[crossfire] "identification" skills patch

[Mark Wedel]

Lalo Martins wrote:
> Some further suggestions re distance identification :-)
> 
> Now there's a much higher chance we'll identify a number of identical 
> items.  So maybe they should "stack"?  Say something like:
> 
> You see 7 bronze swords. (...)

  If the objects are already on the same space, this of course happens.

  If the objects are on different spaces, doing this gets a bit messier - see 
the shop code for an example of that - instead of printing results are you 
traverse the stack of items on the space, you need to store/record all that 
information and then print it at the end.  Not hard to do, bit a bit more work 
than expanding the search area.

> 
> Second: now that you can identify things that you can't necessarily 
> carry, maybe there should be some new skills for some of those?  
> Specially, a skill to id monsters would be sweet.
> 
> You see 3 beholders.
> They seem healthy and aggressive.
> Beholders usually attack with spells, and often drop beholder eyes.
> 
> You see 4 wights.
> They seem healthy and aggressive.
> Wights are usually attack with cold, and often drop wight corpses.
> 
> You see 2 monsters you can't identify.

  That is reasonable, but to really do that, it would seem that the lore 
information should be filled in, rather than trying to figure it out from the 
monster attributes.  To figure out what they usually drops requires parsing the 
treasure structure - not impossible, but defining often/rarely/etc for drop 
frequency gets odd.  I'm also not sure I'd like the output for dragons and other 
monsters, with a list of 20 things they frequently drop.

  The idea of a skill itself, that identifies the monsters, is a nice idea.

  This could perhaps be extended to some other things also - one could imagine 
that one shouldn't really be able to find rare herbs just sitting on the space, 
but using the skill (woodsman, whatever) might reveal these items that could be 
picked up (one way to do this would be to have treasurelists for things like 
forest, plains, etc, which infrequently generates these items - however, like 
other things, these generated items would be in the inventory of the space, so 
not seen, but using the skill correctly would look at inventory of these ground 
spaces and move the item from the inventory onto the space itself)