[CF-Devel] rodlike and wandlike items

[Mark Wedel]

Todd Mitchell wrote:
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      The horn is just an item copy of a rod is it not?  By making the messages
     
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      for rods and wands more generic you have solved the issue. No need to
     
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      vanilla the horn message now, just use the rod item if you want a more
     
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      generic message. Since adding in more items is backwards thinking (I didn't
     
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      think of the other code for identify or creature use, although isn't that
     
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      what happened with the horn being made a seperate item in the first place?)
     
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      it makes sense to have the messages more generic, but not to make a generic
     
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      message for horns since they are ok now and it is nice to have some
     
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      different messages for a bit of colour.  I thought that by making generic
     
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      types for recharging and rechargable items you could have your generic
     
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      messages and keep the special messages for wands, rods, and horns - but the
     
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      better way is to keep te items and make the messages more generic for wider
     
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      application.
     
     
  I'm not positive why horns were made a different item type.  Some of it may 
have been the messages.  It may have also been to have a different equipment 
slot for them.

  The ideal/super generic method would be for the items themselves to contain 
the different messages depending on what happens and not have it hardcoded.  But 
that is not likely to happen anytime soon (and since different items have 
different things that can be done to them, this gets a bit complicated..  But I 
do want to move sound information to the objects and not have it hardcoded as it 
is now, but I think that is a simpler case).

  Certainly with the new body code, the number of item types could be reduced a 
great deal - a lot of the different types were used to denote equipping status 
(could only have one item of a type on at a time).  But now, that isn't true - 
there is really no need to differentiate between helmet, gauntlets, girdles, 
boots, cloaks, .. - they all do the same thing.