[crossfire] Platform statement

[Lalo Martins]

(If someone should think this message seems clashy or
confrontational, bear in mind we're snipping out all points on
which we have already agreed, and/or explained what the other
wanted to know, which is more than half of them...)

quoth Mark Wedel as of Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:37:08 -0800:
>   I'd be a bit reluctant to start a task that basically requires a
> rebalance of all monsters/items.

Actually, I think I'm over-reaching here.  All considerations of *how* to 
deal with gameplay, especially game mechanics, are just IMHO and 
suggestions.  I'll say what I think, reply on threads when asked, but in 
the end, go with whatever the coders decide :-)

OTOH... I'd much rather rebalance all monsters/items now, while I'm 
editing everything anyway, than later.

>   A more general question on the platform statement or just in
> general is how much of existing crossfire are we keeping?  In a
> sense, are we evolving crossfire or writing a new game?  This
> may just help define the scope of the project.

A little bit of each.  It's a rewrite, "Crossfire 2" so to speak,
but not completely from scratch; you could say it's like Nicolas
wants to do with the C++ server, starting from scratch and
copy-pasting chunks of code.  I want to design the world from
scratch but adapt or adopt maps, arches, images, etc.

The reasons for that are many...

For one, I don't think the game as it is needs radical changes.
It's fun as it is; yes there are a few problems, but fixing those
would change the game so much that would probably introduce
others.  I'd much rather start from scratch, with an eye of those
problems, and leave 1.x more or less as it is, so that people
have a choice to keep playing it.

Second, it's a big and patchy world with a lot of history.  It's
been in development for way too long.  It gets to a point where
any encompassing changes will break stuff you don't expect to be
affected at all, or that you've never heard of but is someone's
favourite map.

Also, some "problems" I've heard complaint of are arguably a
matter of choice.  CF1 is basically combat, and many people have
expressed a desire to be able to do other stuff.  Well, just in
case we get that wrong, I'd rather still have CF1 around, so that
the H&S crowd can keep playing it until the heat death of the
universe.  Same about "realism", same about the world and the
stories lacking backstory and consistency; I've heard that a lot
but I acknowledge that some may prefer it as it is.

>>>   For hit points, it could be done away with.  Why should one
>>> necessarily get a big blob of hit points every level, and nothing in
>>> between?  Historically, this has been because you got a random number
>>> of hit points per level.
>>>
>>>   But it would be simple enough to change it to some basis
>>> where you get 1 HP and these different points.  But see note above
>>> about impact of changing HP.
>> 
>> Or, again, possibly you gain HP on quests.  A long, arduous journey to
>> bathe in the Wellspring of Gaea...  I guess that would make HP
>> increases happen less often, but I'm fine with that, since armor will
>> probably be going up faster.
>> 
>> (Then of course each such increase needs to store a force so it can't
>> be used twice...)
> 
>   I personally don't have a problem with certain things, like
> HP, being based on characters level/total exp.  I'm not sure
> how I'd feel with it going up by quests.
> 
>   One question would be how do you deal with death in these
> cases?  Is there still a penalty?
> 
>   Another problem is that I could see players picking the
> quests that only give these bonuses.  IMO, there should be some
> reward in just adventuring for adventuring sake - right now we
> have random dungeons, which can be useful places to pick up
> some experience.  If experience doesn't mean much, you now get
> folks doing quests constantly - maybe not a bad thing, but you
> have to make sure you have enough quests out there for people
> to do.

You'd still want exp, because that's what makes your skills go
up.  I believe in the current system, either damage or wc is
based on skill, right?  (Or both?)  For magic-users it's even
more obvious...

>   I was sort of thinking the opposite - a problem with money is
> because even right now, the values of items are huge from low
> level to high level.  One could say that ones level goes by a
> factor of 100.
> 
>   A normal longsword has a value of 45.  A darkblade has a
> value of 143000 (3000+ times increase).  And that probably
> isn't even the most valuable weapons.

I think it's perfectly reasonable that a darkblade costs 3000x
more than a normal sword, assuming you can buy it at all.

But a slightly better sword shouldn't cost 100x more.

What I see is dividing a lot of things, not only weapons and
armor, in really two categories; mundane and heroic.  Up until a
certain point, you'll use mundane items because that's what you
can afford.  Then you'll buy or find one single heroic item,
related to what you're specialized in -- sword or shield for
fighter, ring for mage, etc.  Then another.  Until at some point
(let's say equivalent to today's level 50) you're living a
basically "heroic" lifestyle, including the stuff in your house
or guild.  Then of course items in both categories still vary a
lot in cost; from the cheap iron shortsword to a finely crafted
steel two-handed, from a stoneaxe to a battle axe, from a trivial
artifact (say a sword with bonuses) to the truly legendary.

>   Most games tend to collapse the price difference - maybe more
> like 100:1 from high to low.

That would work if the rate at which you get money was a lot more
linear, but I think it's less fun that way :-)

>   I realize darkblade is an exception, but you start getting
> into other high priced magic items you can find in a dungeon,
> adds up to a lot of money.  If you want to reduce amount of
> money in the game, reducing the value of items is probably the
> direction to go, not increase it.

