[CF-Devel] More Lore

[crossfire-devel-admin at archives.real-time.com]

Ok, more thoughts on lore:

For generic lore in the arches I believe it is established that it is sufficient to populate the lore <> endlore field with weighted values, e.g.

arch orc
<..>
lore
@5 Orcs are the foul brethern to goblins.
@4 Dwarves and Orcs have a strong hatred of one another.
...
endlore

Whereby the object name, level and other information could be grabbed from the arch if necessary too.  If you customize a creature you need to grab this out of the maps however, e.g. if you make a special dragon, you can put in special lore, it is stored on the map.  This has to be picked up during the map lore collection however.  This would capture the arch name and name if the object had one (have to remember to check for no name...) but I don't know how stuff like level and such can be easily snagged with a script if it has not been changed (look up the arch?- yuck)

For map and quest type information this is not going to work, some maps have nothing of interest, and some like the city maps have many many points of interest.  If you were to go with a header file, you would need to account for different topics.  Also this information can be more tricky to manage since it is more specific.  This is why I think a specific maplore arch object would be good in addition to the lore field.  As an invisible object, map makers can put many different maplore arches on the map and they can be pretty chock full of info.  Say name is primary key, the mesg field can be used for a list of other key words perhaps.   Other fields can be assigned for holding information too, the level field for level information, or title field for location information or whatever.
This can be easily collected via script into a messages type file for actual use in the game, (even collected via dm command if need be), the main point of storing the lore with the maps being portability and customization.

The only thing is that both types of lore should follow the same data format, style guidelines (including truth and falsehood, weighting and level and key word information) and be accessable through the same 'lore engine', although not perhaps in the same way...
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