Best Game Toolset for a castle-oriented RPG?

kaliyama

Hello,
I'd like to play around with coding a mod/module that puts the player in charge of a castle. I'd like to use an engine that let's me keep variables on a track, e.g., the player can make decisions that increase peasant unrest, and when peasant unrest hits X an event is triggered. I'm a one-man band so I'm fine using stock art assets. From a layman's perspective I see two options: a Bethesda toolkit or NWN2. Are there other options? I don't know anything about rpgmaker and torque or ue3 require A) graphics assets and a better grasp of programming languages than I have. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Kali

Platy

The RPG Maker programs are very easy to use and they let you keep track of variables and let you trigger events if variables cross certain thresholds. You're however limited to what are essentially 16-bit graphics.

amateurhour

RPG maker is awesome, and really, really cheap. You can buy XP and VX for about $50 a piece and they offer a full version 30 day trail.

Also, it's 32 bit graphics standard now and if you want to learn to code you can do 3D.

spool32

How many players, and how big of a castle? As you might guess from my sig, I'm very familiar with the NWN and NWN2 toolsets. If you can give me some better details about exactly what you're trying to do, I can give you a very clear idea of whether the NWN/NWN2 toolsets will do the trick, and what tilesets you'll need. I might even be able to hook you up with a builder, but those guys are in extremely short supply nowadays.

kaliyama

spool32 wrote: »

How many players, and how big of a castle? As you might guess from my sig, I'm very familiar with the NWN and NWN2 toolsets. If you can give me some better details about exactly what you're trying to do, I can give you a very clear idea of whether the NWN/NWN2 toolsets will do the trick, and what tilesets you'll need. I might even be able to hook you up with a builder, but those guys are in extremely short supply nowadays.

I'm trying to make the mod revolve around managing character relationships and resources - e.g. managing taxation for periodic gold income, dealing with merchants, nobles, etc. It's meant to be a single player narrative. The castle doesnt have to be dynamic or otherwise change from player actions; I'm tryin to keep an initially limited scope and avoid the need for art assets until I have an otherwise finished project. Thanks for the builder offer, though. So it will be a very script-intensive project; can it handle lots of things at once without breaking? Will it track things cleanly across acts in a campaign?

spool32

OK:

Tracking things cleanly in a campaign: Yes and no. If you want to run this as SP only, you can keep track of the game and have people load it up to continue. If you want to have it live as a "server" people can join and play, you'll need the NWNx database extensions to create persistence in the world. It can handle pretty much anything you can throw at it without breaking, particularly in NWN2. However, NWN2 is far more constrained in terms of building a large world with distances to travel. You just can't make a big world in NWN2 like you could in NWN1. Our PW had locations where it would take you over an hour of constant running to get from one to the other - that's simply impossible to do in NWN2 (and one of the reasons the NWN2 PW community stayed anemic, and never caught on like NWN1 did).

Art assets: If you go with NWN2 you will need zero "assets". The Community's tilesets and mods have everything you need and far far more, all for free. The available models, skins, clothes, weapons, items, and tilesets are what you'd expect from a very active, mature community. Basically it's all been done, and well. However, all your players will need copies of the game.

Let me break that out so you're clear: If you use the NWN/NWN2 toolset, only people who own NWN+SoU+HotU / NWN2+MotB will be able to play your mod.

Dealing with NPCs, managing taxation, and so forth are more meta-functions that I'm not sure are terribly well suited to NWN though. It doesn't sound like you're building something that will leverage a large part of NWN/NWN2 - the combat mechanics and encounter setups. If your players aren't dungeon crawling at least some of the time, it's probably the wrong choice.

I might suggest you check out the Taleworlds Mount & Blade game / toolset. Some of the mods for that are excellent, and the resource management stuff I've seen in some of the mods are much closer to what you're aiming at.

Hahnsoo1

To tell you what NWScript is capable of, I ran a persistent world that tracked Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue on all of the characters logged in, dynamically managed world spawns based on how often they've been culled (with villages of monsters "sprouting" in a zone when not culled), a supply-demand economy for essential materials across multiple villages (with PCs able to adjust the economies by hauling pack mules to different cities, like a trading minigame), magic weapons that leveled up with the character acquiring dynamic traits based on the weapon's name, and a summoning monster system like pokemon where characters can capture world spawns and train them, leveling up their attributes based on their level of care. Oh, and had over 100 different magical songs for bards to use, which dynamically updated based on what instrument they had, over 100 different magical effects from Turn Undead based on icons and other holy symbols used for divine characters, and the ability to dynamically create food items merged from other food items (generated procedurally, so you can literally invent new recipes if you combine the right ingredients).

Storing variables in NWN is as simple as writing them onto an object in the player's inventory. You can mess around with persistent database solutions, but if this is meant to be a save-game experience rather than a persistent world, it would probably be easier just to store it on an inventory item, as these variables are saved with the savegame.

EDIT: Saying this, I probably wouldn't use NWN for more than a proof of concept. If you can get the basics of your "game" working in NWN, you can take the work and ideas and apply them to pretty much any engine out there. It just takes a lot more work because you have to hunt down art assets, learn to program in an even more obtuse scripting language than NWScript, etc.

spool32

Agreed, NWscript is powerful and could certainly handle what he's aiming at... but the interfaces are going to be clunky. There's no ability to, say, add a screen with various taxation rates for different villages. he'd have to go to each "Tax Collector" NPC, or keep an inventory item "Tax Ledger" for each village, and Use the ledger to get a report. Side-by-side comparison wouldn't be great, and the whole thing would appear in a small dialog box. That sort of indirect management of resources isn't easily implemented into the world.... even though it's certainly possible with NWScript, and even moreso with NWNx extensions.

The M&B system already has 90% of that stuff built into the native code.