[crossfire] create earth wall totally nerfed ...

[Andrew Fuchs]

On 8/11/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
...
>   a new movement type for jump?  I suppose that could be done - OTOH, I'm not
> sure how many movement types we want.
>
>   One theory, and what I originally envisioned, was keeping them fairly broad -
> walking, fly low, fly high (spells vs say flying on a dragon), swimming, boat.
>
>   The other side is that you have a movement type for every particular way of
> moving - crawl, run, jump, swim, skip, etc.
>
>   The later provides lots of way to control movement.  OTOH, if movement types
> are automatic, it may not mean much (ok, you have to crawl in that low passage,
> but since you will crawl automatically, what difference does it make?), etc.

It depends.  Can everyone and everything crawl, or only a few races or monsters?

>   That said, looking at the actual problem at hand, I think this is the commit
> that changed the behaviour:
>
> revision 1.4
> date: 2006/06/01 17:24:00;  author: akirschbaum;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -0
> Make earthwalls block all movement types. This makes the spell earth to dust wor
> k again.
>
>   Yet all the earth to dust code looks for is:
>              if (GET_MAP_MOVE_BLOCK(m, sx, sy)) {
> ...
> }
>
>   So the move_block for earthwalls could be changed to just block move_walk, and
> you could jump over the earthwalls and earth to dust would still work.
>
>   The downside is that spells then go over earthwalls, since most spells fly.  I
> think letting spells go over (through) earthwalls would cause problems on some maps.
>
>   One possibility is to make a new earthwall archetype that only blocks walking
> and have the spell use that new archetype, so earthwalls created by the spell
> only block walking, but those on maps block everything.  Map makers could of
> course change behaviour of earthwalls on maps to match what they want it to do.

Yes, if you can jump over earthwalls, they are probably low enough to fly over.

>   I'm not sure if that causes any problems - letting players fire spells or
> other attacks over earthwalls at monsters may cause problems, as I'm not 100%
> sure all monsters are smart enough to try and break through the earthwall (but
> that could then be considered a different problem).

Flying mobs would be able to get over too, but every spell has its
limits, right?  Though i don't think that most mobs would fly over
one, unless they are able to see a target (possible redo of the line
of site code for everything).

Earthwalls are general used by players for protection, either by
limiting the movement of monsters, or blocking spells and other
projectiles.  On the other hand, mobs don't cast spells unless they
have a target, so another player or a friendly mob would have to be
visible to the hostile mobs.  This would additionally stop players
hiding behind earthwalls from exploiting "charm monsters" in most
situations.  Whether this is desirable or not is up for debate.
However it will not fix every instance of charm-killing.

-- 
Andrew Fuchs