[CF-Devel] altars

[Mark Wedel]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2001, dnh wrote:

>
     
      Interestingly it seems the code should move the player in the opposite
     
     >
     
      direction from where he/she came.
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      move_player(pl,absdir(pl->facing + 4)); /* back him off the way he came.
     
     >
     
      */
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      Why did I not get this affect?
     
     
 It reverses the direction you are currently facing. This may not be direction
you approached the altar from.

Consider the case below:


 |
 |----
 A
 |----
 |

 Area to the left is a big room, and the altar is where the A is,
and the passage is single width.

 When you first come to the altar, the code above would work fine.
But suppose the case is now:

 |
M|----
 A
 |----
 |

 With M being the monster you are attacking in melee.  Reverse the direction
does no good, as it just puts you into a wall

 Probably the easiest fix is to require something more than just praying
to be a following.  Maybe you need to do something like
'use_skill praying become_follower'

 or the like.

 Or the idea of only some altars doing automatic conversions (as MT suggest)
is completely reasonable.  It should be hard to come up with some flag
that does that.  Altars found in dungeons could still assist in getting
grace and other benefits, but would not change your religion (praying
over one may still have bad effects, like reducign grace).

 I'm not sure making conversion from one religion to another for free is
a good thing.  I could then see characters saying 'hmm.  About to go
on the dragon quest - let me follow the god that gives me really good
fire protection.   Ok, done with that, now time for undead, so let me
worship the undead destroying god', etc.  Making the altars harder to get to
may not make it quite so bad, but do realize that experienced players will
quickly learn where these altars are, and they will probably end up on
web pages or other spoiler information, so effectively everyone will know
where they are.

 This is one reason for the row of gods in the start town.  The other is
that gods are very important, and before when the altars showed up randomly,
it could be a real pain to find the altar that you really want.

 Now adding in advanced temples could be interesting.  You've gained some
levels, and to progress your learning, you need to visit the high temple
of sorig at the mountain tops.

 The actual effect of this could be mean several things.  Each altar
could have a level, and this transfers to what power of benefits you
may get from that altar (so for the ones in scorn, praying over them is
not going to get you much in the way of special benefits).  This level
could also be used to determine the maximum preist level spells you can
cast - so maybe you can cast up to level 5 from the temples in scorn,
but the high temple of sorig lets you cast up to level 15 (praying
on a lower level altar does not reset this value lower, but to be
able to cast these high level spells means you need to make at least
one journey to the higher level temple).

 Of course, this is a lot of work - new maps would need to be done,
changes to altar and praying code, etc.