dirt patch placeable in the standard parks and nature palette and paint in as many of them as you need to make it look like a road. Now use a combination of the Shrub placeable, and the smallest pine tree placeable and paint them into the area. This can be tedius, but it is required for really giving the feeling like your flying. Don�t be too scared to use a lot of them, if you set up the area just right and it�s not too big, most players should have no problem rendering this area or loading it. But naturally test it and see how laggy it is, or how slow it loads. If it takes more than 5-10 seconds to load on your computer, it might take too long for other players to load via the net, and will likely be laggy for people with slow PC�s. Also please note that the shrub placeable will allow your dragon rider to �Fly� over it, as it doesn�t get in the way of the player. However the Mini Pine tree on the other hand DOES block players from moving. So if you plan on using a thick forest of pint trees MAKE SURE you either give the player a road to follow, or place enough regular shrub trees so they player can still get around without getting stuck or trapped. If you want encounters in these areas, this is entirely possible. But make sure you use small creatures and small flying creatures. For example if you paint a rat into the map, you had better call it a colossal rat, because on this scale the rat would be as big as a house! If you like giants, simply use goblins or other small humanoids. If you need flying demons use mephitis and imps. For giant bats, just use bats, for other dragons use the wyrmlings in the toolset. ETC. Also note that you are POLYMORPHED into a standard Wyrmling. This means you WON�T have the powers of a full sized dragon at your disposal. But you will have a breath weapon, and depending on your level you should get some added Hitpoints. Make sure that the enemies you might place into this area are of a suitable challenge for a wyrmling, and not for a full sized adult dragon. To put it in perspective, pretend you need to scale down the damage/stats etc of the normal things you might fight in this scale so they fit to match the scale of the landscape. If you use things like bats, goblins rats, imps and similar critters the challenge should be pretty close and won�t need much customization. I never played a druid or shifter before so I�m not sure how much more powerful you can get while polymorphed, but I assume that some aspects of your character carry through the polymorph, so you might need to make encounters will multiple versions of your enemies for each possible level of player if your using a PW. But be careful! Now load up your module and see if it works the way mine does. Andvanced If your like me you love hak packs. The screenshots I use for this system where all made with a few good hak packs found on the vault. If you use the right hak packs you can breathe even more life into this mini landscape by using things like placeable clouds, tiny pools of water, placeable fog and mist effects, you name it. In the end be creative and careful not to go too overboard in the number of haks you use! I hope you enjoy this system. Please send all feed back to: Webmaster@demangel.zzn.com Select All Text | View Code in separate window Format   Module and Code Type   Type - Other Includes   None Description I have updated the Dragon riding system. It now includes harnesses and other goodies to try. It works by polymorphing you into a Wyrmling, and sending you to a Miniature representation of your world, or continent. Before you scoff at the idea, I beg you to try out the example module, because this seriously Looks VERY cool, and is REALLY a lot of fun! The Example module shows you ways to use this system, and even shows you that just about anything you can do normaly can be done in the minimap, it also shows you just how cool such a mini map can look! This system requires SOU and HOTU 1.61 in order for it to be used. This system is Ideal for a large module or PW that warrents having a long distance overland travel system. To see just how it could be used, PLEASE try the module! Please send all comments and feedback to [email protected] Or simply post it here! Files Name Type Size Downloads Dragonflight3.rarDragonflight3.rar Submitted: 01-24-2004 / Last Updated: 01-26-2004 rar 310.2Kb 2356 --

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Comments (29): 1 2 3 Posted by crusaderky at 2004-05-2214:33:00     WOAH! fantastic! and with placeable water, you can also travel by sea! Anyone willing to make a non-transparent water placeable that simulates deep sea? _________________________ CRV§ADER//KY I Sette Sigilli - Shard italiano Full GdR Powered by Player Resource Consortium Posted by donnykrun at 2004-04-0720:28:00     You know I was just thinking I bet if you used one of the carpet placeables textured like overhead shots of cities and towns that might work. You will need to have this in a hakpak though. Great Idea Thanks, Krun Posted by Eldernurin at 2004-04-0609:11:00     About adding bats... Since the return of Shade, you might consider adding Veserab to the list of mounts. These large, bat-like, poison-breathing shadowy creatures are used as rides by the Shadovar. The flying mage idea is pretty cool- though they should have to polymorph to explain why they can't use all of their spells in midair... Posted by Darren_Blake at 2004-04-0311:36:00     Sounds like a damn good system for a World Map sort of screen...just a large Rural area with all the dirt patches etc like you mentioned. Good luck with it ;) Posted by Gohaken at 2004-03-2315:12:00     Gah! This is awesome! I have been playing around with ideas for this for over a week now, trying to figure out what I want to do with it... I only know I def want to use it in the PW I'm building - now to be complete with a flight/minimap area and a floating island PC's can fly under and land on. I _need_ an updated version with the fixes discussed in this string of posts, cause this idea is way too crucial to be left with player exploits. I was 100% anti hak before, but I WIL make an exception for this please please upload the fixed version. Other crazy ideas my friends and I dragged up: what about ditching landing sites altogether, and using a grid of waypoints or invisible objects on the minimap areas that correspond to "real" areas? When the player chooses to land (perhaps by activating an item or choosing "cancel polymorph), make a test for GetNearestObjectByTag (or similar opne for a waypoint if such exists) and then land them in the appropriate area. That system could work both ways, allowing PCs to "take off" from any area as well. Perhaps a mage casting "Fly" (item OnActvate?) could warp to the minimap, polymorphed into a pixie... theres a perfect, and quite funny, jump animation that would work for them flying out up from the area they were in originally. Oi! The possibilities! -Gohaken Posted by Khalek_D_Ariana at 2004-03-2008:11:00     DAMN! Clicked post...oops! As below, but a better list... Ways to implement some of the scale changing spells (may be stuff you've already thought of: Lightning Bolt: Use electric jolt VFX. Doesn't jump (or could do a vector-based version of gedlee's!) Fireball: Use combust, without the pillar of flame (the lasting VFX) No AOE. Cloudkill and similars: Simply change the AOE to the smallest AOE constant, as the VFX isn't size dependent. Should look fine. Horrid Wilting: Is it possible to use the cloud VFX without the ground-sprouting start? Not sure, but if so, as above...otherwise, just cloudkill, and accept the colour change :( Banishment and Dismissal: What if you had summonable mounts? (scripted as usual, would be impossible to implement the 'use anywhere' side of a summon, but set as dismissible - would have to look into that!) These spells would be VERY harsh...possibly a save needed! Chain Lightning - Use Gedlees...perhaps with own VFX, as it is fairly narrow anyway. Negative Energy Burst - Circle of death VFX, methinks. Cone of Cold/Mestil's Acid Breath - I'm pretty sure you can't 'just' change the colour of VFX...if you can, Burning Hands is ideal... Darkness - I think the AOE of this one can be reduced, as a cloud, but I'd have to look into it. Great Thunderclap - Sound Burst, with a screen shake? Scintillating Sphere - Gust of wind VFX, with an electric jolt VFX at contact point. Magic Missile - perhaps the gust of wind projectile? The normal MIRV ones all seem too big...:( Web - Normal Web inc. VFX, but only reaches 1 target...no AOE. EPIC Dragon Knight: Hehehe! Easy! :) Other may be more awkward...mummy dust in particular - I think only the draggy duo are good to go, really :) All of these are a touch hacky, but it gives the impression :) Hope this is of help... [Struggling to alter John Covalt's archery scripts since...not long ago...] [struggling to implement Demangel's dragonrider system since...not long ago...] [struggling since....birth...] Posted by Khalek_D_Ariana at 2004-03-2007:54:00     Ways to implement some of the scale changing spells (may be stuff you've already thought of: Lightning Bolt: Use electric jolt VFX Fireball: Use combust, without the pillar of flame (the lasting VFX) Cloudkill and similars: Simply change the AOE on it, as the VFX isn't size dependent. Should look fine. Horrid Wilting: Is it possible to use the cloud VFX without the ground-sprouting start? For all of these I'm thinking along the lines of a spellhook, but a way to avoid that would be to give them an item (eek...another one!), say a rune, that only lasts while in the area, per spell in the book, and disable spellcasting completely. Then whenever that item is used, you can decrement the spelluses (though this is buggy IIRC) and run the new script. If this sounds good, just let me knnow and I'll see if I can drop a line or a hand :D [Struggling to alter John Covalt's archery scripts since...not long ago...] [struggling to implement Demangel's dragonrider system since...not long ago...] [struggling since....birth...] Posted by Khalek_D_Ariana at 2004-03-1904:23:00     :) Sounds good...I'll be truly amazed to see this working with extra mounts AND balance... Yay for you! :p [Struggling to alter John Covalt's archery scripts since...not long ago...] [struggling to implement Demangel's dragonrider system since...not long ago...] [struggling since....birth...] Posted by Demangel at 2004-03-0903:56:00     No, no clear ETA yet, I'm working on my own PW right now which will use this system heavily. Because of that I am finding lots of ways to tweak this system. Due to balancing issues between classes riding even the same kinds of mounts, I need to do balance testing to ensure that the bonuses classes with lower BAB's get, are sufficient to make them useful while in the air. Currently, casters for example are highly nerfed while in flight as it makes little sense to allow a character to cast spells of any kind while on dragon back (your holding on for dear life as it is). Since this newer system will use a modified polymorph.2da file, I wont be able to just disable, or enable various spells with spell hooking (thats a LOT of work as well if you ask me, there are a few spells casters should maybe still have like those using still spell, but then I STILL need to make all spells which ruin the visual effect of scale inaccessable.). Using a polymorph script I can pretty much slam the door shut on ALL possible imersion breaking spells, but now I need to give casters and other non melee classes a bit buffer. The current concept is to give casters nice nuking spells (since all spells can be cast infinately while on dragon back, even a fairly decent spell can be nasty, dragon breath for example HURTS at level 10+ and when you can cast it repeatedly it's almost as powerful as melee combat itself with full BAB if not more so). Since nobody is currently getting any kinds of Ranged attacks, I imagine that giving mages ranged magic attacks like magic missile, and possibly a small speed boost (compared to other mounts of the same type), as well as a a good buff spell (like true strike for example +20 to your next attack roll can be nasty!), will make them must have members of a party for big sky battles. I'm still working on the powers for the other mounts as well. Vampire bats for example will have vampiric regen on thier creature skin, and giant eagles will likely have some nice "cleric" style buffs and spells to counter that. In any event, the best I can say is: Do not worry, the system has NOT died, I am still hard at work on it as it's part of my PW... So the best estimate as to when it will be finished and posted to the vault is "SoonTM" (taking a page from a develoiper in EVE: the second genisis). since this will also involve a LOT of cleanups in the code (like return lines to save CPu cycles) and since I'm modifying it for default PW databases (using NWN databse functions), it will be a LOT more polished stable and cheat resistant when you guys get it next. And should include an on dying script you can add to your own on dying event if your using a bleeding to -10 system. This way you won't unpolymorph when you die and just sit thier dying. You'll fall to your doom instead! :) Ok glad this is still getting some attention. I should sign off now :) 1 2 3 You must be Logged In to post comments in this section.

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