[CF-Devel] monsters, dragons, and images

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

  So many different points to address.

Monster progression:  Ideally, there'd be a somewhat nice and smooth set of 
races from level 1 to 25 or so.  The undead example is pretty close.  The dragon 
is pretty close (but I think there is a pretty big gap between killing 
wyverns/faeri dragons and killing the real dragons).   Demons probably have a 
pretty decent list.  Elementals lack things at low levels.  Giants have a big 
jump from hill giant to troll.

  All it'd really take for most of these is to inject a few monsters.  A beige 
dragon that is between wyvern and big dragon.  A few more giant types (if you 
look at AD&D, there is a big set - hill, stone, cloud, frost, storm, fire). 
Maybe toss in a groll (giant/troll intermix or whatever).

  If at least there are several monsters that are a good match for a level 15 
person, this reduces the monotony that Tim describes.

  However, I think there will still always be an optimization.  Eg, killing 
grolls and beige dragons are roughly the same difficulty for this character 
(given his spells/resistances/whatever), but I get more exp for the groll. 
Guess which one I'd try to go kill more of.

  As a note, there are probably about 200 monsters (taking a quick look at the 
arch directory).  However, some large portion of those are special/really high 
level monsters, and which are probably used rarely (as they should be), so don't 
help the situation with monsters for mid level maps.

  Some of this could perhaps be reduced by giving end of quest exp rewards - 
managing to kill everything and get to the end gives you a 100,000 exp bonus - 
many commercial games do this.  However, I've yet to really see how to put this 
in with the skill system (best I could think of right now would be it is based 
on relative portions of exp in each skill.  Eg, if my skill exp is:

missile weapons: 40
one handed weapons 30
evocation       14
searching       3

  You then taking the percentages. Eg, missile weapons is 45% of my exp total, 
so it the portion of the reward, one handed weapons is 34%, so it gets that 
reward, and so on).  This would also reduce some of the things of killing all 
the monsters that keep generating - the bonus reward at the end might be good 
enough you just want to get to the end of the dungeon to get the reward, and 
care less about killing everything that shows up.

I personally don't know if I'd like a dragon for every attacktype out there. 
Even if you reduce it to just the elemental attacktypes (fire, elec, cold, acid, 
poison).  In fact, we already cover all of those but acid, and I personally 
don't think acid dragons would be that intereting (given that they damage 
equipment, either you are mostly immune so it doesn't damage your equipment, or 
you'd probably avoid those like the plague).

  If anything, mixing up the form of attack could be interesting (bolt vs cone 
vs exploding ball vs seeking ball).  Imagine a dragon with a cone of lightning...

  As far as images - Todd described the forma accurate, and I believe it is 
accurately described in the docs.

  In terms of split/merged images - doing it by hand is one one.  I'd imagine 
that it'd be pretty easy to write scripts to split/merge them (there are already 
scripts to merge them, as the spoiler uses it for example).

  However, the server and gtk client (as well as I think the x11 client) support 
the idea of not splitting the images - eg, it is a 64x64 block. The DX client 
does not support this, as I'd imagine the very old java client and some other 
clients out there.  There may very well be some bugs in this, but like all 
things, that should get fixed.  This functionality was added about a year ago. 
The doc/Developers/images I think describes this adequately.

  One note is that the image can be bigger than the footprint (which is defined 
by the arch/more).  The client makes the origin of drawn images the lower right 
- thus they extend up and to the left.  What this basically means is that you 
can have tall images that the overlap (think something like titans - one could 
stand in front of another and visually overlap the one behind it).  However, it 
is the footprint of the object that determines what spaces it is on (thus, where 
you need to hit it with spells, in the case of buildings, where you can enter 
it, and so on).  Or a simple case would be the hill giant - it should probably 
only have a 1x1 footprint, but still be tall.

  If I recall correctly, this also means that there is not a requirement for 
images to be multiples of 32x32.  Eg, a 8' tall creature could be done as a 
32x46 image for example.  This works better for height than width - odd width 
objects will extend into the square to the left.  However, you could have 
something like a lake that extends just a little into the neighboring space, so 
that the boundary is better, but the fact it is ground still looks OK.

  It'd probably simplify the code a bit if there were no split images - in that 
way, the server code doesn't have to try to deal with both cases (multipart 
object which is multiple images, vs a multipart object which is jsut one image).






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