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

Fri Apr 18 14:23:41 CDT 2003

Andreas Vogl wrote:

>

     A lot of people have complained about the new material code

     >

     since it has been put in place. That is something we

     >

     shouldn't ignore.

     >

     [...]

>

     >

     >

     As I understand it, Tim's main point in this thread was

     >

     that the full item-creation should be enabled.

     >

     This would create a better use for materials, but I'm

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     not convinced that it would fix any of the problems.

     >

     >

     Well I for one am a bit sorry with the initial tone I took on this, but it was based on the other reactions showing up in the list about buggy behaviour and a first impression of a pile of weirdly named items and my not carefully looking at how the material stuff worked.  It is implemented better than I thought (IMHO).  Not that there isn't still room for stuff to be done however.  The issues were legit, but they were fixed more with tweeking than patching I think.
And even without considering construction and deconstruction of items, this is still a useful addition I think.

>

     >

     So, all that being said, I agree with Mark's point of view:

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     It would be better to integrate materials in the

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     artifacts file, and let it focus more on creating

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     special items rather than adding random materials

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     to everything.

     >

     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.  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. 

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?)  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.  
On the other hand I would hate to see a new material created for 
everything under the sun rather than making a good set of materials with 
significant differences (I was worried about mention of mithril crystal 
because mithril melted on a particular map- wouldn't it be better to 
raise the durability of mithril?) These are fairly minor things though 
and don't really speak to the code.

For your edification there's a current list of materials following the 
body of this message.

I don't see much advantage in moving the materials from it's own file to 
the artifacts file.  If it is to be on the server side at least it is 
currently in one place now.  It wouldn't make things any better 
integrating it into another file and might be more confusing.  Right now 
it is one stop shopping (even if you need to download the server code...)

 Now I think every one would agree that the material field has to be 
fixed so that there isn't two places to specify the material, but it is 
totally alright in my opinion to keep the basic functionality the same 
so that if you specify 'metal' you get a random metal, but if you 
specify silver, you get silver.   This was my initial worry that there 
was no control on the material generation, but I was mistaken.  (I was 
under the impression that Tim was having to change the code to fix stuff 
like 'leather armor' or 'mithril mithril chainmail', not merely tweeking 
the arches...) The current having two field thing is more nitpicky (but 
still it should be fixed) than a real problem.  If there was no way to 
randomly specify a material type, then it would be nesessary to make an 
arch for every possibe item to generate random items which would suck.  
On the other hand, when making a map it is possible to specify a 
material so this is good.  Even better the materials do have modifiers 
for value, weight, saving throws, damage, magic(?).
I used the example before, you can have an arch for say a breastplate, 
specifying the material as metal. A map maker can easily take this arch, 
drop it on a map and either leave it as metal (resulting in a random 
metal) or mithril (specific).  This is good in my opinion.  I do wonder 
about what to do with items with multiple materials however.

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.

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...

MATERIAL LIST

PAPER (1)
none          

IRON  (2)
 gold
 silver
 copper
 platinum
 lead
 steel
 bronze
 mithril         

GLASS            4
none

LEATHER        8
 snakeskin
 humanskin
 bearskin
 dragonhide
 wolfhide
 deerskin

WOOD            16
 oak
 birch
 spruce
 balsa
 yew
 bamboo
 ironwood
 wyrmwood

ORGANIC        32
none

STONE            64
marble
obsidian
limestone
runestone

CLOTH            128
 silk
 velvet
 burlap
 wool
 kashmir
 astolare
 asbestos
 rubber

ADAMANT        256
 argonite
 sanguinite
 abyssium
 astrium
 celestium
 damascus
 adamantium
 magmasium
 electrum* -->electrum is a precious metal like silver no? perhaps 
electisium
 glacium

LIQUID        512
none

SOFT_METAL        1024
none

BONE            2048
 ivory
 dragonscale

ICE            4096
none

SPECIAL        8192
?

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