basically title says it all.

the idea is to make random quests available to the fighters guild, outside of the main guild quests. nothing really fancy, they're basically "go there and do this, and earn gold". completing the quests will earn gold (increases by rank) and also increases faction rep very slightly. quests will fail if you don't complete them timely, where you will lose faction rep. you can also accept or turn down available quests, though turning down quests does have an impact.

how is this possible? mostly through globals, scripts, and generic dialog. there's no journal entries though, so as the player, you'll just have to remember the details. right now it's bare bones, but it works, just need to flesh it out and make it fit in the world better.

first things a little background:
there's a npc added to balmora's fighters guild. this NPC will issue out the work. eventually there will be a unique NPC at each fighters guild, who will handle the work regionally. balmora handles fighter guild requests for balmora, caldera, gnaar mok, and hla oad, so these are the areas initially focused.
for the first release, there is really only one quest involving killing vermin, where the location, what kind of vermin, and how many is randomized. this is all tracked through scripts and globals. eventually there will be other types of quests, like an escort mission, bounty hunting, etc, if it all goes well upon initial release.

some things to note:
while the quests will be randomized, and always available to do, there are certain limitations with the engine and scripting. locations are pre-determined in the scripts, so after a while the player is going to be visiting the same locations over and over some for quests. after a while, the player is going to be killing vermin in the same houses, stores, and mines. also, since this relies heavily on the world being 'vanilla', this may not be that compatable with some mods.

this works mostly by running an initialization script when the work is assigned, which will then run the specific script that tracks the quest. there's a few globals that are used to track quest progress and such. when the conditions are met to finish the quest, the globals are reset upon completion payment, and the initialization script is ran again for another assigned quest.
the complicated part is fleshing out the dialog. lots of dialog and conditions to get down since there's no string variables.

i'll keep posted as this nears testing release. if this is successful, then the same can be applied to any guild, like the mages or thieves guild, or the great houses even. however, it is a lot of planning and work though.

Cool idea, I like it. Gives you something to do after you've finished all the quests, or if you don't wanna go down the main-line just yet.

yep, maybe if i'm ambitious, i can tie in needing to fulfill a certain ammount of random quests to be approved to further along the main fighter guild story quest. just so you're not some newb that joins and becomes guildmaster in a week or so.

I really like this idea. It reminds me of Scruggswuggsy the Ferret's http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=1004. Now that never made it out of beta and required MWSE, but it was a similar idea and (because of MWSE) was repeatable.

I don't want to say "Hey, scrap all you've done because I say so." But if you think of extending this after release (or creating a MWSE addon) there's a mod you could have a look at there for ideas on making this... infinite

well, this already is repeatable, and infinite, without extenders. the only problem is, there is only so many houses and places that eventually, you'll be visiting the same spots ad-naseum. this is slightly averted by requiring the player to eventually go to the other fighters guilds to do quests in their respective regions.

though i guess if you have a sense of humor, your character can play it off like "oh that fargoth, always leaving his door open for mudcrabs."

a quick count of the conditions, there will roughly be 120 variations of this one type quest for the balmora guild, broken down as (4) city regions [balmora, caldera, gnaar mok, hla oad], about (10) specific areas within those 4 city regions [houses, shops, mines, city streets], and, for now, (3) types of vermin [rats, kwama foragers, mudcrabs], though might throw in scribs and shalks, raising it to 5. that's not including the different quantities to exterminate, which adds another 5 variations.
i did take into account if your character is a murdering psycho, so if you end up killing inhabitants of these areas beforehand, the locations won't be available. still working on including if it takes into account if you kill them during the quest (not hard to do, but would be tedious).
also, these quests will fail if you take longer than 72 hours.
another concept from daggerfall is that your last quest will be the topic of rumors for a day or so, whether you succeed or fail. mostly affects your guildmates, but extending it to regional rumormill eventually.
also, pay will depend on the quantity of vermin and guild rank, sill working on what should be considered fair pay.

the next variation of quests will be similar, killing larger creatures along trade routes in those four regions.

I remember suggesting something like this some time back so it's nice to see someone finally take it up. :thumbsup: I doubt you saw my topic or anything but still.

Good luck with it. Maybe eventually someone can do this for all the guilds, but I'm thinking ahead too far now.

Oh, and might I suggest making some of the quest giver dialogue a little silly like it was in Daggerfall? ("The husband says it's rats and the wife says it's bats, but whatever the case...")

if i extend this to another guild, it would likely be the imperial legion next, since the quests would be of similar nature, except upholding the law. the other guilds would be a bit more difficult to come up with believable quests that are practical.

for now, this is what i have planned:
fighter guild quests:
1)kill small vermin at residences/mines/shops/city streets (rats, scavengers, mudcrabs, shalks)
2)kill large varmints along roads/outskirts (nix-hounds, alits, cliff racers, wild guars, kagouti, netch)
3)an armed escort (usually involving either wild animals, bandits, or assassins)
4)hired guard at residence/mines/shops (involves thieves or assassins)

that pretty much covers most of the work like in daggerfall. well, i guess i could throw in finding a nobleman's lost guar eventually too, ha!

i have #1 mostly done, it's mostly a matter of getting all the dialog finished. since there's no string variables i have to write every condition out...very tedious. probably the reason this was never done to begin with.
#2 is half-done, with debugging and such. #3 and #4 are still in concept stage.

safe to say that this will strictly feature just vanilla content. in theory it'll be easy for someone to mod it to include new game content, but in practice, it will be a whole lot of tedious work to update dialog and scripts to include new content variables.

sounds good. Any guess yet as to how it will impact FPS in the game?

John

framerate impact - zero.

the primary function of the scripts are (1) randomization of conditions [usually one or two frames], and (2) placement of quest specific stuff [again, one or two frames]. Then there's a background script used only to track a player's current location. globals are used to track progress. dialog *might* be a bit slow since it is a whole lot of new responses with lots of conditioning.

Wow, you just added in 120 quests via 1 mod. haha

You might think about asking people to help come up with more variety.
This also sounds like you could make this more like Jerkson's Exterminators or something.

Commenting on the scripts, I find it is the global ones which impact my framerate the most as unlike textures that end up loading like only once, scripts are always being processed. I hope the scripts only active when someone is actually doing one of the quests. Any single mod isnt usually going to have a huge/any impact on framerate. Its when you start running multiple mods that each have globals etc that things start adding up.