On 04/17/10 12:05 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote: > Hello. > >> Quite some time ago, it was enabled on Metalforge but removed due to >> player complaints. >> >> What people didn't like about it was merging issues in their inventory >> window. They would (for instance) have 8 different Boots of Speed all >> because they would not merge together to be Boots of Speed x8; the >> material types (different hides; dragon, wolf, serpent, etc.) was >> determined to have caused this. > > My opinion is that almost all archetypes should have a fixed precise material, > eg fixed wood, or metal, or other material. > Using random ones should be limited to specific cases, including maybe quests > items...
I agree. But if random ones were really desired, it could be done via treasurelists. for example, if you wanted gold swords, silver swords, bronze, etc, as a random treasure for a quest, this could be done as a treasurelist which lists those different archetypes. One of the other problems/issues with the material code is that you would fine stuff in all different materials, but from a player perspective, it had no value. The item attributes for the different materials was pretty much always trivial, so the fact you had a pine bow vs an oak bow had no real value (there wasn't any compelling reason to want one of those vs the other - more likely what is more important is which ever one was more magical). If alchemy/crafting skills were heavily used and made use of that, this might of had more relevance. But few players use the smithing skills, and I'm not even sure if in most cases there was any recipes that used the various specific materials. > > > >> The goal or hope of the original developer for this feature was to >> implement task quests in the game like find a NPC a stone amulet, a gold >> sword, serpent skin leather armour, etc. and then collect a reward. > > Indeed, this could be done. > This can already be done, though, through the 'materialname' and 'material' > things. > > > > Currently, right now, the material is used for two things: > - when animate weapon is used, to give resistances to the golem > - for throw saves to know if an item is destroyed or not by an attack IMO, a lot more could be done with material, but that would really get tied into the alchemy/crafting area, and is a different conversation. But just brainstorming on that (not suggesting that anyone hop on doing this, but just recording while fresh in my mind): All mundane (non magical/normal objects) are going to be made up of some number of base materials. All the base material (wood, iron, stone, etc) would come from someplace - in the forest, you could harvest wood. One could add some type of mining to harvest stone/iron from dungeons. With that, you could then make the basic items - an axe for example. The materials in the finished items would also be what items you would get if you recycled the materials - for that axe, you might be a piece of wood and hunk of iron when you salvage it. Players should be able to make all these basic items - now for the most part, they probably would not want to. Now from the game design point of view, you would look at the different possible materials and determine if that material is significant enough to be its own object. For example, one might determine that an oak bow and ash bow are close enough there is no reason to differentiate them, so you just have generic bows made from wood. But one might say that yew is special enough that it gives wc+1, so that is given its own archetype. In this way, maybe bows show up in 2 materials, vs half a dozen with the old material code, but the 2 varieties are different enough that there is value in that yew bow What this does give is also base crafting needed for these items - for that bow, you would need wood and maybe a strip of leather. If you had a piece of yew wood, you would make a good bow. A lot of these recipes would also be intrinsic - in that the player/character would know the recipe without having found it - if I'm building a bookcase, I don't automatically fail if I don't have enough wood - I'd realize pretty quickly I need more wood and get some more - same would be true for a lot of these basic crafting. With the basics done, you can now start to work on items using magical materials. For example, you may say that mithril is 50% lighter than steel. So if chainmail normally takes 10 chunks of iron, you would need 10 chunks of mithril to make mithril chainmail, which would be like that iron chainmail except for 50% lighter (which would adjust some other things like spell encumbrance also). Using dragon hides instead of cow leather hide gives you better leather armor - maybe some resistances, better AC, etc. The problem with all this is that it is a lot of work. But the crafting arena needs a lot of work (or did last I looked), and needs an overall good design - these basic formula give some way for characters to build up exp in those skills to make better items, and by starting with the the basic materials, characters would have no problem finding enough wood, iron, etc, from the hordes of monsters to craft to their hearts content. _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire