[CF-Devel] Fw: Diamonds

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

On 14-Apr-03 Mark Wedel wrote:
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      2) The control for material generation is poor.  Basically, as it is now, 
     
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      weapons and armor types will get random materials.  But this then gets odd 
     
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      combinations - no one in their right mind would ever make lead weapons or
     
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      armor 
     
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      (ok, maybe sling bullets, but not much else).  Yet lead plate armor could
     
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      show
     
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      up.
     
     
Nobody in thier right mind would make a -5 cursed plate either, but you see
those.  The idea of the lead is similar, in that it's a rare curse.  But on the
other side.. if we ever implement item destruction to gather raw materials,
it's a great source of lead.  There are plenty of reasons someone might make
something out of most of the other materials..  perhaps an ancient civilization
had access to only copper.  Heck.. in real life, kings used to make armour out
of gold.  I mean, how stupid is that, protectively speaking?

Another interesting example, is balsa.  I created balsa as a "cursed" wood,
like lead.  The effect on objects is pretty debilitating.  However, I noticed
that balsa arrows, while extremely weak, could be carried by the millions
because they weigh practially nothing.  I actually seek them out now.

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        Also, I don't know if there is in fact any code that actually makes use of 
     
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      this new material stuff (alchemy/skill stuff), and thus as a player, you care
     
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      even less about what material an item may be made out o
     
     
Each material has special characteristics that make it better or worse than
others of the same type.  It would be trivial to make silver weapons do extra
damage to undead or something like that as well.  And if the work is ever done
to make the arches for the item creation stuff.. a whole world of uses will pop
up.

(all that needs be done for item creation to work is add a destructor routine,
to basically break an item down into it's raw materials for a fee, and
arches/images for the various tools, tables etc.  Mostly it's the arches that
kept me from ever turning it on.)

As for diamonds.. that problem has allways existed.  It was just never obvious
why it happened before.  The same happens with holy symbols, and allways has. 
The ones you buy in a store don't stack with found ones.

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       It'd also be useful to see how the material stuff is expected to play out
     
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      with the alchemy related code..  Why do we care that the arrow is pine vs oak
     
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      for example?
     
     
For the arrow, you might not care as much.. sans perhaps the balsa example
above.  But lets take a look at the bow.  The yew bow is *way* better than the
pine bow.  If you were really interested in finding the best bow, you would
hunt and seek one made of yew, or one of the other special woods.  Just like
finding a mithril sword is a blessing.

If you want less variety, and want to make the various materials more special..
it's easy enough to tune down the random chance in the materials file.   If you
do that, most items will be made of a certain type, say lead, or pine.

---
Tim Rightnour <
     
     root at garbled.net
     
     >
NetBSD: Free multi-architecture OS 
     
     http://www.netbsd.org/
     
     
NetBSD supported hardware database: 
     
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