[CF-Devel] Accidents and neglected players

[Peter Mardahl]

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      Peter Mardahl wrote:
     
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      > In the end, I went with a kluge which has the effect you see.  Would you
     
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      > please take a crack at removing that kluge?
     
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       Either privately or publicly, can you say what you tried and the end result?
     
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       Otherwise, I have a feeling other people might try the same things you did,
     
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      which ends up being a waste of time.
     
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I tried many things, most of which didn't work, so I don't really remember
them all, but here is my best recollection:

1)  Emergency map and start map seemed distinct in the code.  Starting
map seemed to be read from the archetypes.  I modified the archetypes
file to make the start map be my new hall of selection.  This failed,
either by crash, or by corruption of either the start map or the city
map.  (Can't remember which of those three it was.)

I figured some interaction between start map and emergency map was
causing it so I gave up on doing that.  I did NOT want to change emergency
map.

2)  Rather than insert the player into city/city as usual I tried to
"enter exit" them into the HallOfSelection as soon as they finished with
their race.  This caused a corrupt HallOfSelection.

3)  The present implementation sticks a Word of Recall to the HallOfSelection
in the player.
Players get inserted into city/city as before, THEN pulled out and into
HallOfSelection.  *This* worked.

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       But the other problem is that right now the starting city is used more for j
     
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      where to start a new character - it is also where characters return to in not
     
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      permadeath mode.  I have a feeling that we really don't want to have characte
     
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      return to the class selection map.
     
     
No, no char should EVER see the HallOfSelection twice.

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       I personally like the idea of characters (in not permadeath mode) returning 
     
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      a building (like the city hall) in scorn.  Someplace where you will basically
     
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      pretty much only if you died - your not going to typically go there.
     
     
Agreed.

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       As far as it being a non killing area:  If its easy to prevent 'accidental'
     
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      killings, probably a good idea.  By this, I mean someone accidentally casting
     
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      spell the summoned monsters into the area, and left, with those monsters
     
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      becoming hostile towards other and killing them or the like.
     
     
Well, someone proposed no_magic.  I agree.  However, this doesn't
address the issue of the guy who leaves his char logged in, and 
his char dies 100x from starvation before he comes back.

I'm not too worried about malicious players, but rather accidents.
An accidental high-level burning hands spell might fry a beginning 
player 5-6 times.  Ball lightning was horribly deadly too before
I removed its ability to track players.


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       But it strikes me that no matter what we do, other malicious players can alw
     
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     ays
     
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      set up lightning walls or the like that try to kill the player as they appear
     
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      Maybe not in the city hall map in this example, but perhaps as they exit the
     
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      city hall they get zapped then.  And if you prohibit it from the city itself,
     
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      then perhaps the spaces around the city, etc.
     
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       One solution for this at least in terms of appearing in the city hall would 
     
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      to have savebeds there, so if players do get zapped as they leave city hall,
     
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      they would re-appear in city hall and could then send a message to the admin 
     
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      some other friendly person that can take care of the situation), and go to th
     
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      save bed and quit the game.  But with the current save mechanism, you can sav
     
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      anywhere you want anyways.
     
     
Yeah, but not necessarily before you get killed 5x and lose 68% of your 
experience.

PeterM