Guild of Writers

First of all all of you probably know of MOULa reboot and having to progress through everything again but I was wondering if any grey hats would be able to help Larry F with his own tour this not replacement to Eastern Tours or the Cavern Tours, I already have spoken tp Lystior Stone, and OBH about it but not them can make a committed for this event (he will continue to help me with the Cavern Tours).
So possibility sometime in winter I guess

larry F posting on MOULa under Events Under Zeke365 Cavern Events

Zeke and I have been discussing the possibility of a tour series set in a friendlier time for the western hemisphere. It wouldn't be a true European tour because the language would be English-only. It would run in addition to the regular tour guided by r'Tayrtahn, not replace it. The general idea is to have an alternative for the people who can't hang on until the hour that r'Tay is available. It'd be a trade-off between going on tours at a more convenient hour (those led by me) and going on tours led by a better, more experienced guide (those led by r'Tay).

There are sticking points, though.

First, we'd need a gray-hat who can step up to the plate and do some very creative things with the game using the Fun House, Hood of Illusions, or Magic Hood (depending on which one the gray-hat might have access to). Stone can do what I need, but he works nights and can't really be available for two tour series at the same time, last I heard.

Second, I really need to practice with a small test group who have an idea of what they would like to hear in a tour. I tried to set up a session with a buddy last Saturday, but that didn't work out because she seems to have had something come up and never contacted me. I need to work on my patter and figure out what topics I should be giving lectures on. I don't want to directly imitate r'Tay's tours, although a lot of duplication will be unavoidable. Instead, I want to try to come up with something just different enough for it not to be boring if you go on both tours.

Lastly, we haven't yet agreed on a good day and hour for it if it does work out. I'm kind of leaning toward Saturday mornings (US time), but mine is only one vote out of at least three. Zeke and whoever we may get as a gray-hat also have votes based on their own schedules. We were tentatively thinking of beginning next month, but it's still up in the air and might not happen with the glacial development we have right now.

To give a little more detail, we are looking for someone who likes to modify the existing Ages in the MOULa environment. Making floors or terrain solid and walkable, warping players to specific points, or overlaying elements from one Age on another are some of the tasks we need performed.

As examples, I would like to take explorers to various locations that are normally inaccessible or unnavigable. They'd include the various balconies and terraces of the Palace and Tokotah II, the lower floors of the Museum and Great Library. Areas like the second island and the top of the central mushroom tower in Teledahn. The lake in the harbor and surrounding Ae'gura island, and the bottom of the Great Shaft and Rudenna cavern.

Stone uses a method in which he sets up one of the meditation chambers in a neighborhood to function in place of a linking book, which automatically links explorers to the Age the tour is covering on a given night, and we'd want to replicate that as well, although having the gray hat manually warp them would also work.

Sound interesting to anyone?

LarryF58 wrote: Making floors or terrain solid and walkable

This specific part of the request is actually impossible as far as I know. You could reach similar results with flymode, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to enable that one someone else's (external) client and the controls are kinda funky.

Otherwise it would be possible, but I don't really know how and I don't have time.

Luna wrote:This specific part of the request is actually impossible as far as I know. You could reach similar results with flymode, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to enable that one someone else's (external) client and the controls are kinda funky.

Making accurate geometry based on visuals ingame is impossible.
There is the solution of taking another collider in the city, positioning/rotating it correctly to have a walkable floor in the area you're interested in (I think this would work across clients), but it won't fit the visuals. Plus, this means the other area in the city won't be walkable anymore.
Furthermore, only a few colliders can actually be moved (only if they have a coordinate system, otherwise they are fixed as far as I know).

For a multiplayer exploration of the "hidden city", the best solution is to use a custom server, and install manual modifications on it. (for a PotS-CC based server, one could use Chacal's additions). That's a lot of work though.

One could also warp players on top of existing collisions, there are a few balconies left by Cyan for their random Bahro appearance. They aren't really large, though.

There's always the solution of using the columns of Jalak to make floors where there are none.

The BIGGEST issue of those columns is their propensity to make external clients crash ... a lot... big time

I've done some test in the Spy Room age back 1 year and a half ago. It was fun to have the "illusion" to stand firmly in the Sharper's Office and see how beautiful that room is. A false move and you are expelled from the game to your desktop though. I could do whatever with my Internal Client but every guinea pig (aka my buddies ) crashed so much that it wasn't a fun experience for them at all...

You could always maybe use the COD on TOC MOUL shard for your City Tour. I mean, we call it the City of Dimension but it's in fact just a copy of Ae'gura. There are some new rooms and stuff (elevator, ship in the harbour, etc.) but it's mostly just an ordinary Ae'gura with let say 90 to 95% of solid floors compared to less than 10% for Ae'gura.

It was CoD that made me wonder if making various surfaces solid could be done. Specifically, the palace stairs, courtyard, and steps up to the Southerland Point alley.

In the late night tour, we use the Cleft desert to make large areas navigable, and the Jalak pillars for small areas. Problem is that those don't work well for stairs or places with multiple levels. Last night, we used the Cleft as an underlay to open up the outside of the Watcher's Pub, and we do the same for Rudenna and a few other places, like the Ae'gura harbor. On the other hand, Mirphak seems to have found a way to make the Ae'gura harbor walkable without it; I was able to run on top of the water level without dipping above or below it. I did see objects from a neighborhood there, so it may have been by underlaying it with the hood model.

While I'd love to use CoD for a tour, that's not a very practical solution. It would require every tour guest setting up the client for the shard and creating a new avatar, which can be tricky. Plus, while the shard is much better than it used to be, it's still not a poster child for stability. There would be no spontaneity, no chance for people wandering around to join in spur of the moment. It would be likely to keep the attendance under 10 guests, when we average somewhere between 15 and 25 for the late night tours. The idea is to give people in the US and Europe easier access to the tours, not make it even more difficult to attend.

Mirphak cloned the floor of Minkata. Since it's flat and stand at approximately 20-25 feet above the waving floor of the Cleft, you are indeed under the impression that you are floating over the water in the harbour. It can help but like I said it doesn't solidify all the planes of the stalagmite range or the areas that are void.

There are 2 advantages of this Minkata floor cloning over the Cleft: 1st) it's flat and very extensive, 2nd) it's completely seemingless, you see absolutely nothing!


And no Grey Hat can reproduce what the TOC Team did with their COD just because... it's "on-paper" a hack not permitted by Cyan and more so if you are doing something on their own shard .