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Gameplay · guide

Dynamic events and world bosses

A quest stage with the scope moved off one player and onto a realm — contribution tiers instead of tap-ownership, monotone scaling, and success and failure both leading somewhere.

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What it is

A dynamic event is a quest stage owned by a realm rather than by a player: everybody's kills count towards one number, everybody who did enough is paid, and both success and failure lead somewhere. A DynamicEventDirector runs them and walks the chains. A world boss is one of these with a schedule.

What it is for

The Guild Wars 2 shape. A camp that falls, is retaken and falls again is a place things happen to rather than a list of things to do — and the mechanism for that is one dictionary and one loop, since the objectives are already the quest half's.

Using it

Author the objectives exactly as a quest stage's. Add a duration, tiers and the two branches. Begin one, Tick the director, and read Stepped to see what an ending started.

⚠ Contribution tiers, not tap-ownership. Deciding who "gets" an event by first hit, most damage or killing blow is what makes a world boss a race and a passer-by an intruder. Contribute is also how a game credits work no objective counts — healing, reviving, repairing a wall.

⚠ Scaling is monotone by construction: one clamped linear term, no table and no per-band override. A shape a designer can bend is one that can bend downwards, and an event that got easier when a tenth player arrived is a mechanic for griefing it.

⚠ Rescaling raises and never lowers, so a player logging out cannot complete an objective.

⚠ The clock is checked after the objectives. Finishing on the very tick the duration runs out succeeded; the work was done, and the other order reads as the server cheating.

⚠ A chain may cycle and nothing tries to prevent it. What is bounded is one resolution: DynamicEventDirector.MaximumChainDepth is a backstop against content whose events all end the instant they begin, not a limit on how long a chain may be.

⚠ An event already running is not started again. Two failures both branching to "retake the camp" is ordinary authoring; the other reading gives two instances with half the participants each.

⚠ The schedule is authored here and enacted elsewhere. Doc 28 puts a world boss's schedule in Live.Instances.Cluster because it is fleet-wide: a schedule one realm decides is a boss every shard sees differently. Nothing in this library looks at a clock.

Examples

A camp that can fall:

yaml
# Assets/Events/camp-defence.vxdef!DynamicEventDefinitiondisplayName: Defend the campscene: maps/queensdaleduration: 60objectives:  - { type: Kill, count: 10, targetTags: [ Creature.Bandit ] }scaling: { baseParticipants: 5, perParticipant: 0.2, maximum: 3 }tiers:  - { displayName: Gold, minimum: 50, rewards: { experience: 900 } }  - { displayName: Silver, minimum: 20 }onFailure: [ events/camp-retake ]   # and retake's onSuccess points back here

Running the chain:

csharp
using Vixen.Gameplay;using Vixen.Gameplay.Quests;static class Camp {    public static DynamicEventDirector Start(QuestLibrary library, GameplayEventBus bus) {        var director = new DynamicEventDirector(library, bus);        // Success and failure both lead somewhere, which is the whole point.        director.Stepped += step => Announce(step);        director.Begin(DefId.From("events/camp-defence"));        return director;    }    static void Announce(EventChainStep step) { }}

Paying everybody who did enough:

csharp
using Vixen.Gameplay;using Vixen.Gameplay.Quests;static class Payout {    public static int Settle(DynamicEventInstance instance) {        if (instance.Status != DynamicEventStatus.Succeeded) {            return 0;        }        var paid = 0;        // One player's tier is not another player's loss — everyone who reached one gets it.        foreach (var (participant, contribution) in instance.Contributions) {            if (instance.Template.TierFor(contribution) is { } tier) {                Give(participant, tier.Reward);                paid++;            }        }        return paid;    }    static void Give(PlayerId participant, QuestReward reward) { }}

See also

Next

  • Quests, stages and objectives — A quest is stages, a stage is objectives, and an objective is a subscription with a tag query — so it costs nothing when nothing dies.
  • Gameplay events — A verb, a subject and a place, posted by whoever it happened to and filtered by whoever cares — the half of "features meet through tags and events" that tags alone could not carry.
  • The quest and event-chain editor — An editable model over the definition, and a chain walked into a spanning tree because an event chain is cyclic by design and both of the engine's graph models refuse a cycle.