Hello,

I have done a little work on the quest script system which I think adds a lot of utility to it. Take from it what you will..

The change that I have made is to have the script system look for a couple alternate .pl files when searching for quest scripts.. Specifically, it searches for a .pl file which is the (first?) name of the NPC, slightly modified (` turns into -) in the zone’s directory. This file is only looked for if there is no script file corresponding to the ID of the NPC. Further, if there is no file for the ID, and no file for the NPC’s name in the zone folder, it can be configured to look for a final file in a ‘templates’ directory based on the NPC’s name, which is common to all zones. This can be useful for giving generic speech patterns to generic creates which might appear across many zones.

This allows several things:
#1: If you have a lot of NPCs with the same name in a zone, say ‘a_guard’, then you can define one script file ‘a_guard.pl’ which defines their speech patters within that zone, etc.
#2: If you have NPCs which do the same thing in many zones, like Priest Of Discord, you can define a single script file in the templates directory which will work for every zone.
#3. you can have both general and specific scripts with this, since an ID.pl file will over-ride a name.pl file in any direcotory, and a name.pl file in the specific zone will override a name.pl file in the templates directory .
#4. Browsing through the scripts to edit them, or making new ones is a lot easier.

The patch file is here, relative to 7-25-04 CVS from biosprite:
http://eqemu.psend.com/quest_scripts_byname.diff
Note: When applying the patch on a unix system make sure that zone/embparser.cpp has UNIX line endings, not windows (mine has windows when I unzip fresh source)

It turns on and off with -DQUEST_SCRIPTS_BYNAME in your DFLAGS of the zone makefile. At the top of embparser.cpp you can turn on and off QUEST_TEMPLATES_BYNAME to toggle the template directory concept, or change its directory name (which is relative to the zones/ directory)

This is untested on windows, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. Im not sure the best way to apply a patch on windows either.




Hello,

I have written a set of scripts to convert the old perl_quests to the new database.
I do this by looking up the character’s name from the script file, and cross referencing it with the current database.
It is definitely not perfect, it fails to properly or uniquely identify 278 people, but it gets the other 1300 or so correct. Im also not sure if all the item IDs line up, but the few I checked did…

I am making it available in two versions, the standard ID-based quests: 
http://eqemu.psend.com/quest_scripts_id.zip

And a Name based system, based on a patch found here:
http://www.eqemulator.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=92144
Lives:
http://eqemu.psend.com/quest_scripts_named.zip

If you want to see the perl & shell scripts I used to do this work, which should work for future DB changes, or completely different DBs, they live here: 
http://eqemu.psend.com/quest_scripts_convert.tgz