[crossfire] Server map redo: movement types

[temitchell at sympatico.ca]

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      From: Mark Wedel <
      
      mwedel at sonic.net
      
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        Unless a race has native flying, the player would have to do something to 
     
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      start flying (wear those boots, ready the skill, cast a spell).
     
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        The question was really want to do once that has happened.  Eg, player has 
     
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      applied the boots of levitation and now walks to a shop map, etc.
     
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Well yes, naturally if you apply items of cast a spell you are choosing to fly.  
What I was really getting at was jumping/flying as race move types.  Some races like dragons can fly - but I don't think they should just always fly - it should have to be added as a command - fly and bound to a key or whatever.  Jumping should work the same way and all players should be able to jump over a single tile if it allows flying over.
The problem I see with autoflying is the code choosing when to fly the player not choosing.  Perhaps you are fighting and want to bump into low walls (you might want to use it as a barrier and fire missiles over it instead of flying over it by mistake). If the fight is going bad however then you can fly or jump over the wall (if you can - enter weight issues)  suppose it isn't treating flying any differnet, it is how you enter that movement state.
I can also see cases where flying is blocked (low roof) and you want the player to bump into the barrier and have to continue on foot- not simply continue moving (not automatically change movement to a walk.)

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      > I also think that even players with fly ability shouldn't be able to fly 
     
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      > all the time but only for a period of time (based on CON or STR and race 
     
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      > or spell?).  Jumping would basically be flying for one turn.
     
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        Certainly depends on how they are flying.
     
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        Something like levitation boots obviously give you permanent flying.
     
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        A spell does have a duration.
     
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        Now for skills, trickier issue.  One could argue there could be something like 
     
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      a fatigue stat, and if you're too fatigued, have to stop using certain skills 
     
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      (like flying or other strenous stuff).  Actually, this idea has merit, so I'll 
     
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      start a different thread on fatigue.
     
     
The 'fatigue' part was simply to prevent races with flying from moving across oceans and large mountain ranges and the like at will.  This gives them a *huge* advantage over non flying races.   If a dragon can fly a distance equal to their Con before having to land then they get a massive benefit to movement bit it's not like they're going to fly across the oceans (they'd drown).  Now if you use a magic item to fly instead of a racial skill then it's not a balance issue - however that item should be worth a *lot* more if it allows you to fly across the ocean now.

As for movement types - there is a lot in the archives about it but I see these as the main ones:

Walk
Fly
Swim (shallow water)
Sail (deep water)
Climb (high mountains)

and some other ideas:

GhostWalk - etheral movement through (non iron?) things.
ForestWalk - movement through *dense* forest for woodland folks.

Maybe Crawl or Crouch would be nice too - it would let you crawl through small places or maybe hide behind low walls - a good skill for the smaller races perhaps.