oh, boy... i guess that was the barrel of monkeys. an NPC, or Non-Player Character, is someone that exists within the Gamemaster's world, but is not "run" by a Player. let's think computer games here for a moment. take Halflife, for instance. you, the Player, are "running" (quite literally in that game...) a "Player Character". the computer programmers, game writers and scripters can be collectively called a "Gamemaster" (in paper and pncil games, there's usually only one of them.) they have created a world for you to adventure in. the supporting characters and monsters (including those head-crab dudes) are refered to as Non-Player Characters (note the "non" part there...), people the Gamemaster has created to populate the world. NPC's serve an important function as they provide something other than adversaries for the Players to interact with, thus elevating Role-Playing above Wargaming (in a sense.) however, adversaries are also NPC's. basically anyone within the Gamemaster's world that the players can interact with AND is not being played by a Player, is considered an NPC. please note that not every NPC in the world needs full fleshing out. just the most important ones. trying to populate my current gaming world (with it's 600 million inhabitants) would take more time and energy than i will have in my lifetime. so the idea here is two-fold : 1. set up the SQL tables, making sure that the primary key is a unique number (which i'll use to identify the NPC), populate a few records and test the connectivity (to win2k or linux, whatever my personal box is booted into at the time...) 2. create a PERL, Python or C++ program to randomly "roll up" a veritable butt-load of NPC's and populate the database. i'll hook it up to one of those name-generators available on the web so i don't have to pour through the phone book looking for names (which i do when i GM a game. i think my players are getting sick of NPC's named "bob") i'll have the program generate 10,000-odd NPC's for the database and then perhaps write a program to randomly grab a selected number of NPC's. since each NPC has a unique number, if i find one i really like, or who has become a major part of the story-line, i can just write down the number along with it's name and pull it up with a simple select statement.. if it works the way i planned, i'd definitely consider hooking it up to a web-server so you or your kid can try it out (for that matter, anyone else who wanted to play with it too.) thanks for the info too. just FYI, even being a VBA programmer, i wouldn't touch Acce$$ with a forty foot pole tipped with dynamite. it's probably the crappiest program i have ever seen. VBA in Excel may be M$ and leave a lot to be desired, but at least the code is clean, easy to follow and not scattered to the four winds (that's a bit misleading, i'll rephrase that : "at least the code has the CAPACITY to be clean and easy to follow. in Acce$$, you're pretty much stuck writing shitty code)... > -----Original Message----- > From: Ralph Zeller [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 5:33 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [EUG-LUG:1552] Re: you, SQL, and a barrel of monkeys > > At 09:41 AM 7/11/2001, Justin Bengtson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >background : > >i'm a gamer geek. i had this wild idea last night amid a heat-induced > >trance of keeping a SQL database of NPC's. also, my employer is gearing > me > >up for SQL programming, which makes this an excellent side-project. > > Justin, > > My son is a gamer, and I know he is always talking about NPC's. For those > of us who have no clue, what are they? Non-Player-Characters, right? but > beyond that, could you help me understand the basics? Thanks... > > By the way, I prefer MySQL. It has been around awhile, the ODBC driver > works well with Acce$$, and there seem to be ways around its shortcomings > for my needs. The tables need lots of space, but you can locate them > anywhere. > > Ralph
