[crossfire] The future of Crossfire

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> I realize my previous mail was quite vague, so I'll try to expand some :)
> 
> 
> What I mean by a fun game covers many things:
> * a coherent world. What is the story of Scorn? Why is there an underground 
> city? This should be, at least partially, part of the game (for Scorn it's 
> probably already the case, I don't know). Ok, we can have unrelated maps, 
> sometimes, but let's try to not abuse that :)

  I agree - certainly more stories on why the ways things are would be good. 
This can also be used to explain other aspects of the game.

  Other questions are:  What is the governement structure?  Of the main towns on 
the main continent, is each effectively a city state, or is there a central king?

  Extra lore about the world could be used to explain other things.  One could 
come up with something that each god basically created one of the races - gnarg 
created the dwarves, and they lived in the bug underground cavern.  Lythandir 
created the elves, and they live in their forest town.  Some of the other gods 
created some of the different races, which could explain why there is scorn, 
santo dominion, and navar city - since there are several different races of 
humans, those were some of the places they just lived.

> * coherent also means "if Navar bans undead/necromancer, why can an undead 
> player enter?"

  Agree.  OTOH, the security there is quite week - even if you're not undead, 
you could come in with a bunch of necromancy type items.

> * more non hack and slash quests. HnS/grinding can be fun, but it shouldn't be 
> the only point. Make players think, force'em to know or travel the world, 
> things like that make the game fun - assuming traveling is fun too.

  True - it would be good if there were more things just out on the world.  AT 
one time, the idea of the weather system was also to extend into having herbs 
and other stuff grow up - if you have to wonder from A to B, you might find some 
useful herbs for you.

  In some games, recovering an item from a place far away (but not particularly 
dangerous) is a not infrequent type of quest.

  But I also think that more varied rewards for quests would be nice - it would 
be nice to have some other things that could be given, like experience points, 
learning new skills, increasing reputation (an idea talked about before but 
never added), etc.

  And while a lot of this could be done with scripts, I'll state this:  For any 
point that comes up where it could be done with a script, there should then be 
an example script set up that does that, with it clearly documented (ideally at 
the top of the script) with the values to change.

  It doesn't do me any good to say 'it can be done with a script' if it now 
takes me 2 hours to write/test that script or figure out if there is a suitable 
one elsewhere I can modify.  In the case above, there should be a sample script 
that looks for an item in the player, and then gives the player some skill exp 
(or that skill if they don't have it).  In that sample, at the top of the script 
would be the skill I want to grant/add exp to, the amount of exp to add, and the 
item it is looking for.  It shouldn't be a need for me to look through the 
entier script to figure out what needs to be changed.

> * as Mark said, we don't have tactics for now. Just go straight in monsters, 
> if wrong sword/spell, oops, too bad, you're dead. IMO, there shouldn't be any 
> way to die suddenly without some warning (concrete example: entrance of 
> wizard tower, monsters you see are just birds/goblins - but if you don't take 
> attention you fall into a pit and face 3 red dragons, oops). I am not 
> advocating removing danger, or having a game where you can't die. Just that 
> there should be more game balance about how fast you die (of course, if you 
> ignore all warnings before doing the fire god, you'll die pretty fast, but 
> that's because you didn't pay attention to the clues)

  Agree - instant death isn't really ever good, otoh it seems fair to me that if 
you just enter caves/dungeons at random, you're sort of on your own (finding the 
dragon cave in the nobility quest is hard, but if a low level character did, 
they would die pretty quickly, but to me, that would seem reasonable - its far 
enough off the beaten path that a low level character probably shouldn't be 
wandering there in the first place.

  As far as speed of combat/damage, I've had this idea I never got around to 
implementing:  Add a settings option, like damage_factor, which is a percentage, 
with 100 being default.

  In the hit_... functions, modify damage calculation to do something like dam = 
dam * 100 / damage_factor.  Some extra work here would need to be added to take 
care of rounding issues (I know there is code that does it for resistances).

  This makes it very easy to tune down the rate of damage, and thus how fast 
both players kill creatures and creatures kill players - it does change game 
play in some other effects - since damage is reduced, healing spells (or items) 
are effectively more powerful - they'll keep you alive longer.  It's a matter of 
debate if spell/grace/hp regen should be similarly slowed - if you don't, it may 
mean that your mana would recharge enough during combat to do something with it 
again, and hp regeneration becomes even more powerful.  But if you slow it down, 
then it would be painfully slow to regain those attributes after combat.  I'd be 
tempted to not have those affected at first (or maybe a separate setting for that).

  I think this change is actually fairly easy to make, because I think almost 
all damage calculation goes through 1 function.

> * defined classes and races, with their limits. Currently, except the 
> meditation skill of the monk, profession doesn't matter at all, you can get 
> all skills. As you said, items usable only by some classes, or maybe limit 
> the maximum skill level, or whatever. Or make it harder to train in things 
> you don't use, whatever.

  This has been discussed before, and I think a lot of good ideas/solutions come 
up with - just no one ever got time to make the changes.

> 
> Concerning static NPCs, yes, they are static - which is why you can script 
> them using Python, using the animator (hopefully it isn't too broken). IMO we 
> could almost have a special script per "important" NPC, that is part of the 
> game. Scripting is programming, so we developers shouldn't have too many 
> issues with that ;)

  But here's the thing - if I have a quest to escort an NPC from scorn to navar 
city, what would that script look like?  Right now, I envision it being pretty 
complicated - I think it'd probably be good to have some amount of C code 
backend to simplify it.

  for example, within the script, you'd probably really just want to be able to 
set waypoints (go to x,y, apply exit, got to x1,y1, etc).  but let the C/monster 
  code deal with it moving between those waypoints - in that way, it also can 
take care of if there are enemy monsters about, what to do in that case, path is 
blocked, etc.  I know all this could be done in python, but it would seem to be 
become a pretty complicated python script at some point.