[CF-Devel] few things (Weapons stuff and PR)

[dnh at hawthorn.csse.monash.edu.au]

Firstly, I have been playing around with Mark's PR stuff and I am very
impressed. Everyones fears about balance are really misfounded, it is
actually harder to begin with (you need two items just to get what would
usually take 1). I agree weapon_magic shouldn't be there but other than
that I see no problems. It is really good for Vuns of characters as now we
can make characters start off with say -20 vun instead of -100 thus being
a minor annoyance but little more. With this power balancing the gods
should be alot simpler, thanks alot Mark, Great job.


I have greatly appreciated everyones comments on my proposals for the
general speed and weapon code. I have come up with a few ideas that might
make you feel abit better. Firstly, with multiple weapons, I have enlisted
the help of my brother (hopefully) and we aim to change the whole attack
code, so that a player can attack with more than one weapon seperately, at
the same time =). What this means is as Mark suggested, you have a dagger
and an axe, the dagger will hit fast, will the axe will only hit slowly.
What this will allow us to do is completely prevent the whole averaging
and adding rubbish that I thought I would have to do. Hopefully, we can do
things like give the Q a permenent extra weapon, "Tail Whip" that
constantly attacks and is permanently on when a Q fights. This also could
be employed for some special attack skills, fire touch, karate, punching.
Considering Kicking is different to Fire touch, a Fire born that knows
Karate (I know that sounds stupid =) will attack with that and firetouch
at the same time... What do you think? This will also apply to
attack_types, thus preventing getting two weapons and creating a massively
powerful combo. Also, the option may come that a player could wield two
shields. Crazy as this may sound, it may turn out to be fine, or a massive
spot for abuse (two good shields in combo might create some unforeseen
unbalances), should I ignore this possibility and write pure code, then
balance any items which may abuse the system. Or do I create a block so
only one shield can ever be equiped?

On the speed stuff, Mark is absolutely right, you can't really give speed
in metres per second. My main issue was with weapon speed anyway, and that
was with the numbers used (0 to 20) or whatever. I think it should be from
0 to 100 (or greater) which is % of the max speed you fight with your
hands. Really I couldn't care what the units are, but the current system
for designating weapon speed is very limited. I would like to know how the
weapon speed actually affects the final speed, I can't seem to find to
code that handles it =|. My feeling is that the weapon should affect the
speed of the weapon only by the Dex, Str and level of the player. It
should not be a matter of maximum speed because I think that is too
restrictive (A player who has extremely good weapon skills will still only
be able to swing a certain weapon as fast as a player of a much lower
skill and str as long as they are both at max).

For the unlimited quivers, I wouldn't mind that at all. My thoughts would
be you would want the quiver to act as the arrow, and everytime it is
fired it replicates in your inventory (Although the player wont see this).
Then you could try and define how fast a player can fire out these magical
arrows by setting a cooldown period on the quiver (arrow). So the player
will still be limited by the fact that while the arrows are infinite, they
can't be fired as fast as normal arrows... if of course the quiver had a
magic value of say +5 I would think it would fire alot faster. I leave
this project open to anyone, but I think it would greatly improve the
'FUN' rating of archery no end. Crossfire is one of the few games that
actually keeps track of arrows, I personally think that detracts from
archery (even if it is much more realistic). Adding this quiver as a
normal item that is rare, and giving a special one in some quest would be
appropriate I think.

dnh (AKA Darth_bob)

ps. Isn't this very exciting, I think crossfire is really moving now. I
would say we are well on our way to version 1, which I dare say is even
more exciting. Soon, we are going to have several projects all being
'beta' tested throughout the community... PR, gods rebalance, multiple
handed weapons and Andreas' (red_blaze's) maps and savebeds stuff. My
thanks to
Pete and Mark especially for their massive amounts of work, and to Jay and
his new god intervention code. Thanks also to anyone else who has been
helping of late (MichToen and Andreas) I am really excited by this
progress.