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That question is so broad it's impossible to answer. There are many opcodes which can perform a variety of functions, and you are mostly limited by your imagination and creativity. Doing some things is a lot easier on GC beause of its extra opcodes, but it is often possible to come up with solutions that work on Ver.2. Certain things are unfortunately impossible; for example, the opcodes that allow you to make players invincible or give them status effects like Shifta or Zalure are only available in GC, and there's no way to simulate those opcodes on Ver.2.

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NPCs can walk through locked doors. You would have to have the NPC disband from your team to make it stand on the other side of the door. You could then have it follow you again if you open the door. Rares don't drop in quests, so there's no harm in spawning forced rare enemies, but quests have no control over drops.

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The maps with fake walls are special maps that are never used in free play. Sega added them to Ver.2 specifically for quests. Forest 1 and 2 have only one map of course, while Cave 1, Cave 3, Mine 1, and Mine 2 have six configurations. Cave 2, Ruins 1, Ruins 2, and Ruins 3 have five configurations. Be aware that you cannot use map six in Ultimate mode, unless whoever plays your quest uses the Ultimate Map Fix patch on PSO PC. Using map six in Ultimate is impossible on the Dreamcast. Of course, fake walls aren't the only way to hide spawn points for monsters. A spawn point can have as large or as small of a radius as you want, so you can stick it in a corner somewhere with a radius as large as a button, and unless a player steps in that exact spot, the monsters tied to that spawn point won't appear.

I just wondered what is needed to write a DC ver.2 quest and if there is some how-to on that.

I have some nice ideas for quest which i would like to create.

Schthack's quest editor is a public download now on the SCHTServ forums, although using it isn't exactly intuitive.

I'm of a similar mood, but the slightest mention of "code" puts me off on the whole thing. Now that I got an internet connection again (though a flimsy one at that before I upgrade to a new one), I found myself looking for something that would let me mod PSO PC. I downloaded that quest tool and even opened - what I think were - PSO quest files to see if I could understand what made them tick. Which I... Didn't. It's not so much the op codes as at least descriptions for those, even if sometimes vague, can be found online; it's trying to guess at how it all goes together that gets me. I wish Sega had released more quests like The Value of Money; longer, more elaborate takes on character interaction, maybe some mystery waiting to be solved on P2 or across Ragol. But I couldn't even make sense of what governed enemy spawns, let alone making the quest active at the Guild. It doesn't seem like I'm going to make a spiritual successor, play mechanics-wise, to Soul of Steel anytime soon, for instance :/

I did find some tool that let me see and extract character textures from the game, so now I'm thinking it may be possible to create new textures and reinsert them (aka, replace the originals, doubly useful because I can't think of any way to test them other than using the character creator and it's camera tools), which is something I might try doing when (or if) I figure out how. I was tinkering with some visual designs for a couple of classes that combined PSO, PSU and PSZero's aesthetics (though not much from PSU, since I find it pretty terrible), so I might fare better there.

Texture replacement has been possible for almost as long as quest editing; I use one of the GC outfits for my FOnewm on PC. You are correct that it's only possible to replace existing textures, and you are the only person who will see the changes you make.

Soul of Steel is the second-most complicated quest in PSO, and it's the most complicated one on Ver.2. The most complicated quest of all is Seat of the Heart, but we can't play that one. Story quests are always a pain, since they usually involve NPCs.

Yeah, that's usually my problem with modding - I usually start with the worst possible ideas, the trickier ones

I'm going to study the file format and texture position on the files to see what I can do. The character ones (like HUmar, for instance) are a bit different from the likes of, say, Quake 3, because they're actually split up from a "main" texture body; while enemy parts like De Rol Le are more similar to what I encountered in the past.

Yesterday I also went nuts trying to "decode" the neon writings that appear on the floor of Mines 2, in that large area with an S-shaped corridor. It also kinda helped that I have PSO's font installed, so when in doubt, I wrote down what I thought it meant then scaled it down to the same size, and went with what was similar.



Other than numbers - fairly obvious to see - the texture size is pretty small so with some guesswork, I only found what seemed liked the words "danger" and "sonic" in PSO's alphabet. I also realized that the "Danger/No Trespassing" sign on Caves 3 is inverted in-game.

Haha, nice. I never knew that. My favourite is how the arena on Dark Falz 3 says "Dark Falz" everywhere, both on the light ring itself and on the light ribbons that float through the air.