Hi,
I've been looking for an engine/hosting/scripting solution for bringing my 2D MMO vision to fruition in my off-hours, and Graal looks promising. I have a few questions about Graal's playerworlds capabilities; if you all could give me quick-and-dirty answers, I'd very much appreciate it.
1. Is there a limit to the number of NPCs a Graal world can contain, and the number of variables they can manipulate? My plan for a 2D MMO involves a high amount of NPC interaction -- is it feasible to have a Graal playerworld with hundreds or thousands of NPCs, where each NPC tracks whether you're (for example) friendly or hostile towards them based on your past actions?
2. I understand that the tileset can be edited freely (my current plan is to use a pure ASCII tileset, early 90s adventure game style, so that I can rapidly prototype and develop content without being focused on art) -- is the same true of the User interface? I find the interfaces in the Graal worlds I've tried to be incredibly cluttered and unintuitive... ideally I'd be swapping out the interface fonts, the way that NPC names and text are displayed, that sort of thing. Is this easy to do, or are some aspects of the interface "hard-coded"? Does the life bar have to look like a yin-yang symbol, for example?
3. How difficult is it to move NPCs into different 'states' where they react differently to players? For example: If player A comes along, has a dialogue with my NPC, and chooses options that make the NPC angry -- can the NPC still be angry when Player B comes along, and act accordingly? If an NPC hands out a task to Player A, who then completes it, can I have that NPC offer a different task to Player B? Is there any way to save all this 'state of the world' data so that it wouldn't be lost if the server resets, if a map is exited and then reloaded, etc.?
4. Are there significant limits on world size or complexity?
5. Is there a way for me to play around with the editor prior to renting a playerworld?
The sort of world I'm aiming to develop is somewhat idiosyncratic... with less of an emphasis on traditional combat and cluttered features, and more of an emphasis on interacting with the world, the NPCs within it, and the other players.
How feasible is a project like this, using the Graal system? Are there any playerworlds currently running where people have modified the UI to be sleeker and more intuitive? The playerworlds I've tried out so far all felt like their UIs were constructed on the fly by teenagers, rather than with a particular aesthetic sense.
Any help you can offer is much appreciated!