[crossfire] What about a gameplay revolution?

[Mark Wedel]

Juha Jäykkä wrote:
>>   That's a bit different game.
> 
> I agree: I'd like to see CF stay an RPG with major hack and slash content. The 
> amout of H&S might be too high at the moment, but I do not think that's 
> because of H&S, but lack of other content - so we come back to content again. 

  Pretty much agree.  That said, there have been times in the past where we 
focused more on the H&S - someone would find out some way to circumvent a 
monster, and it was like 'We can't have that' and things were changed.  At some 
level, if players are clever, it shouldn't be a requirement that they kill 
everything in sight.

  Now a lot of RPG games are really H&S - there may be some parts which are not. 
  Most games also have some delay in groups of monsters - you'll kill a group, 
and you wander a bit before you get to the next monster - that lets 
spells/whatever recharge.  Crossfire often has the case where monsters are wall 
to wall - so you clear out a room which is full of monsters, and there is a 
door, behind which is another room full of monsters, etc.

> Personally, mining for diamonds instead of fighting for them in order to use 
> them in making a ring might be more interesting. Also, making almost anything 
> with alchemy, jewelry etc is quite difficult unless you have a script which 
> keeps on trying. That's bad - beginners don't have scripts. Also, those 
> skills increase way too slowly to ever really get above level 10 or so 
> (again, without a script). And creating some of the fancier rings, for 
> example, at level 10 jeweller...

  I think the entire alchemy/item creation probably needs to be revamped.  That 
is probably a different discussion (I wouldn't put that into core gameplay), but 
quick thoughts:
- Most all common raw materials (wood, water, rock, etc) should be something 
that can easily be found/harvested
- Success rate for most items should be greatly increased, with the flipside 
that for powerful items, the ingredients should be quite rare (so you're luck to 
find the component to make something really good)
- Related to the H&S above, concern always was of it being too easy for players 
to get exp doing non dangerous stuff.  IMO, that isn't a problem as long as they 
can't get exp faster.  If a person wants to sit in town crafting stuff, I have 
no problem with them getting exp.  The limitation in their case would be 
materials.  With the combat rebalance, I've tried to target it taking about 30 
minutes/level (presuming effective gameplay, no deaths - and this is more the 
adventuring side, not the details of selling items in town, etc).  So for 
skills, if it takes a player 30 minutes to make enough item to gain a level, 
that would be about right in balance.
- Recipes/instructions should really be a character attributed, not a player 
attribute.  I realize there are some special recipes right now where only a 
character that has learned it can make it, but for a large number, it is really 
the player knowing the recipe (either through looking at the file, or just 
acquiring tidbits among multiple characters)

  I personally don't have much problem with a character mining diamonds (that 
should clearly be harder - maybe need a pick axe to work through stone, etc), so 
long as the time it takes is longer thant it would take to get same number 
through adventuring.

  My general philosophy on RPG worlds is that going out adventuring and killing 
things should be the fastest way to get money.


>>   Yeah, there are different approaches.  If players craft their own
>> weapons, then one could find different components that give different
>> bonuses - instead of the existing armor improvment logic, maybe you find
>> something that gives it 5% of fire resistance, or +1 str, etc.  And you can
>> go and choose how to combine those different pieces together.  Maybe as a
>> way to burn up money, you have the empty weapon sold in towns.
> 
> This is more or less what I proposed a year ago: to define what ingredients 
> are required to get, for example, magic resistance +1 to an item. Suppose 
> that is an eye of the beholder (I'd like to see some logic in this so players 
> might guess that an eye of the beholder, a monster with 100% magic 
> resistance, might come handy in crafting stuff to grant magic resistance). 
> Now, you might need 1 eye to get +1%, 100 eyes to get +10%, and 10000 to get 
> full immunity (if that's even possible), so it becomes progressively harder 
> to get higher resistances. Or exceeding +10% might even need some other 
> ingredient as well or what ever. But these ingredients should be the same for 
> rings, swords etc. Of course, then we need also the rign or sword itself. 
> That, too, might be crafted by the player - perhaps level 1 jeweller can 
> craft a ring which can consume 1 ingredient (not ingredient type: just one 
> single eye of the beholder), level 2 can craft a sword which can consume 5 
> ingredients etc (or whatever progression we wish). And then nice XP from 
> crafts, too, so they actally do increase in levels, too.

  When I originally wrote that, I was thinking more rare treasure items you 
might find at ends of dungeons or in treasure chests that give inherent bonus 
(shard of sharpness - +1 bonus to weapon, etc)

  But in thinking what you wrote, I don't see any reason those can't coexist - 
there certainly could be many different ways to get a +1 bonus to a weapon (or 
magic resistance, or whatever).

  There is lots of balancing of different aspects here - the rarity of monster 
parts is related to how common that monster is.  Right now, some parts are 
perhaps too common for one to say it should be used for bonuses - makes it too 
easy to get a high bonus.  But if the number of monsters is reduced, so are the 
number of parts.

  I was also thinking that items have a fixed number of slots for how many 
enchantment type bonuses they can take, and that number be pretty low (otherwise 
we get characters with ultra powerful weapons and armor).  I was thinking that 
perhaps 10 as the upper limit - if one says that one can get +1 hit, it means 
they could get a +10 item with no other bonuses.  But most likely, it is better 
to mix that up - maybe +3 with 30% fire and 30% armor or something.

  But related to your comment above, maybe mix different parts together.  Maybe 
that item still can hold 10 different bonuses.  Maybe 1 beholder eye can be used 
to give a 1% magic resistance bonus, and if the player wants, could put 10 
beholder eyes on that item for a 10% resistance.  But maybe also he can take 
those beholder eyes, do some alchemy type stuff and get a single item that gives 
him 3% magic resistance but only use one slot, etc.

