[CF-Devel] Equipment musings

[Mark Wedel]

  I'm currently implementing the ideas I sent to the list about a month ago - 
the item_power and the body location.

  In very quick summary, the body location is to give each race a set of 
locations on his body to equip stuff.  Thus, a human has a torso, and armor uses 
the torso slot.  However, a dragon doesn't have a torso, and thus can't wear 
armor (or at least human armor).

  This works out nicely - you can now more finely restricts what races can not 
can not wear (compared to the blanked can use armor flag).  The one odd spot is 
bows/weapons/shields. You can also do things like give a fireborn 4 fingers so 
it can wear four rings.

  The way the code is you have 2 'arms' for the above mentioned item.  A sword 
would use one, and a shield another.  A bow uses both, requiring that you 
unequip your weapon and shield (as per discussions on the mailing list). 
Similarly, you can make 2 handed weapons that also require the removal of shield.

  This all works fine until you examine some of the strange interactions.  A 
character that is prohibited from using weapons is really prohibited from melee 
weapons - it can still use bows.  Thus, the dragon, monk, etc can fire that bow.

  For some races, this doesn't make too much sense - if the dragon can't use a 
weapon or shield because of his strange physiology, it doesn't make much sense 
that he can use a bow.  My solution in that case is to just give him 0 'arm's, 
so he can't use bows, shields, or weapons.  I think that is the right approach, 
but this obviously weakens him some.

  I think the can use weapon flag will still be needed for things like monks 
and/or worshippers of gaea.  In my original thinking, the idea would be that you 
would just have the force object use up some of these locations.  But a 
worshipper of gaea still needs to be allowed to use shields.  So the can use 
weapon will be as it is now - a prohibition on melee weapons, but not range 
weapons.  IMO, that isn't much a problem.

  The can_use_armor is more problematic.  This is a case IMO where the force 
object should use up those body locations.  This provides much finer grain of 
control (should a prohibition on armor really effect things like girdles? 
However, the problem with shields comes up again - you just can't reduce the 
body location, as the player could still choose to use a shield but without a 
weapon.

  The more I think about this, the more the idea of splitting the two arms apart 
makes more sense, eg, instead of having 'body_arms 2' for humanoids, have a 
'body_weapon_arm 1' and 'body_shield_arm 1'.  Things like bows or two handed 
weapons would then just use both of those locations.

  One reason this wasn't done was because of the idea of characters with two 
weapons (under current code, this won't be allowed because of the many problems 
it would cause).

  The alternative is to add a no_shield_flag to the various things that prohibit 
armor.  I guess that isn't that hard.  IT sort of gets away from the original 
idea in which item_type wouldn't be very important, eg, all items of all types 
have basically the same effects, and the body location information would just 
limit where the different things could get applied.  I think that is probably 
what I will do for now.


  ITEM POWER:  As part of these changes, I've decided to implement the item 
power idea I had.  Basic summary was that each object would have an item_power 
rating, determined basically by how good it was, and your total equipment would 
have to be less than some value which is based on your overall level.  Thus, 
first level characters wouldn't be able to use really great stuff, and even high 
level characters that have all the best artifacts would have to make choices on 
which to wear, as it won't be possible to wear all the best ones at the same 
time.  This will make things harder, and from what I've seen, people generally 
think the high level stuff is too easy.

  The coding on this is actually pretty straightfoward.  The hard part will be 
balancing.  And more precisely, objects that have been created before this code 
goes into effect - for those objects, the computer calcuates the item_power 
(just as it would do for randomly created objects).  The problem is that the 
calculation isn't very good right now when it comes to protections.

  In any case, my idea is to provide this information (examining an object will 
tell you its power rating, and the skills command will show you the total you 
have equipped.  However, there won't be any prohibition enforced - you can still 
equip way more stuff than you should perhaps be allowed to.  This will let us 
see how things are and tune them appropriately.  Then some time in the future, 
the actual enforcement of these can be activated.

  --
  I think both of these changes will make the game much more interesting - 
different races can really be much more different now, and many more ways to 
balance the races and classes.  Hopefully, I'll have something to commit within 
a week.