Task: Starting Skills (COMPLETE!)

[John Adams]

Kinase has been kind enough to offer to help with a little data entry, so here is the task at hand. Hopefully this write up will also help others building their own servers set their player starting_skills correctly.

• This write up refers to us using our DB Editor, which is not yet a public tool - sorry about that You can use any MySQL tools to accomplish the same thing, but you'll have to look up your own IDs when inserting.
  

Using the DB Editor is fairly straight forward. You log in using the information from the previous PM, click on the Server menu as that is where the starting_skills data is defined, and using the "skills" and "starting_skills" editors, you should be able to start building player starting skills. Many of them are already configured. For example, using the Class picker, select Guardian and you will see the skills already assigned to players who choose the Guardian class.

Any changes to what is already configured are done through the Update, Delete and Insert buttons you see on the page. To add a new skill to Guardians, ensure class_id column has Guardian in it in the Insert row (bottom). Next, select the skill_id from the drop-down (ie, Spear) and click Insert. Now any new Guardian created will have the Spear skill set.

The reason this came up at all is that we are discovering that players who have "Axe" skill for instance, cannot equip a "Great Axe" item because they lack the skill. We could change the Emu core to allow skill inheritance, but I think it would be more customizable to leave it the way it is.


There are some considerations to be made when setting player skills. The most important is to eliminate as much redundancy as possible. If every class can Pierce, there is no reason to assign every class_id the skill_id for Piercing. Select "ALL" for the class_id and insert Piercing, so every character created can now use Piercing weapons.

Second consideration is Archetypes/Classes vs SubClasses. If the only classes that can use Piercing are Fighters, Mages, and Scouts (not Priests), then you would set up the 3 Archetype class_id's to Piercing, and not Priests.

• If you played EQ2 back when there were Archetypes, Classes and SubClasses, you should be familiar with how these work. If not, let me know and I'll go over that in more detail.

Another are ALL skills. From the Class Picker, choose "ALL" (not All Starting Skills, but just All) and you will see every skill that every player gets on creation. Things like Magic Affinity (the ability to wear jewelry), or harvesting skills, etc. Again, try to set these up with as few redundancies as possible. For instance, I noticed today while setting this up, that 24 player classes all had "Alcohol Tolerance" configured - when class_id = ALL would have done the job.

Lastly are Race skills. I do not believe we have any of those configured yet, and not completely sure if they are even identified.


Anyway, that should get you started. As for how to determine what class gets what skill, well that's where you come in. Use the web, research what you can, and get as much set up as you possibly can. Please defer all questions to this public forum in an effort to educate others.

[John Adams]

I think this task is done. Xinux? Sylva1n?

[xinux]

Yup all done awhile ago.