Spiderwoods, an idea i would like approval for.

[Vadenor]

i decided i had enough spare time i should start helping flush out the sword coast a bit.

im an amateur, my previous experience is photoshop and Bryce (won 1st place hey hey!),

my first project for the surface is the 'spider woods' i kinda want to create an 'swarm area' where groups of ideally 5-6 people would be fighting through swarms of mobs, however xp would be penalized severely after that point to prevent zerging.

the purpose of this is to give players that awesome sensation you get when you wade through a swathe of foes, you truly feel pressed and rewarded when you succeed, or equally epic when you perish under a pile of dead foes.

this would include monstrous spiders, phase spiders, ettercaps, and either a lizard/gnoll tribe losing a battle against them....

im worried this may strain the server, the party will be battling ideally 3-8 monsters at a time, this is meant for organized parties who want to have a good thrill and a good bonding experience with their RP friends.

what are your thoughts?

[Luna]

It's possible. It might strain the server though at peak hours.

It's hard to tell if people would use it or not to due to the lower xp.

How's your area building?

[DM Sword]

The concept reminds me of how the graveyard is setup currently, except for higher levels. I imagine this would be an extension of the cloakwood forest?

[Vadenor]

yarr! uhh, im still hammering kinks out, its still very much in alpha, the concept isnt quite like the GY, more like ettercaps and spiders kinda lurk in ambush, so there would be web traps and ideally spawns of 5-8 mobs in an "ambush" so you would have to be careful on how you proceed, running around like zerg groups like to do would end up with people webbed and being eaten at various points of the map.

i am having problems figuring out how to get traps to trigger monster spawns, but ill address that once i get the physical map done.

as for the entrenched (and losing) tribe of demi humans yet to be decided, i dont know if you want to make them KOS to PCs, or make them so desperate they ask for help....

i just ran through cloakwood and remember thinking "huh, arent the spiderwoods from BG supposed to be around here?"

trying to get traps to linked to monster spawns, but im kinda in over my head with it, i just wanted to make sure that people would like this idea.

as for the reccamended level....optional. i noticed the batari cave doesnt get alot of love, folks like to go from lizards to goblins, when i was leveling both those areas got impacted at times.

i just wanna make a zone where its like the movie aliens....your kinda walking around eyes peeled fore movement. Suddenly the motion detector starts pinging and *BAM!* ....

Oh, the lower xp would be harsh for parties in excess of a certain number, more so than usual, since the high spawn rate could easily make ZERG grinding feasible and thus defeat the point of this zone. which is to give people a...ugh i dont wanna use this reference, but sort of a 300 feel you know?

[Mammothtruk]

concept sounds really cool

maybe have the interaction between the spider forces and the demihuman forces have a variable spawn rate that takes into account the population of the server to reduce the impact or better yet.... make that server 2 portal happen.

[Vadenor]

i shall finish my papers and then get to work....oh yes...they will learn to *fear* ettercaps....

[Vadenor]

hmmm, my ettercap models were NWN1...blast, where do you gentlemen get your creature packs from?

[Luna]

nwn2 vault. I don't think there are ettercap though.

I think Pains monster pack has all the creature packs consolidated into his one pack.
So maybe try that one.

[TickledToDeath]

Awesome idea!
I have never stumbled upon any ettercap models... but maybe a thin purple Grey Render might do the trick for you?

http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... ail&id=193

Size it a little in and nobody will see the difference .

[Rasael]

For Server considerations it might help if these creatures ran fully custom scripts and perhaps suffer a complete lack of perception both sound and vision. (Deaf & Blind)

I once read that this alleviates the server's need to keep lists for what each individual creature is seeing or hearing.
The mass ganking of tresspassing players would then be a relatively simple script that sets the creature to attack the nearest enemy or the second nearest if it isn't doing so already to introduce a random element preventing only the nearest player from getting mass ganked while the rest of the party is ignored.
Plus there woudn't be any artifical intelligence whatsover needed except for the occasional web script you could throw at the players or a boss spider.

Then if the area is clear they just all get destroyed with random intervals; pretty sure the server already has this though.

I think I read this when someone was developing a framework for massive battles in NWN2 singleplayer modules. It kind of works too but the pathfinding and general bumping could be ugly.
Heck, it might also be possible to have some sort of warzones using this system.


I'm not sure but I think I also remember reading that spawning creatures takes more resources then merely unhiding them so a better alternative could be to transport the creatures from some sort of storage area and back when they die (for ressurection). That way the server wouldn't need to spawn the creatures merely tranport them. The storage area might even be in the area itself, it doesn't have to be another area. For example a central spider mount which is a high ring and hollow in the center. Players with the survival skill could then also notice a whole lot of red dots in that region if the spiders aren't script hidden. (At least I think you can't use survival on script hidden creatures - Don't know how that skill works actually)

Supposing all this works as I'm assuming the major consideration on the server side would be how many players are in the area.
The more players present the more the server has to keep tabs of which player is seeing what and also which player is hearing what etc..
With a lot of enemies and a lot of players that would end up being a drain.

An option there is to include a hard limit on the transition that prevents players from entering if there is already a number of people in the area. (10 to 15 i'd guess max and / or a single party)
I'm guessing that without the need to keep tabs on the perception lists and AI of the spiders themselves there's plenty of resources left for a very great number of creepy crawlers

I haven't actually been able to test any of this but I'd love to hear the results if you happen to run some experiments.


PS. Can you make the spiders different scales to make them less uniform?

[Rasael]

This is what I was thinking about: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NW ... ail&id=178

[Rasael]

On another note: Making creatures permanently deaf and blind DOES empty their perception lists and eliminates the need to update or keep these for the server.

so this idea is feasible I think and perhaps even larger regular battles are possible because all of the checks the server needs to do that are perception related can be "killed". A cheap custom AI can replace the more expensive normal AI.

The main limiting factor is the amount of PC's because these unfortunately cannot be made permanently blind and deaf... or can they?

[Candide]

If this is added in I think it would make most sense for it to be put in Cloakwood.