Pre-AOS & XMLSpawner2

[The Real Keith]

So I started working on a RunUO server with my buddy @Moody. The concept was simply pre-AoS mechanics with as much high seas content we can get away with. We worked for a while getting everything tweaked and we began working on boats. It just wasn't happening, so we checked out servUO and were immediately satisfied with the results and the community.

Here is the problem and trust me, I was warned about this. I was told that ServUO is better equipped to deal with aos + servers and not pre-aos servers. Im my mind I thought, well I'll just set the expansion to none and we're good to go right? Super wrong.

After setting the expansion to none and tweaking various game mechanics, I started to dig deeper when discovering XMLSpawner2, I read about what it does and how it works and thought it was really awesome but all of the included features built into ServUO is preventing me from achieving my goal of a true pre-aos shard.

I tried commenting things out, I tried deleting custom content, I tried a lot of things. Ultimately I died a little inside.

TLDR;

XMLSpawner2 is preventing me from making a pre-aos shard because of all of it's aos functionality.
I'm using ServUO over RunUO because of it's core and it's ships, smooth movement, etc.
I need some advice on how I can achieve snuffing out some of this XMLSpawner2 stuff while keeping it intact and stable.

 

[Moody]

As the brains of the operation (check current mood <----), I'll be back in a couple of days to give it a proper go.

Might not be in the development interest of ServUO, but would pre expansion flags be a good idea? That way you can get periodical shards a lot easier (Core.ML.Pre) would flag true for every expansion before ML. Plus it'll make the whole development side of it a lot easier when OSI adds a new feature to a current expansion (if !Core.CurrentExpansion.Pre) would mean that every faction before the current does not get this new feature.

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here, would be nice to be corrected!

 

[The Real Keith]

XMLSpawner2 seems like it has "bloated" ServUO. Don't take it the wrong way, XMLSpawner2 is awesome and I intend to use it and it's functions but is it really nessesary to add all of the random stuff, like the VIP system or the Special Foods which don't even work out of the box? Why not make those separate files on the repo or resources page and allow people to pick and choose what they want to add?

My issue is, everything is wired together to be dependent on all of it. I can't remove 1 thing without breaking 5 things.

 

[Lokai]

Part of the "problem" as I see it, is visibility. As a shard owner, you could probably care less if your Admin account can see stuff that is not true "Pre-AOS", but you DO want your players to be shielded from it, correct?

So, rather than "Removing" everything that doesn't fit your model, why not consider "Hiding" it instead?

One example, there are about 30 commands that players and GMs can run that have to do with XML this or XML that. So, go into those scripts, and simply upgrade the AccessLevel required to view those commands to Administrator. Voila, problem (by virtue of invisibility) solved.

 

[The Real Keith]

Thats basically what I've been doing. That's what I figured I had to do since everything depends heavily on XML, it's just a matter of finding it all. I'm mostly concerned about mechanics and items. Things like spell damage, swing timers, calculations from other skills, artifacts. It looked like there were many files inside of XML that handled it.