[CF List] Gnarg

[Andreas Vogl]

Kimmo Hoikka wrote:
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      Big size monsters have some weaknesses with spells currently, the
     
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      best example beeing the notorious lorkas the fallen who kills himself
     
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      all the time with his powerfull spells, perhaps thats not the intent,
     
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      rather makes the map a bit too easy sometimes...
     
     
You didn't mention the best point: Lorkas is killing himself
with attacktypes that he's completely immune to.

Assuming he's not attacking himself with melee,
His spells only do fire, cold, poison, magic - to all of which
Lorkas is 100% resistant.

This bug has been known for a good while, but nobody could come
up with a fix yet. I suspect it might be related to this old
stats-glich in the monster code: When a monster applies any piece
of equipment, it's stats get replaced by those from the default arch
or sth. (See below)

The fact that Lorkas has suicide-tendecies doesn't pose a
direct leak to balance, as his guardians (Rancid, Vultoor)
are mean enough. However, I do agree the bug is annoying.

Andreas V.

Here is an old excerpt from the cf-devel archives:
Andreas V. (me) wrote:
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      > When a monster with special resistances
     
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      > (special = not identical with archetype) has the "can_use_armour 1"
     
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      > and can_apply/will_apply set, this screws the monster's resistances.
     
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      > When applying an armour, the monster seems to revert to archetype's
     
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      > resistances (or maybe even none).
     
     
Mark W. replied:
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      This applies for more than just resistances - basically all attributes
     
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      (str, dex, ...)  The problem is difficult to fix.  Basically, to fix this
     
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      would require a second store of values as stored in the map file.  This
     
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      could perhaps be done via a dynamic archetype - if we notice some values
     
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      being changed, we allocate another archetype, update the objects arch
     
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      to that, and set a flag so we know we have already done this (and to free
     
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      that archetype when we free the object).
     
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      The reason this happens is that when a creature applies something (note
     
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      the both monsters and players use the same function), we go back to the
     
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      archetype values to use for base and just add/subtract onto stuff.  This
     
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      is much more accurate, and in some ways the only way to go (since
     
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      resistances are not strictly additive, I am not sure if you could
     
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      accurately remove resistances without recalculating them all).