Legends Plugins

[Sceer]

I'm catching back up on NWN2. I left when the first Legends plugins were coming out. Since then, the plugin maker has created a whole suite of plugins that seem quite intuitive to use as well as versatile. I just checked out some of his YouTube tutorials here.

Just curious, is the BG team using any of the Legends plugins? If so, what is the reaction to them? What do you like about them? If you are not using them, what's the reason for it? Is it simply lack of time/resources to implement them or a severe incompatibility with the gameworld that prevents their use?

[Luna]

I haven't tried them. I think Tooley maybe has. Not sure about others.

At least for the quest stuff the little I looked at seems like it would be hard to port over our 40 quests to their system.

But that is the only one I think I kind of looked at.

[Rasael]

Heya,

I've looked at them before and the mechanics weren't that easy to customize for what we wanted. They are neatly done but it is inherently infexible if you want to add new mechanics to it because you'd have to recode the UI it uses. For experienced NWN2 scripters it's easier to just not use it and stick with scripts because you can still use NWNX to communicate with an SQL database -- meaning you can write and read data from there however you want as without needing his plugin. (inside NWN2, outside NWN2, through a website etc..)

Setting it up at this point would cost a fair amount of time and would actually reduce the amount of features we have. The Legends talk plugin isn't as extensive as our monster talk script for example so adding it wouldn't make sense.

The AI / Quest plugins I haven't looked at but it might make it easier to add quests. The AI pro'bably won't happen since our current setup is very cheap CPU/memory wise and adding a database is only going to make it expensive in comparison. (The same is true for any database access - it's inherently slower than something that is just in a script)

One other problem is that development work could get more complicated since all plugins require access to a database. There are ony two people on our staff that have that and I'm not one of those - nor are most our scripters or area designers or even DM's. (reason being it's hard to setup and perhaps a security risk as well depending on how it's done)

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For a new Persistent world I'd defintly reccomend them - because I do think they make building a lot easier unless you have a large and experienced team working together.

[Sceer]

Good points. It's tough to incorporate core things like this into a mature PW simply because of incompatibility issues. The access to the database sounds like a major issue alone, not to mention your other points. Too bad, as it seemed like a nicely packaged setup. It's something I would have loved to have as a toolset wizard oh so many years ago in the vanilla toolset days.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Luna]

I agree with you. At least for the quest generator it looked very nice and pretty user friendly.

It would clear the big problem with quests right now which is doing the scripting.