so i'm testing the quest generators in Caveman 3.0, and its going pretty well, then i come to that darned MOVE_TO location quest, where the location is a legendary treasure.

in our last episode with this quest (so to speak), i ended up showing the general location on the maps, and placing the treasure just beyond visual range, requiring a limited search. the player arrives at the general area, the treasure (and perhaps a guard) spawn, and the quest ends.

only problem is, the treasure is in the form of dropped inventory items, which also appear on the maps. which makes finding it not much of a challenge, needless to say.

so now i'm thinking the thing to do generate and save the treasure location when i generate the general location, and when they get close to the treasure location, then show a message "you found the treasure!" and spawn the treasure. the other alternative is to somehow flag the treasure as "don't show on maps", and modify the maps to use that flag.

they still have to search. but the treasure won't show on the maps til they find it. the downside is a message and spawn is somewhat contrived, depending on the range of the spawn from the player. i guess if i place the treasure far enough from the general location, and spawn it far enough away from the player, it wouldn't look that bad.

how does this sound? acceptable?

any suggestions?

I would question the whole MOVE_TO type of quest, it's unthrilling. Unless it's far, far away and requires killing a lot of monsters on the way :) Maybe just remove that quest type?

sounds like the better alternative, but might require a good deal more work than just spawn-on-arrival.

which tends to make it the not-better alternative. its bad design to go around special casing everything. and so far, this is the only case. seems a little extreme to add support for "map invisible objects" to the game engine just for that.

Unless it's far, far away and requires killing a lot of monsters on the way

but of course! <g>.

The Journey IS the adventure!

Seriously, think about it.

imagine the Odssey or the Lord of the Rings if you could just fast-travel everywhere.

but just to be safe, i have special encounter tables just for quests, number appearing scales to both party size and level, and i have two different custom AI's (attack and defend location) just for quest bad guys.

of course, the full version will include all play testing cheats, so you can always just left click on the maps to teleport, like i'm doing now while testing and debugging the existing quest gens.

i made the treasure location far enough from the quest location (abut 400 feet) that it will always spawn far from both the player and quest location (no closer than 200 feet from the player). the effect isn't that bad. and i didn't have to mod the engine. : )

the real question is; which would provide the better presentation? That is the point after all is said and done. That's why I think adding support for map-invisible objects is the better alternative, I think it would lead to a better presentation, but I could be wrong about that.

turns out the effect is essentially the same. the treasure doesn't show on the map until the player has found it. lesson learned: work smart, not hard. through clever design of the quest, it could be implemented with the existing engine capabilities without modding the engine.

Depending on the size of the map. There reaches a certain point at which lack of fast travel would make it feel like I'm wasting my time running through the game. Fast travel to just settlements might be an acceptable middle ground.

in this case, its a seamless open world 2500 miles across. and you can travel cross-country automatically via both the world and local maps, to any point in the world, at any time, even during combat. but it doesn't teleport you, its actually walks you across the world, checking for encounters as it goes. game time can be accelerated while you do this. when an encounter occurs or you reach your destination or you realize you've become lost, it stops moving you, and drops out of accelerated time, and goes back to FPSRPG mode. So you get the benefits of fast travel (automatically travelling fast), without its problems (IE missing all the adventures on the way). you can also right click on the maps to teleport (a built-in cheat). left click moves you cross-country, right click teleports you instantly.