> 
>> is just a stick someone picked up after all).  So now instead of every orc
>> dropping a pile of stuff, maybe every 4th orc drops one item type of thing.
>>  Drastic reduction in treasure - it also means that when you do get
>> something, it is at least a little bit more exciting.
> 
> I prefer the realism of orcs dropping whatever they were using in the combat, 
> even though it creates lots of loot. For orcs, this probably is not a problem 
> either, since 99.9% of orc-loot becomes worthless very quickly. The same is 
> true for most, if not all, currently generator-produced creatures: they 
> rarely carry anything magical (except pixies and vampires). The fact that 
> fire (if used) burns some of this loot helps somewhat with the excess, but 
> otherwise I don't think it's a problem.

  Perhaps - it may also be more a case that generators don't make really good 
monsters.  But there are still those maps out there with good monsters piled up 
like crazy.

  But a problem I see is that money really isn't consistent - some creatures 
really just are not worth fighting, and others really are worth a lot of money. 
  So I could certainly see why some folks would say they don't have a lot of 
money, while other folks would say they do have lot - depends where you go.

  But even at low levels, orcs can be a good source - sure, most of the stuff is 
crap, but if you get 500 items dropped, a few will probably be +2 in nature or 
have some artifact bonus and be worth 50 platinum or something.  And at low 
level, that is a really nice chunk of change.

  To me, that's really the problem with huge number of items generated - odds 
are that some really good things will get generated now and again.

> 
> Excess loot only becomes a problem when you go kill titans, death knights and 
> such, but the rebalance probably reduces their numbers so drastically that 
> there should be no problem there either. Besides, I *still* have never seen 
> many of the higher power stuff, like Rings of Power (not pow +somthing, 
> but "the Three Rings for the" ... and the Ruling Ring as well). And I've 
> searched and searched...

  That's sort of a different issue - rarity or certain items vs accumulation of 
wealth.  One could have lots of money but still not found certain items.

  The nature of that special artifact code does make some of those items 
incredibly rare - they are not on any treasure list, so what has to happen is a 
ring get generated by some mechanism, then that ring be converted into a random 
artifact, and then conditions (and luck) be such that the ring gets converted 
into that special ring.

  For some items, like most weapons, the artifact mechanism probably works fine. 
  But for rings, a better way to generate them is probably needed (currently 
bonuses are done in the treasure.c file - it should really be done on 
treasurelists or something that doesn't require a recompile to change the 
behavior of)

> 
> Also, making extra archetypes like "broken shield" (or the 0-100 "condition" 
> scale discussed elsewhere) might be realistic for loot dropped by dead 
> creatures: if you just smashed an orc with a morning star, chances are its 
> plate mail is not in prime condition any more; likewise for other stuff, too. 
> So make them drop smashed items. Shops won't pay for them, the player may fix 
> them, but since these would be normal items (magic will of course vanish if 
> item is broken), repairing them is probably not what most players want to do.

  I was thinking about this.  Items below some condition could be worth 0 money, 
so the player has to invest time in repairing them (which means they are not 
making money adventuring) or not deal with it.

  One concern I have on this is inventory management - I'd really hate to have 
40 different swords in my inventory by virtue of them being in slightly 
different condition.  That would just get really annoying really quickly (this 
brings back memories of the material code, where stuff could get made of many 
different materials)

  For the weapons my character is using, not much of a problem there, as that 
should be a fairly small number.  But when cleaning up loot, that would be a pain.

  A quick thought could be that most of that stuff has 'condition 0' denoting it 
is broken crap (useful for materials and repair), and another else has 
'condition 100'.  At least that one, on that initial pass, we'd only really be 
doubling amount of different items in ones inventory.

> 
>>   And as a new player, I'd get turned off pretty quickly if I logged in,
>> and have a list of a few beginners dungeons I could explore, only to find
>> that they have all been cleared out.
> 
> I rather liked what was proposed earlier: that monsters would gradually return 
> to dungeons, map areas etc. That would give an added feeling of realism, 
> would solve problem with cleared out maps and might even give a surprise 
> every now and then, like the place which was infested by kobolds for years, 
> and to which kobolds returned eventually no matter how many times they were 
> cleared out, would suddenly, after latest clear-out, become infested by 
> goblins, for example.

  As long as that works, then that is fine.  My concern is actually getting such 
repopulations to work properly.  I'm also a bit concerned that this seems like 
addition of a fairly new/complicated feature when there is already lots of 
things that could/should be done.  Not to say it shouldn't be done, but I don't 
think I'd put this in the top 5.

> 
> A related question: is there something preventing us from profiting from the 
> work done at forks of cf? It seems some of them already have some of the 
> features we desire. Heck, I don't even know if cf is GPL, BSD or what it 
> is...

  Crossfire is GPL.

  For the forks, most likely we could take much of changes they've made to the 
server code and use it ourselves, because that work would also likely be under 
GPL (GPL license says derivations must also be under GPL)

  For non server stuff, it gets trickier.  It really depends on what license 
they use - if they say it is under GPL, then sure, we could take those bits. 
But one could certainly write something new from scratch (client, map editor, 
maps, or images) and probably make a fairly good case it isn't a derivation, and 
thus could reasonably have a different license.

  Last I recall, anything hosted on sourceforge had to be under GPL or similar 
type of license, and IIRC, most of the forks were hosted on sourceforge, which 
probably means they are using such a license - if not, then they probably 
shouldn't be on sourceforge.