Heh, fair enough. All those uses of Bardic Music would be pretty overwhelming, too.Fifty wrote:I was thinking of having every single inspiration running at onceNone of them are unhelpful
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cdaulepp's 198 Gencon pictures and photos
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/vi ... 9&forum=95
a snippet of the ton of stuff he posted in this thread:
"Persistent World sizes
8. Q: I want to ask about Persistent World sizes. The reason I asked earlier about how you handle your encounters in NWN 2 and my question about dynamic spawning of monsters was to help me understand where the developers were coming from when they made the comments about module size.
Have you heard of the PWFSE_SPAWNER system for doing encounters?
A: Brandon, Travis, and Ryan – No. What is that?
Me: I play on a Persistent World in NWN 1 with around 2000 areas, yet we’ve been able to keep the size of our module down to only about 70+ MB. It’s based off the old Dragon Mountain Boxed Set.
Brandon, Travis, and Ryan – We loved that campaign. That is an awesome setting.
Me: We used to use the “paint” method to draw encounters. [sarcasm]You know how fun that is. If you change a creature blueprint, then you have to click the “update instances” button and wait for 2-3 hours while it cycles through every area in the module to update every instance of the creature.[/sarcasm] That was no fun. We spawn monsters now through scripting instead of through triggers and painting of encounters. It has significantly reduced the size of our module and has allowed us to have 2000 areas in just 70 MB.
Brandon, Travis, Ryan – How does it work?
Me: In the PWFSE system we paint waypoints in the locations where we want our spawns to occur. Then, in the onEnter event of an area, when a PC enters the area, all the monsters on the screen are spawned at once. Instead of having zillions of painted encounters, we paint waypoints down. It’s much more efficient that way and has reduced the size of our module significantly. For those occasions when we need a trigger to spawn a monster - a boss perhaps - we can mix PWFSE with painting triggers.
This ended the interviews. But I have a few more comments about PW size because I am very much encouraged by what I heard and saw in the toolset. When the Devs discussed PW maximum size a month or two ago, many PW builders thought it was the end of the world for them, but there is some good news after all. It was obvious that NWN 2 still uses the same method of painting encounters that NWN 1 used. I would be willing to bet that painting encounters in NWN 2 is just as bulky and inefficient as it was in NWN 1.
The Devs comments about PW size have to be understood in this light. There is a better way to do encounters, in my opinion, that greatly reduces the size of modules in NWN 1. If this same method for encounters can reduce the size of areas and modules in NWN 2 then everyone can create a larger world than was previous thought possible.
Ryan asked me to shoot an email over to Frank Kowalski about it because he would be able to answer my questions on this subject.
The other encouraging thing is that Obsidian is rarely, if ever, creating monsters dynamically. Obsidian has one blueprint instance for each creature in the toolset. And then they have, who knows how many painted instances of this blueprint, with variations galore in each area, depending on what the developer needed for a particular area. But none of this is being done dynamically. This is extremely inefficient, which is good news for PW builders who know how to create monsters and add properties to them dynamically.
Dynamic scripting means fewer creature blueprints, fewer item blueprints, and therefore smaller module size. Anyone who uses dynamic scripting will be able to have a larger persistent world than an equivalent builder who does not use dynamic scripting and paints gazillions of monsters in their module.
I’d love to hear what the Devs say about this particular issue. It potentially has a great benefit for multiplayer. I hope I’m right about being able to reduce the size of modules through dynamic scripting and using scripting to spawn monsters instead of painting triggers for them.
More in a minute.
cdaulepp"
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/vi ... 9&forum=95
a snippet of the ton of stuff he posted in this thread:
"Persistent World sizes
8. Q: I want to ask about Persistent World sizes. The reason I asked earlier about how you handle your encounters in NWN 2 and my question about dynamic spawning of monsters was to help me understand where the developers were coming from when they made the comments about module size.
Have you heard of the PWFSE_SPAWNER system for doing encounters?
A: Brandon, Travis, and Ryan – No. What is that?
Me: I play on a Persistent World in NWN 1 with around 2000 areas, yet we’ve been able to keep the size of our module down to only about 70+ MB. It’s based off the old Dragon Mountain Boxed Set.
Brandon, Travis, and Ryan – We loved that campaign. That is an awesome setting.
Me: We used to use the “paint” method to draw encounters. [sarcasm]You know how fun that is. If you change a creature blueprint, then you have to click the “update instances” button and wait for 2-3 hours while it cycles through every area in the module to update every instance of the creature.[/sarcasm] That was no fun. We spawn monsters now through scripting instead of through triggers and painting of encounters. It has significantly reduced the size of our module and has allowed us to have 2000 areas in just 70 MB.
Brandon, Travis, Ryan – How does it work?
Me: In the PWFSE system we paint waypoints in the locations where we want our spawns to occur. Then, in the onEnter event of an area, when a PC enters the area, all the monsters on the screen are spawned at once. Instead of having zillions of painted encounters, we paint waypoints down. It’s much more efficient that way and has reduced the size of our module significantly. For those occasions when we need a trigger to spawn a monster - a boss perhaps - we can mix PWFSE with painting triggers.
This ended the interviews. But I have a few more comments about PW size because I am very much encouraged by what I heard and saw in the toolset. When the Devs discussed PW maximum size a month or two ago, many PW builders thought it was the end of the world for them, but there is some good news after all. It was obvious that NWN 2 still uses the same method of painting encounters that NWN 1 used. I would be willing to bet that painting encounters in NWN 2 is just as bulky and inefficient as it was in NWN 1.
The Devs comments about PW size have to be understood in this light. There is a better way to do encounters, in my opinion, that greatly reduces the size of modules in NWN 1. If this same method for encounters can reduce the size of areas and modules in NWN 2 then everyone can create a larger world than was previous thought possible.
Ryan asked me to shoot an email over to Frank Kowalski about it because he would be able to answer my questions on this subject.
The other encouraging thing is that Obsidian is rarely, if ever, creating monsters dynamically. Obsidian has one blueprint instance for each creature in the toolset. And then they have, who knows how many painted instances of this blueprint, with variations galore in each area, depending on what the developer needed for a particular area. But none of this is being done dynamically. This is extremely inefficient, which is good news for PW builders who know how to create monsters and add properties to them dynamically.
Dynamic scripting means fewer creature blueprints, fewer item blueprints, and therefore smaller module size. Anyone who uses dynamic scripting will be able to have a larger persistent world than an equivalent builder who does not use dynamic scripting and paints gazillions of monsters in their module.
I’d love to hear what the Devs say about this particular issue. It potentially has a great benefit for multiplayer. I hope I’m right about being able to reduce the size of modules through dynamic scripting and using scripting to spawn monsters instead of painting triggers for them.
More in a minute.
cdaulepp"
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