[CF-Devel] Fw: Diamonds

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

  There are certainly various issues with the materials.

  In terms of the question at hand - the code that checks for quantity of an 
item, which is used in all sorts of places, only checks for the quantity of one 
'grouping' of an item.  Thus, if you have 50 spruce arrows and 30 oak arrows, 
and something is looking for arrows, it will say there are either 50 or 30 
arrows on that space, and not 80 (the 50/30 depends on the order of stacking on 
the space).

  Thus is actually a fairly old bug, but until the material stuff showed up, 
almost never posed a problem (once in a while, I seem to recall someone would 
find issues related to potions, as they were identified differently or somehow 
wouldn't merge, even though they were the same).

  The reason why the logout/login works is because there is a special hack to 
update the material type when an object is loaded.

  To answer Todd's question:

  I certainly want the expanded material form to be in an external file - to 
have to update values in the server and recompile for any new material isn't a 
good idea IMO.  I communicated this to garbled when he was doing the work on 
this, and this was done.

  However, that said, there are certainly some issues with materials:

1) Items of the same type (eg diamonds) of different materials don't merge. 
This isn't a fixable problem.  but the problem it leads to is that now instead 
of a just a pile of +1 arrows, you might have +1 spruce arrows, +1 oak arrows, 
+1 pine arrows, etc.  In a sense, creating a lot more inventory clutter.

2) The control for material generation is poor.  Basically, as it is now, 
weapons and armor types will get random materials.  But this then gets odd 
combinations - no one in their right mind would ever make lead weapons or armor 
(ok, maybe sling bullets, but not much else).  Yet lead plate armor could show up.

  I personally don't mind seeing a whole bunch of materials in the game.  The 
problem is that when you get bombarded with all these material types, it looses 
much of any specialness.

  Also, I don't know if there is in fact any code that actually makes use of 
this new material stuff (alchemy/skill stuff), and thus as a player, you care 
even less about what material an item may be made out o

  It certainly wouldn't be hard to remove the material name from the object name 
(As presented to the player).  I just wonder if that may cause extra confusion - 
why do I have 5 stacks of arrows, of which they are all identified, but they 
don't merge?  You'd have to then examine them to see that they are of different 
materials).

  I'm not sure what the ideal situation to this is.  One thought is to just have 
the majority items of base (generic) material like in the old days, eg, wood, 
stone, iron, etc, and thus not detail what it is made out of.  Then a relative 
small number get made out of special materials, and these are added to the name 
(thus, those pine arrows may be relatively rare, so they'd be unlikely to 
clutter up your inventory much, because its less likely they'd show up)

  It'd also be useful to see how the material stuff is expected to play out with 
the alchemy related code..  Why do we care that the arrow is pine vs oak for 
example?



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