[CF-Devel] Materials (was FW: DIAMONDS)

Sat Apr 19 01:45:59 CDT 2003

On 18-Apr-03 Todd wrote:
>

      Well I for one am a bit sorry [snip]

     No apology neccesary.

>

      It is implemented better than I thought

     >

      (IMHO).  Not that there isn't still room for stuff to be done however.

There is allways room for tweaking..

>

      I think there is a misrepresentation on this random material thing.   

     >

      Since I may have contributed to this I feel obligated to address it.

     >

      Now it is fully possible to specify a material using the materialname 

     >

      field (what happens if the 'material' is '4096' (ice) and the 

     >

      materialname is 'oak'?) so it is a bit annoying but the basic idea is 

     >

      good.

This is my fault, as I have not provided adequate enough documentation.  The
way it works is this:

material: specify the general category of material.  Only used when randomizing
a material, and in a few weather routines.  In an ideal world, the code would
no longer pay attention to this.  The idea is this is the category that the
random material is drawn from.

materialname: The actual material.  Right now if you were to do something like
set the materialname to oak, and the material to ice, you would only get one
bizzare result, and that would be that the routine that sweeps the world
decaying objects on the bigworld map would treat you as ice rather than wood. 
utils.c:decay_objects() is the only routine left that still decides what to do
based on the material field.  All saves and whatnot are based on materialname.

If a mapmaker made an object and set materialname without material, it would
not be an error, and the effects would not be bizzare.  Basically, if you want
a random material, set material, and not materialname.  If you want a specific
one, set materialname.

If anyone is wondering.. the correct fix for this IMHO is to pick one of the
saves, perhaps physical, or make a new "weather" save, and have decay objects
just roll saving throws rather than the little if/else loop.

>

       It is only a matter of explicity setting the 'materialname' in 

     >

      the arch to create the specific item you want (the appearance of 

     >

      randomness is because this wasn't done in many cases - most likely to 

     >

      get some of these things in circulation fast), not because of the design 

     >

      of the code.  Actually the code makes it real easy to specity a 

     >

      particular material but this wasn't done to many arches so many things 

     >

      are assigned a random material. 

It was actually done because I went through and marked up all the ones that
were obvious to me.. but evidently I missed alot.

>

      There may be some tweeking to do as well.  It might be an idea to change 

     >

      Iron to Metal and Leather to Hide and make another organic type to 

     >

      seperate flesh from vegetable matter.   I can see that maybe gold and 

     >

      lead (others?) should be in the soft metal category (no more gold or 

     >

      lead swords by accident?)

M_IRON -> M_METAL is just a naming thing.. I just left it M_IRON for old code
compatibility.  Same with leather->hide.

As for organics.. That is a very complex and touchy subject..  For example,
what would you use flesh and vegetable for.  would you mark meat as being the
specific meat of an animal?  Is that useful? What about vegetables?  Is it
useful to know that the rose is made of "rose matter"?  basically.. I wasn't
sure what to do with organics.. so I left it the heck alone.  If someone comes
up with a good use..  please implement it.

>

      I am not sure how the magical materials 

     >

      should work (seems strange - especially since there are other magical 

     >

      object fields).  There are also a lot of stones missing, namely the gem 

     >

      types (diamond, ruby...) which would fix the 'granite' diamond issue.  

I was thinking of that, but didn't really see it is very neccesary.  perhaps a
"crystaline" material for gemtypes.  The granite diamond isn't much worse than
the "stone" diamonds of old, just slightly more specific.

As for magical materials.. the concept was to have a single magical, and a
single cursed material for each category.  So when randomizing, there is a
small chance that you get something bizzare.  It might be fun to go around
collecting astolare to make yourself an astolare cloak, if item creation ever
happened.

>

      metal) or mithril (specific).  This is good in my opinion.  I do wonder 

     >

      about what to do with items with multiple materials however.

They should probably just be converted to a single one.. but in some cases it
doesn't bother me that much.  Wooden axe, metal axe.. they are both reasonable
possibilities..

>

      One thing that would be nice (read WISHLIST) would be that you could 

     >

      specify a colour in the material so that generic images could be made 

     >

      for some things and the colour applied based on the material.  This 

     >

      would make it easy to have a single image for so many items (armour, 

     >

      ore, ingots).   There is little point of having a materials system like 

     >

      this if you have to create arches for every damn item anyway just to get 

     >

      a picture.

Yeah.. I don't know a good way to do this.

>

      There is tons more to say, I have run out of time however.   I would 

     >

      like to talk about fireballs and acid and mining and stuff too...

Yes.. much to speak of here.  Worth noting is that I feel too many things are
just invulnerable to destruction.  Nothing should be wholly invulnerable.. just
varying degrees of hard to destroy.

>

       electrum* -->electrum is a precious metal like silver no? perhaps 

     >

      electisium

Yeah.. but it works well and makes sense..  it's a fantasy world.. :)

>

      SPECIAL        8192

     >

      ?

#define M_SPECIAL               8192    /* when displaying names, don't show the
                                           materialname */

This is so you don't end up with stuff like "mithril mithril crystal",
"leather leather armour", or "organic eyeshield".

---
Tim Rightnour <

     root at garbled.net

     >
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS 

     http://www.netbsd.org/

NetBSD supported hardware database: 

     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/hw.cgi

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