Chemist's Work Bench in Thayan enclave

[The Butcher]

The enclave has every crafting bench except for a chemist's, which I find particularly odd. I'm not sure if this is intentional and if it should be handled ICly or not. Either way, my suggestion is to implement one.

[Rhifox]

Correction: The workbench area has no chemist workbench. The summoning area does have a chemist's workbench. So Thayans can just use that one, but non-Thayans with a crafting pass have no access to one unless they are permitted by a Thayan to go into the restricted section behind Enchan.

[The Butcher]

Yeah, and that's what I mean. With the only other chemist's workbench that I know of being in Sundren city, having one in the Thayan crafting area to those who purchase passes would be nice.

[roguethree]

Been asking for benches for a long time. Was told they're not adding them right now because, you know, that new crafting system from two years ago.

[Cornuto]

The real reason is: "fuck the crafting system."

[Rhifox]

The real reason is -- fuck the crafting system.

But... but...

Some of us like crafting...

[Cornuto]

But... but...

Some of us like crafting...

Even more reason to hate the crafting system.

[roguethree]

Behold: Kaeldornuto!

[Cornuto]

Behold: Kaeldornuto!

I don't even know what this means, but I'm probably offended.

[Cornuto]

On a more serious note, I know its not a great answer, but as much as the majority of the players hate the current crafting/gathering system the staff hates is equally as much (if not more.) There's a ton of things wrong and its a pain to work with from both a user and developer perspective.

The decision was made to replace it a long time ago, and not waste developer resources on it at all. Replacing it also isn't a simple thing -- for example, all the GUI bugs that were caused recently were due to a single bad include in a script. Comparatively, the crafting and resource system is like a bastard octopus with tentacles in countless scripts throughout the module, so the potential to break everything by messing with it is very high.

Sorry, we know it ain't great.

[roguethree]

But we've been unable to interact with large portions of the system simply because benches aren't in place. Can't someone just place them and not worry about modifying the system so players can operate with as much autonomy as possible within the broken system until something new is complete?

[Snowmane]

If someone *looks around innocently* were to offer to take the crafting system on themselves, would the dev team be open to that?

[GodBeastX]

It's not so much the fact that people don't have time to CODE it, it's that DESIGNING the new system is where things are falling short, and ripping out old one which someone decided needed to be integrated into EVERYTHING is a pain.

Essentially what I would like is the crafting system to mainly subsist on gold and very raw materials. Sundren just isn't a big enough place to warrant going on gathering expeditions to craft and the resources would be just to limit the number of crafted goods popping into the system.

But stuff like dying armors and enchanting and what not should just be primarily "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY GOLD COINS!"

Designing a system that fits in with what we want loot to be like needs to be considered.

[Saulus]

As mentioned in the past, crafting is not a priority for the staff and we don't want to get caught up in a million edits to something that will be ripping out and replaced, only increasing the amount of work to do so.

Everyone knows it takes time to develop these things, but now that the big update has happened, dev priorities can shift over to things like crafting, which have been a long time coming.

GBX who will be implementing crafting has a very small set of projects he needs to focus on, crafting being one of them. Will it be the next thing he develops? Probably not, but it's going to be the top 3.

[Snowmane]

Well, since the server seems to be aiming to be more Pathfinder like, perhaps a secondary crafting system could be developed along the lines of the Pathfinder system and once that one is stood up, we could slowly begin to dismantle the old system. At least, this seems to be close to what you are proposing GBX.

I only suggest this because the crafting system seems to be stuck in analysis paralysis and asking the dev team to work on it has been like asking a child to eat their broccolli and asparagus. And please don't take that as a criticism, I sympathize with your plight. I know how horrible it is to step foot into someone else's messy implementation.

I've created a few game systems for friends in NWN that were used on a few servers (none really mainstream). I made henchman systems, new familiars, various spell mods and a few custom PRC's.

The biggest system I made was a set of scripts that could take a snapshot of a dungeon then be able to "reskin" itself. It would automatically repopulate with different monsters themes and then add traps and treasure in a pseudo random fashion that fit the theme, making the dungeon a little different each time. (It was inspired by the RDG module in NWN). My friend actually used it to create a quest dungeon that would flip its state based on two quests. The first quest was a rogue quest where the rogue was sent into a crypt to steal a gem from a tomb having to sneak by or kill clerics that were down there giving rites to the dead. Well if the rogue succeeded, then the tomb would reskin itself to be filled with restless undead and a new cleric quest would be available to enter the tomb and replace the missing gem with another. At which point another rogue could perform the first quest again.

I am a little lite on the NWN2 skills, but I have been working on my own module recently. I actually created a few C# toolset plugins to help with the development of the module. I am a software engineer IRL (C++ mostly), so I am pretty sure I could develop the skills for doing some advanced work with NWN2 scripting which is very similar to NWN 1.

Anyway, I guess I'll just leave that out there. A lot of the players enjoy crafting in one form or another and I really believe it is something that needs to be addressed. I'd be willing to develop a proposal for a crafting system and submit it to you all if you like.

*edit*

OK Saulus