[CF-Devel] Re: New races and spells.

[Flying Pedestrian]

On Thursday 14 November 2002 04:51 am, Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      On 13-Nov-02 Todd Mitchell wrote:
     
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      > Personally.. I'm all for letting players choose whatever
     
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      > crazy picture they want.. within some amount of reason.
     
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      Extending the system would be nice - But it doesn't make
     
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      a lot of sense while there is no art to support that.
     
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      For a player animation you need faces in all four
     
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      directions. You cannot just copy monster images because
     
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      they don't support those directional facings.
     
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      Of course one could argue: Let's just make the change,
     
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      then people will automatically draw the art to support it.
     
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      I don't have a problem with that philosophy, but past
     
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      experience has shown that it doesn't work.
     
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      I'd rather try to collect art before doing the
     
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      change - then people might be better motivated to draw
     
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      something, as they are eager to get the new feature.
     
     
Here's a thought, then - it looks like, when picking available races, 
the current system simply looks in the archetypes for whatever races
are there, collects them, and makes them available.  Perhaps if we settled
on a naming convention for "race class facenames" we could similarly 
have Crossfire "set the face if it's available".

Then, we could go ahead and enable the feature.  The instant the
artwork is created and added to the archetypes, it automatically
becomes available as a feature - until then, it just stays at
the default face.  Instant gratification might help encourage more artwork
submissions...