Hey there, first post here, played D:OS and enjoying the alpha of D:OS 2 these days. I'd love to share some random thoughts about the current topic:
I tried to read all the posts of this thread, and i see a general consensus about making the editor similar to Aurora toolset.
I played myself for years with NWN 1, been a DM and a scripter, joined RP, PVP, powerplay servers with MMO/instance behaviour and admin'd a full roleplay one. Handling people is not easy, the deeper you go into roleplay, the more attention you must pay to every player's step.
I want you guys to remember one thing though, since NWN pops up every other post: the combat system here is full queued turn based, not asymmetric delay on actions.
Why is this important? because when DMing in divinity, you can take care of everything in a sorted line of work, without fearing that a faster player could meteoshower your face. But also because having >4 people playing can become boring and frustrating so i see the constraint of max players a necessity.
Another point that i see often is that people want a realtime ingame editor,. The power of Aurora was that you could take your time building your world in a separate tool, then when joining the game as a DM you should have a skillbar with every need you could possibly have at runtime:
- controlling units, making them talk by simply using the chat system. This allowed real roleplay from the players who would type in the chat the answers, so no need for branching dialogue trees.
- spawning / despawning creatures, items. An intuitive interface for tuning the stats of the spawned item/ creature, like naming, stats tuning, switching talents on/off, AI templates (ranged, melee, healer, etc.)
- teleporting every unit at will. - Change weather / time of the day if the lighting is dynamic, so you can have your very own eclipse of Doom and making it worse by turning on rain.
I'm personally against editing the landscape in realtime, but that's just me and minor changes may not be problematic, like placing furnitures around, but that shouldn't be the focus of the runtime part, since you have players to entertain.
So, all this to say that i'd love an external tool to create the map, placing npcs and whatnot like you do for the main story, and at runtime having the power to possess npc and making players role by simply chatting.
