ALMOST HUMAN, We need your help please!

[Arkos]

The dungeon creators wanting to work on the open-ended community driven project viewtopic.php?f=14&t=4553 to showcase the communities mods in a traversable, enigmatic, massive, open-ended, seamless, over-world are running into road blocks. We need to be able to load a .dat (separate dungeon file) from inside the current .dat (current running dungeon) on the fly without having to exit the game--with persistent saves of everything (stats, inventory, etc.) between .dat files. We are trying to travel from dungeon to dungeon seamlessly, bringing with us stats and items from each dungeon to the next. We are trying to create a connected open-ended world of dungeons, showcasing the communities mods!

As of right now, we have to use one dungeon file to keep the world seamless, but this is not scalable. We need to be able to load separate .dat files in game while keeping our inventory and party stats from the last .dat file. If this is not possible, is there another way to accomplish what we are trying to do?

Thanks so much, and thank you for such an awesome game!

Sincerely,
Arkos

[Neikun]

It's almost like the reverse of import party. We need to import a dungeon into a party

[Komag]

I personally would rather have a dozen other features or tweaks before this one, as it would require a lot of work on their part for a relatively small payout

[msyblade]

Throwing my hat into the ring. If we can get support, we can (try to!) bring to life some really amazing ideas. Loading the .dat from within a .dat is not as important as being able to truly import a party. We can start at the beginning of the overworld map each time, with the keys available to progress back to where we were. (cheap, but if it gets the ball rolling. .)

[JohnWordsworth]

I think that moving from .dat to .dat would be a pretty hefty job as it's problematic... If you go from Dungeon A to Dungeon B and dungeon B doesn't define 'a_gold_key' then does the party lose it? Do you have to load all .dat files into memory just in case? If dat A and dat B both redefine the party hooks - which one takes priority? Does that break all of the faked skills/spells you've learned?

Have to agree with Komag - while this could be cool, I think it's a huge amount of work for low pay-off. Maybe a feasible solution that would introduce more general features could be...

(a) The ability to define what the "level text" is for a dungeon level, so you could have Level 1, level text = Outside, Levels 2->9 being dungeon 1 (levels 1-8) and then Levels 10-20 being dungeon 2 say (levels 1-10).

(b) Maps bigger than 32x32 would be cool. The auto-map would have to only show the 32x32 area of the map centred around the player though.

[John Smith]

I am in favor of a change like this.

[msyblade]

Pre defined parties, and some other bells and whistles (New gui mechanics, "thirst meter") would have to be forgone to pull it off. But as far as assets, with separate .dat files, objects/monsters would be self contained, and we could share simple items.lua files. It does sound like people that know far more about this stuff than I do, have their doubts. I defer to their expertise until I understand more about the hurdles involved to truly make this happen.

[Arkos]

I concur with msyblade. But, I just want to mention that supporters on the open-ended over-world thread actually think this would be a HUGE payoff. Here are some comments from some of the supporters:

Msyblade (Creator of Hotel Hades)

Really think this is the beginning of the "Granddaddy of all mods". If executed flawlessly, it could change the entire genre of dungeon crawlers, and heck yeah I wanna be part of that!

Neikun (creator of Neikun's Workshop)

I am for this idea. I just hope I have time to contribute.

akroma222 (creator of Labyrinth of Lies & (24) re-textured/re-coloured MONSTERS + new item drops)

I really like the sound of this Linking finished dungeons together in a packaged mod has real potential

Mahric (creator of Wine Merchants Basement - so far voted #1 for Dec. 2012)

I like this idea very very much... Please come with creative solutions, since I'd love to see this happen anyway!

Asteroth (Creator of "Corrupted" Wallset & The Rise of Simon)

Yes, I believe some of us are actually going to try to do this. Call it madness, but some times you just gotta try.

Jkos (Creator of the open community project eob1-waterdeep https://github.com/grimrock/eob1-waterdeep/)

I believe that I don't have the time to contribute to this project but I just wanted to share my thoughts and hopefully help you guys a bit.

McSkivv (veteran beta tester of the Dungeon Editor)

One way or another, this project will reach awesome fruition. It simply has too much potential to be left behind in the hypothetical dustbin of scrapped ideas.

If it isn’t too much work, I’m wondering if it is possible for the .dat files to reference a common library (a separate file or files) for things that need to be shared between .dat files like stats, inventory, spells, party progress, etc. I’m a software engineer and moving things off to libraries to be common for separate projects (or in this case dungeons) really isn’t that hard. So, instead of everything being in one file, the .dat file would reference the common library for things needing to be common between different .dat files. An example of this or an analogy is a web.config file for web applications referencing another file for connection strings, something like the following:

</configSections>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config" />
<appSettings>

This web.config file (think of it like the .dat file) is referencing a different file for ConnectionStrings (ConnectionStrings.config) that are needed for connecting to a database. This ConnectionStrings.config file is common between many web applications. I’m hoping the same type method of referencing a common file (for things like inventory and stats) could be done for dungeons. So, think of the dungeons as a web application that references the same file as other web applications (dungeons) for connection strings, but in this analogy the connection string file common between them would be a file for inventory, a file for party stats, spells, etc. This way only 1 file for inventory has to be updated for all dungeons instead of having to update every .dat file to include that Xaafe Chinese Automatic Star launcher that increases the attack power amount of Chinese Stars by 20 points! Now all dungeons have access to it