Story Tools

[Guest]

This is a suggestion I thought of. There could be story tools (like the map tools) where you could make custom stories. It could include writing dialogue, scripting events and NPCs (once there added), placing certain items in containers, scripting weather etc. I was thinking that this would be a good thing to do towards the end of development after pretty much everything else is done. I am not requesting this, I'm simply suggesting this as an end of development thing to do. Also, I know that you could probably just code the story and make it a mod but not everyone knows how to code (like me). It would just be tools to make stories like Baldspot and Kate's.

 

P.S. Thank you devs for creating an AMAZING game!! 

[Japer]

Back in the early days of K&B I remember devs saying they will have this function, where you can create custom stories, in fact I only remembered last month that I had written out a very lengthy story for PZ a few years back. I'm certain the devs will add some tool for a function to create stories/scenarios for people to play out.

There were actually a few written back in the day, one was an extension on the K&B story, another was a short story that took place inside a restaurant and had 2 variants of what happened. (God that's a nostalgia trip, I had completely forgotten all about those until I started writing this, damn my sickly good memory).

Those were the 2 I remember, and that was on a much earlier build, so no doubt it will be available in future builds.

As for any old forum users, anyone else remember the fore-mentioned story mod? I have gotten myself curious....

[Rathlord]

I really doubt that we'll be seeing any GUI tools for this kinda stuff. You're almost certainly going to have to know some Lua to get this done- making a full GUI for this would be hugely time consuming for the devs- basically writing a whole new program. I can't say it will never happen, but I don't thikn it will. In a perfect world with unlimited funds and dev time, this would certainly be something I'd like to see, though.

[Japer]

@Rathlord you may remember the old scripted event stuff I referenced too earlier, it won't be a simple thing to do but I believe it's more than possible to have various user-generated scenarios.

Alas I remember the old stuff was scripted text etc, im not sure how dialogue would work with the NPC system when it's developed, hopefully we can have scripted 'scenes' to generate a story

[Rathlord]

No it's definitely possible- and should even be supported. It's just not likely going to be something that you can do with no programming knowledge from an outside program. To some extent, it's gonna require going into Lua and doing it.

 

I do remember those mods being out there, though I never used them. To be honest, I never used a mod on the old map at all- I typically like to enjoy games in their base state for a while before modding. And by the time we moved over to the new map and such I was involved enough in the testing that I couldn't have mods interfering with my test results- so in my entire few years hanging around TIS I've only used a couple of RoboMat's mods for short periods of time.

[Japer]

I personally cannot wait until customs stories are into PZ with NPCs, the game already has so much depth that NPCs will turn it into a black hole, an empty void sucking time, in a good way.

I'm the same as you in the modding aspect, back then things appeared to change so quickly, even now new builds are coming so fast, it's hard to get stuck to a 'game changing' mod when the game is ever-evolving. The first mods I ever used were written by myself recently, and even those are out-dated because PZ evolves so fast.

I remember the switch to the new map, I personally hated it, maybe that was just related to change, I just never got the feel for it tho, that's when I stopped playing for a while.

[Suomiboi]

I really doubt that we'll be seeing any GUI tools for this kinda stuff. You're almost certainly going to have to know some Lua to get this done- making a full GUI for this would be hugely time consuming for the devs- basically writing a whole new program. I can't say it will never happen, but I don't thikn it will. In a perfect world with unlimited funds and dev time, this would certainly be something I'd like to see, though.

What about this? : http://projectzomboid.com/blog/2013/07/the-shazam-report/

The beauty of this system is it doesn’t require programming knowledge to implement scenes, as well as looking pretty to boot.

Do you have something on this that we don't? Was it sidelined? Etc...

EDIT : double post

EDIT2:

Modders need not worry, as we fully intend to extend our own toolset to allow our own propriatry free system in the future,

[Rathlord]

As you can tell they don't intend to release the Articy system to people (as I believe it costs). I don't think there's anything to suggest that their tools are going to be any less complicated to use than the mapping tools are. That's just my 2¢, though.

[Suomiboi]

Yes of course, but by reading your comment I had the impression of just having to code everything through lua, as in with regular mods atm (might be my reading comprehension though ). The articy system seems a lot more user friendly. (same with the mapping tools it would be hell going through text files without any image output) If there would be anything near the map tools user friendliness it would be just awesome. As we can already see complete noobs (read me) doing the stuff with somewhat of an ease.

 

hmm... I'll need to take a look into that articy thing and see what it's like.