ContentDesigner:Groundspawns

EQ2Emulator: Harvest Ground Spawns

This article will demonstrate how the Content Design team builds Ground Spawns based off of collected data from EQ2 Live.

RAW Data

After you run packetparser.exe -populate {world_db} and all your RAW data is pushed into your EQ2Emu DB, first time you log in you might see something similar to Figure 1 - the RAW Data.

As you can see, there are many, many shrubs, roots and collection nodes (?) in this area.

Your Task:

• Observe the same area in EQ2Live's version of this zone and identify the Ground Spawn placements.
• Decide where you want your "main" node to spawn.
• Combine all nodes in the surrounding area to build an estimated spawn percentage value.
• Remove excess nodes.
• Create valid Offsets for spawn location placements to emulate seemingly random spawn locations.
• Determine depop/repop rates for a node.
• Build the Ground Spawn Items lists (see special note at the end of this article).

Compare to EQ2 Live

Log into EQ2 Live, find the same area you are working in, and compare the nodes in the Live area with the data you have present in the development environment. If there are nodes missing, you can easily create missing nodes using the /spawn create command. More than likely, you'll have plenty of spawned nodes to work with and should not need to create any.

You should study the area for 10-30 minutes as well, because we discovered that Harvest nodes, when untouched, seem to despawn after a period of time, stay missing for their specified respawn timer interval, then spawn again - sometimes as their partner node in the spawn location placement.

Spending the time to observe EQ2 Live's full functionality will allow you to build the best possible emulation of EQ2 Live. This is a must for our Content Designers, so please, no guessing.

Building Your First Node

You know from your analysis of the Live zone that there are four (4) nodes that spawn in this particular area, and you know they generally exist in the 4 corners of the grassy area. Take another look at the picture above (Figure 1), and you will notice where the player is standing, the roots/gardens that are near the player can represent that particular corner of the area, so you will want to combine all those nodes into a single spawn location using the /spawn combine command.

Combining Spawns

Using the spawn combine command, you will do a rough cleanup on this small area, creating 4 spawn points with 2 possible spawn types each: roots and budding natural garden.

After cleaning part of the area, you can start seeing it becoming like Live already!

When you are finished you should have a nice, clean area like this:

Note: In these screenshots, I had also cleaned up the "?" collection nodes separately, because they are not considered ground spawns and would not be grouped/linked to the spawn process of harvest nodes.

Cleanup Remaining Junk

Anything else that is lingering around the area can be removed using the /spawn remove 1 command - PROVIDING:

• it is the same type you have already finished cleaning (same exact spawn_id's)
• not something used in a quest ie., a temporary spawn
• not a spawn that has a unique appearance (which in raw data should have a unique spawn_id)
• not a spawn needed to analyze/build spawn location groups (spawn parties)

It is very critical to not go hog-ass wild deleting everything in your path just to get the task completed. The result of hasty spawn removals will be a deletion of the entire zone, repop, and re-clean... and no one wants to do their work more than once

Offsets and Respawns

Designing Offsets

/spawn set offset {x,y,z}

/spawn set repawn {value}

Respawn/Expire Timers

/spawn set expire {value}

/spawn set expire_offset {value}

Assigning Rewards

Rewards are those items you would get from harvesting a node (cabbage, deer pelt, sunfish). Our current system allows for the 1, 3, 5, 10 + rare harvesting opportunities, and also raises your skill depending on what you are harvesting (ie., harvesting a tree node will increase your Foresting skill to it's max for the given tier).

IMPORTANT: Currently, the ground spawn system requires a lot of work. While you can build loot lists to award players for harvesting nodes now, they will not behave like they do on EQ2 Live exactly. If you must build loot lists for ground spawns now, I suggest not spending a whole lot of time "tuning" them, because the system revamp will likely negate all your work.