Region swapping
| Submitted by ghastley on Thu, 2006-07-27 11:14 | ||
If you played Yesterhaven for DS1, you're familiar with the way that the town was multiple regions "in the same place" and I'm looking at doing the same thing in DS2. My project is reusing the Kalrathia to Darthrul regions from the DS2 world, with new or revised mobs and npc's, and I'd like to have two instances of the a3_02_03_mordencity region with the second being a cleaned-up or repaired version after the baddies have been defeated. The latter would have all weeds, shuibs and morden artifacts removed and more decorative elements in their place. Has anyone done anything like this? If so any pointers on stitching would be appreciated. I suspect the Yesterhaven example only worked because there were no doors that needed re-stitching. If you left through one door from the town, you'd enter the other version through a different one, so the map really just linked three or four different Yesterhavens that just looked similar. Darthrul has only four doors, the main gate, the elevator down to the "moat", the elevator to the passage beneath, and the Finala-only gate to the hatchery. The last three are dead ends, and you can only retrace your steps. My current idea is to re-map the hatchery to start at the "broken" Darthrul and end at the "fixed" one (locking the entry so you can't go back), but then how to connect the second Darthrul to the rest of the map at the main gate? forums: |
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Can you show / hide the differences with fade groups and triggers?
The only other thing I could think of would be to use the teleporter system to cross a barrier along the journey (but I don't know if you can turn off a location to make the transition a one way trip).
I'm actually thinking now of solving the problem by making it worse! :twisted:
If I also clone the outskirts region that connects to it, there are places where I can block the path back to Kalrathia and force the party to look for another route. There are a number of locked off side dungeons that I can unlock to provide a back way to link to the original regions, in particular the ones used for Sartan's quest in DS2. It would not have to be a full clone - just up to the point where i add the blockage (landslide?).
This has an extra benefit in allowing me to generate a higher level of mobs for the return trip, as it will be a new region (that just looks identical to the old one). I just need to ensure that nothing in the pair of identical regions is a single-use toggle that would be wrong if reset The doors used to connect the regions would have to lock behind the party, or they could go back into the past, but that's not difficult to achieve.
Cloning Darthrul allows me to have a path for spawning monsters in the "before" instance, and none in the "after" as well as making it easier to edit the decals, objects etc. that differ between the two. I get new instances of all the region gas files etc. to avoid conflicts. I can add shops etc without issues, so it's a much cleaner solution.
Yesterhaven works like an elevator.
When you first step onto the platform and the fog pulls in while the poem plays, the platform is actually moving to the snowy yesterhaven, The rest it done from a linear standpoint, so there is actually 4 seperate towns of yesterhaven. :P
I found a showstopping problem with my idea. Once you back on the first instance of a region, you can follow the original path to get to the "old" version of anywhere else.
Yesterhaven never took you back to any region, just a copy of it, so remained linear.
It looks like I have to do as Sharkull suggested and make all the changes happen in situ.