Quest flags for 5.2

[Eglin]

Originally Posted by Scorpious2k

The appropriate thing to use in this case would be factions. IMO, this feature has no place in in a default quest.

Factions have a whole lot of baggage, though. For one thing, setting faction affects the way that a mob cons to an individual, which may be an unwanted side-effect.

Factions again.

Again, I don't think so. In the generic example of "be extra nice" you don't see the full ramifications of confusing faction with an arbitrary tag, so I will present another example. What if I want to have a quest that makes a victor into, say, the evil taxman of qeynos. The evil taxman can tell any npc to fork over some cash and they have to comply. The taxman can still kill denizens (to the detriment of his finances, perhaps) or kill their enemies to change his faction with them, although that won't necessarily have any bearing on his status as the evil taxman. One has nothing to do with the other. You say above that such features have no place in default quests, but I beg to differ. Regardless of how you implement it, it is going to require that a large number of npcs have access to the db vars which in turn means that you are going to be making all of those db queries every time you enter the event loop which is, like I said above, unacceptable.

It's a matter of design.

That is exactly why I thought it deserved discussion. Why alter the semantics of scripting? Why should a command to check pc flags work from some scripts and not others?

If you need it, then you set the flag. From the script, you might put a comment in if you are worried about knowing whether or not the feature is used (and can't figure it out when you see the commands used).

In my opinion, this is the narrow view. The alternative is to make a function for querying db vars avaliable to all npcs. The alternative allows us to maintain a consistant API. The alternative allows for more flexible scripting. The alternative runs faster.

The only problem for some may be that thought and planning has to be done.

Wanna' elaborate on that for me, pal? I can only come up with two or three ways of interpreting that, and I don't particularly like the implications of any of them.