[crossfire] RFC: dynamic alchemy

[Wim Villerius]

On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 21:21 +0100, Anton Oussik wrote: 
> To those unfamiliar with it, shadow alchemy generally involves finding
> hash collisions for the recipes, fooling the alchemy code into
> thinking you are doing something else entirely. Since the hashing
> function is (on purpose) very weak, there is no easy way of making
> shadow alchemy impossible short of entirely changing the way
> traditional alchemy works. It is currently hard enough to discourage
> most people though (thanks to some safeguards in the code). For most
> purposes, however, it currently does what dynamic alchemy will do, but
> without the much needed game balancing, and very scarce documentation.
AFAIK shadow alchemy is indeed in desperate need of game balancing and
since it is by no means documentated (except that it's written 'in the
code') it is almost never practised (anymore). At least on MF, I know no
active players that do anything with it. (Are there any active players
anyway?)
Perhaps I could even put it this way: because shadow alchemy is
undocumented (and almost unknown) there is a request for dynamic
alchemy!

> I like your idea about dynamic alchemy, but creating a resistance
> table seems like a lot of work, and so does messing with the arches.
> Instead, why not make a semi-random roll on what to add/subtract,
> partially based on the hash value of the ingredient? This means that
> only the alchemy.c file will need changing, and dynamic alchemy will
> have a much better chance of actually happening (+working).
That would be very interesting, the only question is how to make a
reasonable guess. It would be kind of weird if a Vampire's heart gives
resist_fire bonus. I'm terribly afraid that it has to be documentend
(one way or the other) what bonusses an item can give, but that could be
my ignorance :)
If you (or someone else) has an idea to make this suggestion work, I'd
be happy with it.