NWNX/MySql Persistent Storage?

[Ciretose420]

I'm sure this has been asked before. But I cannot find anything on vault, google, or these forums, that fits my needs. Can someone point me in the direction of a NWNX MySql persistent chest system, that isn't based on the markshire design?
Preferably, I'd like to have someone to chat with who knows scripting and would be willing to answer my questions about designing my own chest system. If you're interested in assisting me with this, send me a PM on here.

Thanks guys.

[Baaleos]

its not actually very hard to persistently store items.

The easiest way to store items, is to use a mule creature to hold the items.

AddHenchman and OpenInventory are the functions of interest.
Pack his inventory full of items, then when done, use

StoreCampaignObject on the creature.

This will store the creature, along with his items to the database.

This is alot easier than storing each item individually

RetrievePersistentObject or RetrieveCampaignObject etc - will re-summon the creature, at which point you can re-add the creature to party, and then open the inventory.

[Ciretose420]

I realize that's the easiest way. But I've seen it done with static chests. And I think it looks better. How much harder is it to do with a regular chest?

[Ravine]

Easier. I've done it with virusman's chest-storing functions in nwnx ( http://www.nwnx.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1083&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15 ), no need for 'mules' anymore (at least under linux). But probably you have to design it yourself to suit your needs.

[Baaleos]

a Chest or a Mule creature would probably work just as well.
Anything with an inventory should have the same capabilities.

Even if they didnt, you could simple spawn the chest,
on the onClosing event, transfer items from the chest to a back-end mule creature. and then persistently store the mule creature.

Or
Just store the chest directly.

[PlasmaJohn]

We've had a lot of trouble with a placeable inventory based system. The OnClose event is unreliable. When you have stackable items, partial stacks automatically recombine when added to an inventory. Unfortunately the OnDisturbed event fires -after- that happens making it impossible to keep our counts accurate which would often cause massive item duplication.

We have mostly abandoned this method and have adopted a dialog based approach.

[virusman]

Ravine was referring to the latest additions to NWNX ODBC, with them you can store the entire placeable with its inventory and properties, without using OnDisturbed and handling every item individually.
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[PlasmaJohn]

Neat idea... but.

Writing out the whole inventory just rubs me the wrong way. Yeah, I know, NWN often forces us into extreme measures.

Our menu based chests were a byproduct of a persistent merchant project. They produce an alphabetized list of the contents and we're not limited to the standard placeable inventory capacity (ours can be any number of 'squares'). As part of it, I added a self-serve menu where the owner can upgrade the capacity if they have the gold to pay for it without having to submit a Player Housing revision.

Somebody told me that they preferred the realism of the graphical chest. *shrugs* Ok, so it's not to everybody's taste. The only feature missing is the red highlighting telling you that you can't use an item.

[Ravine]

Hm, not really 'writing out the whole inventory'. Simply save the whole placeable-object. It only takes one row in the DB per user. I assume, your approach is to save every item individually to the DB.
As i understand, your conversation-driven bank lists the contents by item-name. For example, we are using item-creation scripts, which generates random 'fantasy-names', so the properties must have to be seen by players.

[PlasmaJohn]

[maddogfargo]

Based on what I've read you cannot save a placeable chest to the database in a blob field. It has to be a creature. This is why some storage systems use a mule creature with the Mimic chest creature appearance.

It is simple, and I used it for 5+ years on NWNDB which is FoxPro DBF based with no issues. Routine maintenance repacks helped greatly.

Also used the NWNDB for player housing, and it supported one player who loved to push the limits having a castle with 800+ placeable objects stored to the database. Again for 4-5 years with no incidents of corruption or problems.

This worked fine for us, but the flipside is I would have preferred to use SQL for better performance. A lot of the systems would need to be re-written though so we just decided to use it until it broke and turns out nothing broke.
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[Tsais]

Regarding this comment about saving a placeable and its inventory (using NWNX2):

[virusman]

Here is a snippet from my persistency system code:

[Tsais]

Thanks for the examples! Unfortunately, I'm still not able to get it working. Here's the simple test I tried:

[Terra_777]

Can only store creatures and or items. 'x2_medium_Chest3' looks like a peaceable.
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