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

Sat Apr 26 16:58:20 CDT 2003

  A few quick notes:

  The idea of the material having a value/gram field is interesting.  My 
personal thought is that while automating pieces is good, having base or some 
other value in the arch is also good.  I think my item_power calculation code 
shows that having the program try to figure 'values' is tricky.

  I note you also get an odd case.  For example, plate mail normally weights 100 
kg.  Plate mail that weights 60 kg, under the above system, would arguably be 
worth less if made of the same material.  But the fact it is lighter means it is 
actually more valuable to the player.  So if we suppose we have mithril which is 
half the weight of iron, its value has to be more than twice the value of iron 
just to stay even when you sell it - really, its value would have to like 4 or 6 
times iron, or maybe more.  This is just a note, not any big issue in I see 
doing it.

  That said, for value calculations, I wonder if a simple addition of 'value of 
crafted plate armor' + 'value of 50 kg of mithril' is the right approach.  In 
reality, it is the combination of these two that would make mithril plate really 
valuable.  This might just be an issue of proper tuning.

  As for transmutation - I agree that some automatic transmutation should be 
allowed (eg, program decids to make this set of plate out of bronze).  I just 
think the number of items made of the non default material should be quite small 
in most cases (5%?)  This could also be more an issue of balance.  For example, 
if steel is lighter and doesn't cost much more than iron, then everyone that 
could in the would make their objects from steel and not iron.  Maybe the exact 
percentages depends on the material - maybe iron is available in some part of 
the world, so they use bronze instead (best available material that is readily 
available).  In this case, 90+% of the objects of that class would be of iron or 
bronze.  Mostly, I'd like to make stuff appearing of alternative materials rare 
enough to be somewhat noteworthy - this IMO adds more interest (wow, a bamboo 
arrow - haven't seen those before).  If after you clear out the newbie tower you 
have already seen most of the different material types in the game, it just 
isn't that interesting.

  Also, by doing this, you reduce the clutter in the inventory.  For example, if 
an object is amde of the 'default' material we don't change the name, and only 
include the material in the name of the object is non default, inventory is a 
lot cleaner and you won't have 15 different types of clubs in your inventory.

  as for player controlled transmutation (via spells or objects), this probably 
isn't that great an idea.  Alchemy ws added quite a while ago and predates this 
new code of course.  But the reason I say that transmutation is generally bad is 
that it would sort of seem to defeat the purpose.  If I need bronze for an 
object I'm making, but I can just convert that copper armor to bronze via some 
spell, one sort of has to ask what is the point?  Why not just have the shops 
sell blocks of bronze, gold, brass, iron, etc in that case?  If the idea is that 
players are supposed to hunt/find the materials, just allowing them to convert 
from one to another doesn't seem to be much a point.

  OTOH, I am a bit concerned about the need for different materials and how they 
show up.  Eg, suppose I need bronze for soemthing I want to build, but don't 
have any, and no shop has any.  Well, I should go to a map where a lot of items 
show up, knowing some might be bronze.  And if what I'm really focusing on right 
now is making that item, I might as well choose an easy dungeon where I can get 
a lot more stuf quickly, eg, newbie tower, goblin quest, etc.  This probably 
isn't good if I'm high level - clearing out low level dungeons so that others 
can't play them (or worse than that - killing everything, but leaving most of 
the treasure behind).  But I don't actually have a good solution to that.

  As far as the economy - making the argument that it is fundamentally broken so 
that if I break it more doesn't seem like a good arguement to me - it just means 
it is even harder to fix it down the road, if so desired.  That said, I don't 
expect the over economy problem to get fixed by this code, but I don't think we 
should break it even more - we should at least try to improve it some.

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