[WIP] Quest Path Map

[Moriarty]

I've decided to try and visualise the quest path possibilities in SW3. The modders among you will probably be aware this is quite a task - there are almost 200 seperate "quests" in the quests directory! In reality there are "only" 20 missions, but a lot of ways they can play out.

So in the spirit of laziness, I've automated it.

After a few hours work (I'm on a go-slow this morning it seems) I've got all of the data extracted textually and created a PNG of it to try and help with visualisation.
This was created using stock SW3.


Warning - these images are big in pixels (only 50-100 kB filesize): About 7000 wide and 1100 high. For rather obvious reasons I'm not inlining the images into this post directly.

Version 1: http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/4609/88781349.png
Uses mission numbers for column headers


Version 2: http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/6241/73838913.png
Uses directory name for column headers. I've not gone looking for mission-names-proper yet.


Now I just need to figure out how to turn that into a nice map.

Comments/suggestions welcome. I figure these versions may be of more interest to modders than regular players.
As noted on them, they're released under the cc-by-sa 3.0 license, so feel free to edit them (more likely to be relevant for later releases).

Moriarty

[Goblin Wizard]

You're right. 1. It's a lot of work. 2. It's totally useless for normal players (without the ingame names/titles/dialog options).
But.. I'm curious why are doing this? Are you going to make same new quests or modify existing ones?

It's somewhat useful - I have some side quests lying around I never got around to implementing (for example, if you take the escort mission with Alex early on, I planned for an extra encounter and dialog later in the endgame in Alex's path) - but the main problem is I don't fully understand the scripting.

[Moriarty]

Thanks for the feedback.
I'm doing it because it's become clear there's a hell of a lot of content behind the game and I'd like to figure out how to get to as much of it as possible while re-playing as little as possible. Personally I'm not over-keen on replaying things for some reason, well, not in the short-term anyway.

I'm hoping to end up with some sort of computer-generated flow-chart like-thing with all the missions on - that would be useable to regular players if it was then manually edited with text saying what choice led to the path, which shouldn't be too much effort.
That however is phase two, which may be a little delayed.

As much as I dislike replaying games, the different paths in SW3 are sufficiently different that there isn't too much overlap, at least in the endgame. Gripes with the game engine aside, this is one of the better branching story games I've played. One of the best imo. There are rare few games which make me bother replaying a different storyline - if they even bother to offer the option to do so.