<font size="1">as I read through my stuff it sounds kinda imposing or bossy at times, so I'll just state beforehand, it's a subject I'm very interested in, so I have alot of opinions about your ideas, and I'm just being straightforward, instead of saying "I think", and "in my opinion" every other sentence </font>
For example, would you have certain quest giving npcs, such as a certain sage or oracle, that generated random quests over and over? Or give any or every npc the option of giving out quests that point to certain threats in the region(aka Dwarf Fortress adventure mode)? Or would those be too random and generic?
yes I do think that would be too generic and that it might make the game seem more lifeless than without it. it'd feel like a gimmick basicly
And how about generating the major threats first, determining how dangerous our world is from the start? Not little random encounters but the 'legends' of the world. Lets say a dragon is generated in our world. Well the dragon has to have a village to feed from and terrorize, then a procedure would generate a village near the dragons lair. Same with that evil wizard to the east, and the ogre tribes in the north, and so on. Or would you do the opposite and attach them to certain geographies and villages that already exist?
this sounds much more interesting. either a few things like always dragon village dungeon wizard, with an occasional extra twist like a hidden creature that sometimes pops up in the forest. but it's a simple set of things, that vary, but it's like a superadvanced board game instead of a living breathing world. that would be fun I think. OR it should have a crapload of options, where it's really interesting to encounter certain things again, and the world is so varied from game to game that it's really a new experience.the manpower and time you have will most likely dictate which course you can take.
And what about random twists that can happen on certain legs of a quest? You were send to a dungeon to find an amulet, when you get there to the final stage a random twist is generate and the amulet is moved to another part of the world, now a band of paladins have taken it. Then the quest could keep twisting with different plots to keep it going potentially until the end is generated.ow this is all very possible, but it's definitely advanced stuff. this is the first thread I've read from you, so I'm not sure of your skill level, but if you feel like you're struggling with basic construct, don't even start on this until you're super comfortable. but I think that would be the holy grail here. if thinking through complex math or logic comes easy to you, you could do this, especially because...
I want a generated system thats different each time but without being too random.
And then theres implementation within construct. Arrays, variables, ini's, hashs, timelines, etc.
This is just a general discussion about quests and their structure and implementation and what how YOU would do them?
Discuss
ok, well here's the lucky part. it just so happens that construct has a unique set of plugins by the one Arsonide, whose specialty is making badass plugins. a few are of interest here, also one by myself.
this next part is pretty winded, but it'll probably be useful
arsonide's suite of plugins revolves around the generation of procedural data. not procedural content, like making a dungeon for you, though there is at least one great dungeon generating plugin in there by loumu(I think others have made some as well). but arsonides plugins revolve around useful random data, like perlin noise, useful for creating smooth randomness like rolling hills where regular random numbers used for height would just make a totally unrealistic jagged ugly landscape. all these plugins allow you to seed the randomness btw, so you could have a persistent world the player can revisit, or where you can make an infinite world, and only generate the part you're on now, but still be able to go back to the part you loaded out of memory earlier. gridtree allows you to 'tunnel' into your randomly generated data for additional levels and details of random data. say you want a random "dungeon", and in it you want a certain random "number of goblins", but then each goblin was supposed to have it's own set of random data, over and over. it's difficult to track data like this, and more difficult to be able to call on it exactly when you need it. the gridtree plugin solves these two problems. it's really a very unique and powerful plugin. also, i forgot the name, but he's working on one to generate random names based on syllables you provide. and yet another one made especially for generating random histories, forgot that one's name as well, but you can choose whether time goes on while the game isn't on. of course it's not really running in the background, but the plugin abstracts the idea of randomness throughout time, to make it easy instead of a major headache. just search the completed addons forum for anything by Arsonide, and most likely it will be very useful to you, if you're really into procedural stuff.
the s plugin by me may come in handy as well, because it's usually good for anything really complex, or outside the scope of construct's current set of plugins and system commands.
I warn you, it has the worst learning curve of any plugin, but it basically allows you alot of access to stuff normally only plugins have access to and allows you to design data structures similar to c++ structs, and allows you to save all that data in encrypted format. in the data structures you can have objecttypes, and objects, so you can have a 'party' made up of a 'name', a number for 'experience', and any number of 'party members'
and a 'party member' has a sprite object, which is the 'character', and also has a 'name', and 'hitpoint's and he's always holding a sprite object, which is his 'weapon', and then he has an 'inventory' of objecttypes, that you can spawn into objects whenever you need.
also it gives you direct access to picking so you can pick everything that makes up your entire party, or everything one at a time, or remove a person's weapon from the current picking list, etc.
alot of stuff, but this is getting long winded enough. you get the idea. don't use it unless you feel like you need those functions. or everythings getting crazy complex, and you can think straight anymore. but arsonides stuff you should definitely look into.