[crossfire] Crossfire 2.0+ features/priorities

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
> On 1/31/06, Anton Oussik <antonoussik at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In order to achieve that I propose starting with 3 changes:
>>   * DRASTICALLY reduce  the hp regeneration (something like 10-fold)
>>   * Significantly increase hp of players and monsters (3-10 fold)
>>   * Significantly lower resistances given by items (so a player can
>> get up to 25% resistance or so with several items)
> 
> One thing that might work well there, would be to also have a
> reduction in weapon speed (reduce it by a factor of 2 or so).
> Currently when you attack monsters the attack messages are numerous
> and spam-y, if they were slowed down a lot (to at least the point
> where you could read all of them out loud as they come in). There
> would be fewer attacks to calculate, the rate of damage would be less,
> and there would also be fewer draw_info messages to transmit, which
> seems like a win all round.
> 
> It would also make it possible to bring back the point from long ago
> of attack sounds, since attacks and parries would be slow enough that
> you could actually have sounds mapped to them.

  But this is also tied to player speed.  Unless you make attack speeds really 
slow, but that doesn't work will with current movement code - really, attack 
speed I don't think has much effect if it is slower than the players normal speed.

  So I think without some significant changes, hard to slow it down to the point 
you can read it out without some major restructuring.  If we say the player 
speed is 0.5, that is still 4 attacks/second.

  I think to be at a 'readable' pace, it would need to be closer to about 1 
attack/second.  But you still want to move at a reasonable pace.  So to do that 
'slow' attack, you'd need some code restructuring - basically, you'd have to 
have a separate 'weapon_speed_left' variable or the like - if you try to move 
onto a monster, if your weapon_speed_left is less than zero, you just can't move 
there (right now, you'd attack the monster).

  I had suggested a long time ago adding something like 'damage factor' as a 
setting, which divides/multiplies damage done/received.  This provides a 
convenient way to make adjustments without having to change all the archetypes 
and the like

  If we're going to start adjusting HP of creatures/players, I'd state a primary 
goal to be that monsters and players have more similar HP.  One of the problems 
right now is monsters have so many more hp than players that targeting spells at 
other players become almost instant death.