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Tips on Dungeon Sharing: Spread the Doom Around

By: Rob Bartel

One of Infinite Dungeons' most innovative features is the ability to share your favourite dungeons with other players. At any point during your adventure, the owner of the module can choose to export the dungeon using the Dungeon Journal item or the dungeon entrance doorway. When you do so, every single aspect of your current playthrough is saved out to NWN's database system. Quest progress, area exploration, puzzle states, high scores - everything is tracked and accurately preserved in the \database\ folder of your NWN root directory.

Within the \database\ folder, you'll be able to recognize exported dungeons by their ID_9999 filename where "9999" is a unique, 4-digit, identifying number from 1 to 9999. As with all NWN databases, three separate files will carry that ID_9999 filename: ID_9999.CDX is the index or summary of the database information, ID_9999.DBF contains the actual data itself, and ID_9999.FPT describes each of the variable types being saved. All three files are required so, to avoid confusion, it's best to zip them all together before sending them to your friends or posting them to NWVault for others to download.

To import a dungeon into Infinite Dungeons, unzip the three database files into the \database\ folder of your NWN root directory. If you already have another database with the same name, you can change the 4-digit identifying number to avoid overwriting previous databases (remember that all three versions of the file must be renamed). Infinite Dungeons will recognize the new database when you search for dungeons to import. The next time you play the module, you can use the Dungeon Journal or the dungeon entrance doorway to import an existing dungeon into the game. You will then be presented with a list of dungeons currently in memory and/or available within the database folder. All dungeons are listed by their in-game name, but the database filename ("ID_9999") is provided in brackets to ensure you'll recognize any recently added dungeons.

When you import a dungeon, you will be presented with a series of questions to determine how much of the dungeon information you want to keep. For instance, you might only want to keep the general layout of the dungeon, or perhaps you want to keep all of the same puzzles and quests and combat but with all of the content reset to its starting state. You might want to retain the previous high scores or erase them and create your own, or perhaps you want your dungeon map to benefit from your previous adventures within this particular dungeon's depths. Once you've explored the dungeon to your heart's content, you can export it all over again for future replay or to send to another friend and share the fun.

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