We all know that hindsight is 20/20 vision but what everyone seems to be avoiding is the fact that everything humanly possible was supposed to be scripted to serverside for security reasons. It seems to me you get the choice of fun but abuseable or secure and annoyingly slow to develop due to constant roadblocks and issues.

I was waiting for someone to bring this up. There's no danger to the server by having scripts done clientside. There's no danger to anything at all except for player fairness. This didn't stop people (presumably) from playing in the past, why would it stop them now? Having the threat of someone abusing the clientsided nature of the game gave the GP team a reason to exist.

Ultimately, it's very much worth the risk of cheating in some situations to get things functioning as they did in the past, which is what the majority of people want anyway.

Sure, but for a long time it Was a concern; if someone could auto-hack all the arrows to home in on their enemies, baddies to spawn in the bank, explosions to form giant symbols of hate in OnlineStartLocal...it's problematic.

What sucks is every time it shifts from "Serverside is important" to "Clientside is important", Classic loses a lot of time Rewriting everything...it's better with classes, at least they don't have to go level-to-level anymore, but still.

It wouldn't be as "insecure" as the pre-NPC server days, but yes, there would still be things that could be "illegally" modified. Who cares? It didn't happen that often, and it's just not that hard to deal with. I think most people would agree that it's better than the alternative perfectly "secure" and horrible to play with version.

This shift has happened one time thus far due to being forced and nobody really thinking about whether or not it was necessary, myself included. However, this was not the cause for the huge delay that's been experienced with the conversion to using an NPC Server.
I have no idea what you were referring to when you mentioned classes.

Probably a good thing we don't dictate policy, then. ;-)

Say they move movement from serverside to clientside.
Any script that edited movement - from defining the size of blocking objects to pushing the player away from or towards certain NPCs - has to be rebuilt to make sure it's moving the Client instead of/as well as the serverside.
Then if you get hit, your flying-backwards is clientside too. So everything that used to hit you serverside has to hit you clientside. Every NPC that does damage has to make sure the Client's in on the game.
And on it goes.
At least they don't have to edit 3000 levels in the level editor like we used to have to; For The Most Part they can just open the Classes pane and edit "baddies" and "sardon_vortex" right there in RC. For the most part.

I'm fully aware of what has to be done to make things work properly. At the moment, however, there's nowhere near what the old Classic had to convert if a change is made. It should be relatively easy.

I also understand how classes work already. I just didn't see what you meant in the previous post with the way you had worded/structured the sentence.

I don't see why they can't use the default system. They're basically rebuilding the wheel with Classic, when it's not needed. Sure, it's not the most secure system but there are much easier ways to deal with that.

If I recall, there's no way to allow for various things that're important to quests. (At least old ones.) Lifting, pushing, and pulling come to mind, but there's probably more than that to deal with.

Ideal Compromise:
release the script for the default system, so Classic can edit and override it as necessary. The end.

There are very, very few things that I can think of that they can't replicate with the default system.

That's easy to say if you aren't sure of yourself, but how about some examples to show that you are?

Push/pull/grab all have their respective functions that are called on the default system:

function onActionGrabbed() {}

so on and so forth. There's no need to even rescript it. Lifting? I don't think there is an action called for that, but I don't think it'd be hard to replicate with scripted items. There are functions and checks for items carried and such, though. I wouldn't be able to say if anything else could be as well without knowing exactly what is needed. Either way, while the default system itself is fairly limited, it's a lot easier to just rescript/tack on needed things with it instead of rescripting it all.

Either way, nothing on the server so far has showed me very much reason why a custom system is needed.

I imagine it had a lot to do with development in stages; the custom system was built when
1) there was no default system
2) the "defaults" didn't work online
3) it sure seemed there never Would be a "defaults", and even if there were Classic wouldn't be given access to it.

Nowadays, sure, I guess you can do everything just using the defaults and some clever PSYCHIC GORRAM scripting (bonus points if you can tell me where ordinary mortals can look up function onActionGrabbed(){;...); that said, any of us could pretty easily take an empty server, an old Classic levelspack, and do a better job than Stormy, huh?

Well, go for it. You have my blessing. Iff you succeed, I'll throw my weight behind Your classic supplanting Stormy's classic, and Stormy's classic going back to the Under Construction tab.

None of that was true when I last stopped scripting. I've not seen anything since, but I'm not saying they definitely don't exist.

That may be true, but the content you're unfamiliar with does in fact need it all.


I'd probably be one of the first people to start to do this if it were allowed. Too bad I've got other things occupying my time now.

It's been around for a long, long time. Before GS2. I believe they were introduced a little after triggeractions were.

Then it shouldn't. If I can look at something and not see why it can't be done with the default(script-wise), then I see no reason why it needs to be custom.