Sunday, December 28, 2008

Silver Spires Meltdown


As mentioned before, I have been playing on a persistent Neverwinter Nights server off and on since my friends here at Astromen! have never managed to revive our little role-playing game in cyberspace.

It so happens that the Silver Spire server in England completely melted and they lost everything on the 23rd of December. The community is not enormous but rather fervent in their participation and they are currently debating on the message board whether to simply revive the game with a six month old database or take this opportunity to completely revamp the world when a new server solution is found. (The third option of letting the project and virtual community disband and move on has been heartily opposed.)

I would like to take some of the successful tweaks that were implemented in the Shield Lands and try to get them scripted into the new incarnation of this other, more consistently used game community.

As much as I love the MPOP system, I think it would be too complicated to incorporate into a game world not built specifically for its use and the monster population system should be cherished and used for something interesting and obtuse in art or gaming by Pete and other interested Astromen. I was thinking specifically of using the things that were collected from around the NWVault and programmed together to enhance the general game experience. Specifically: Looting monsters, the improved sneaky ambushing monster AI, removing tiresome and slow magic casting animations, some portion of the much improved Shield Lands economic system . . . etc.

If "Astromen presents, Shield Lands 2: I Win at Nintendo D&D" is not realistically going to happen, I would also suggest joining in this Silver Spires game to get a Dungeons & Dragons fix as it has the benefit of a more robust community where building, programming, administrating, play-testing tasks are shared among many people making everything not so daunting like taking on another part-time job. While total creative control would be unnavailable, at least there is actually a fun game to play whenever you fancy. Player requests and in character role-playing events change this game-world on a regular basis as well.

Either way, at your earliest convenience please send me links or pared down hak packs that I can use, so that I can geek out to epic proportions.

7 comments:

Pete said...

Ten-four. I will get back to you shortly on this.

Don J. said...

As I think about this, please send me a copy of the last build of the Shield Lands as well. I would like to tinker with it and host the module periodically to pimp the tweaks you made, particularly the MPOP system.

Don J. said...

Where oh where are my toys?

Pete said...

Sorry for the delay. I've been in New Orleans for the last six days touring their biennial. I will post on what I saw when I get home.

I have to go, but I'll get you links to those two systems you refer to in the posts if they have free wifi at the next airport.

Pete said...

Ah, so the script packages are:

Jasperre's AI

and

Neshke's Extendable Spawn System (NESS)

I talked about them in this thread, many moons ago.

Pete said...

I need to unbreak the treasure chests and then I'll send you the module, forthwith.

Pete said...

Yo, Jason: I e-mailed you the module over the weekend. Everyone else can get it here.