Basic ideas behinh making an in-game Quest editor?

This is just me asking out of curiosity. I have no real intention of doing anything with this at the moment, but I figured it would be handy to know, given my over all interest.

So, if you've seen clips of Sword coast Legends, or have ever played Spore Galactic Adventures, or have messed with the Foundry system in the MMORPG called Neverwinter, I am sure you know what I mean by in-game editor. I am curious as to what the basic ideas behind making a simple, easy-to-use but powerful system that allows players to make their own quest content inside a game are.

 

I'm not sure how in-depth those games are, I've never played them, but at the heart of the system would be dynamic conditions and triggers. Allow the player to create a condition (collect 5 fruit, destroy 10 monsters) or collection of conditions and associate a trigger with it (spawn new npc, give 10 gold).

 

To clarify as I've never touched any of your examples, do you mean making quests while actively inside of the game, or as an extra tool bundled with the game that changes the in-game quests?

You're looking at several different topics here, like "what's the best way to store large amounts of data inside Unity that's still editable at runtime?"- which immediately keeps "prefab databases with data entry directly in the inspector" off the table. Also "what would be a good way to construct that data so that it's stored in several parts can be pieced together easily to make a unique result?".

Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to answer this in-depth, both as it's not really in my wheelhouse (and thus would require extensive research) and because I'm on my way out of the door right now, but maybe that can get you started. You may look into AssetStore packages that do something similar to what you want, as it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that someone's already done this.

 

You could try your hand at this right now and learn a lot: make a simple "game" where there is a fixed camera looking down on a pre-made playfield (say a plane with a texture).

The "editing" portion of it would have the user place and remove a series of 3D world waypoint markers, and then the "play" portion would have automated entities navigating between those waypoints in the order they were entered, such as "patrolling" between them.

For the actual interactive portion, you have to navigate your player between the patrolling robots without being hit by them (for example).

Write the positional data of the waypoints to PlayerPrefs (or a file), and read it back in, and make some support for erasing waypoints, reordering them, etc., and when you have successfully done those tiny baby steps towards an in-game editor, you will have a really good idea of what you are getting into here.

 

Relevant to in-game editors, I just saw this link go by on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/3facwd/ingame_level_editor_tutorial_series/

I have not watched any of it, but it reminded me of your post earlier this week.