Respawning The Dead
Unless you are considering programming for multi-player (MP), you may not have considered some of the potential pitfalls that come with the death of PCs - apart from the obvious for the player. If you have altered the way your death system works as well, like I have, then there are even more considerations you need to take into account. The bottom line, I believe I have ironed out all the potential "death" circumstances since I last posted and have employed a system that offers the player a GUI presenting an option to be respawned at the cost of an XP penalty, or to consider a different action, normally to turn around and head back from where they came from. This will normally only be an issue where a player is trying to return to a different module within the campaign and when they carry the corpses of companions or fellow players. Because of the way my system works, trying to do so would lose a lot of vital equipment. There is a similar issue when a player tries to leave an overland map encounter area, which I have dealt with in a similar manner.
Fixing Little Things
1) Visual Effects On Store Items: I recently found out that if you have an item that has a visual effect on it and it is added to a store as a "limitless" item, that when bought, the visual effect does not work. I made a workaround for this problem by replacing the bought item with an identical one upon acquisition.
2) Monster Items Reversion: Another small issue I found was that if you have copied an item to your campaign and kept the ID information the same as the original, then any such item added to a creature at build time will revert back to the original. E.g. If you copy an item to your campaign folder and alter the description to avoid any mention to Faerun and then add the campaign item to a creature, it will instantly revert back to the Faerun descriptive one. NB: Having campaign items with the same name, tag and resref is not normally a problem with respect to any other aspect of the campaign (that I have tested to date anyway). Anyway, I also worked another small piece of code to replace these "incorrect items" with the correct one upon the creature being spawned.
I mention both of these small issues, as I imagine they could be something others may have a problem with and not yet be aware of it. If anybody wants the code that I used to resolve the issues, let me know.
As Big As The Moon
This is just an excuse to post a picture I took of the moon a while ago. However, it is true that my world Althéa works out to be about the size of the moon. Anyway, here is the picture, and you can find a few more here.
Moving Onwards
Fixing the problem with the transitions between modules when the player has a dead PC in their midst was an area of coding I was not going to do for a while yet, as I obviously do not need to worry about it for only one module. However, because it impinged on another area I was working with, it had to take priority. The good news is now that I have that code sorted, I can get on with what I was trying to do in the first place. More on that later in another blog perhaps. What I can say now, however, is that Hoegbo has once again kindly offered his help with some of my work and I will be taking him up on his offer soon, which means area production should benefit greatly.