I disagree; I'd rather increase the value and reduce their
number.  The problem, as you said, is finding one just lying in a
dungeon; well, but I don't think you should.  Truly awesome items
are the rewards of long quests, and you probably won't want to
simply dump it on the sale store.

>>> I'd strongly suggest a decimal system be used (10:1 or 100:1 ratios). 
>>> I really don't want to have to be doing 64:1 multiplication to try and
>>> figure out values of different items.
> 
>   I'd also suggest that names of currencies by intuitive.  I
> don't think anyone would know valuy of cleekins to aytbits...

Well... I strongly disagree.  But since this seems to be a matter
of opinion, I don't know that anything can be done about it.

So I propose I do it my way, and we see how it looks, and in say,
a year from now, we evaluate how much it sucks.  If it doesn't
work or makes the game too hard, it's a simple matter to edit
only the coin archetype files.

For one thing, I think it's clear to me from the last few emails
that the whole way you use money in the game would be different;
and at that point, I'd rather make the money more, <hmm, I know
there's a word for what I'm thinking but it refuses to come to my
mind... fitting the theme, mood-building, more part of the story
than the game system>, rather than less.

>   IMO, the main focus of playing crossfire is to have fun, not
> necessarily for it to be realistic.

I singled out this statement to make a point which I think is
central to my whole vision.  I'm not saying this in the context
of money, but everything.

The driving word I'm aiming for is "believable".  Not exactly
realistic, because if you wanted realistic you wouldn't be
playing a fantasy game.  But why do people like LOTR, Narnia and
Oz, while pretty much all other pre-1970 fantasy worlds have been
forgotten?  As I see it, it's because it's believable.  That
doesn't mean you'll read LOTR and end up thinking all that stuff
really did happen.  It means there is depth, internal
consistency, and detail enough that you can suspend your
disbelief and, for the duration of your reading, treat the story
as "real".

On that aspect many games can be instead compared to Wonderland.
It's a fun ride and you may even want to read it again and
again.  But there's no internal consistency or detail.  If either
Alice book was as thick as the Return of the King, I doubt many
people would have had patience to read it to the end, let alone
go after the sequels.

And on a tangent, there's a lady in Britain who made millions
upon millions of pounds from the realization that children do,
too, care about detailed worlds with depth and internal
consistency and over-arching sagas :-)

>>>>> (tall faces, etc)
>   I think I follow, but just to make sure I'm clear.
> 
>   In this case, the human uses 4 cells on the map (2x2), and
> obscures 4 more cells (its tallness in this context).

Right.

I *think* much of this work is already done in the server and
jxclient.  But there are no arches that use it yet.

>   The main think we're looking to gain here is finer
> placement/movement of items (with each cell being smaller,
> movement steps are also smaller)

One of two.  The other is finer granularity of shapes, so eg
humans and elves don't have to be "square" anymore.

>> So yes, there would be more map positions to keep track of.  Not really
>> more objects in the sense of cf objects.  But yes more tails.
> 
>   I wonder if there may be better ways to deal with this.  In
> any case, we're not really going on design here, but general
> goals.  But my quick thinking is that it could be more
> efficient not to use all those head/tail archetypes and instead
> have some form of footprint in the archetype.  When some action
> happens, look for nearby archetypes and check that footprint.

Sorry, I don't follow.

>> Yes, impact needs though.  Especially in things like speed, and having
>> all those tails around, and how many map cells the client and the
>> protocol can reasonably handle.
>> 
>   I thought one of Ryo's goals was to remain protocol
> compatible.  This change sort of seems to go away from that.

Again, I believe this work has already been done at least partially.

> Most of the CRPGs I've played have pretty much had a single
> scale - even if there were indoors, they would be same scale as
> outside.

Hmm, my experience is different... most 2d CPRGs I played, at
least this century, have 2 or 3 scales.

>   I guess it depends on how the outdoors is done.  If outdoors
> is really just a time sink to get from town to a dungeon (or
> other town), then maybe a different interface is needed.

It's not a time sink, it's a, hmm, progressive multi-level menu.

For a metaphor, try to find something on Google Maps without
changing the zoom level.

The idea is that I want to make a "dense" (as opposed to sparse)
world; not add 1000 miles of nothing in one direction and then a
city.  So let's say you go out of Scorn to find that dungeon in
the forest, or a village.  There will be a lot of interesting
things around.  There's also a chance that many (most?) of those
aren't interesting to *you*, so you'd rather not have to think
about them too much.  So you zoom out to the big picture; Ah, all
right, there's a forest here, there's a village there.  You go to
the forest, then zoom back in to find the grotto... or go to the
village and zoom back in to find the house you want.

That's not realistic.  Realistic would be forcing you to wander
around, maybe follow the road, maybe consult a map, and hope for
the best.  But IMO having a "zoom out" would improve gameplay.

>> - Or if doing client zoom button... then scale 3 will simply help
>>   you find the forest more easily, at which point you zoom to 2 in
>>   order to find the actual dungeon.  (Cool side effect: there could be
>>   some abandoned treasure just lying around, which you only find if you
>>   zoom in to 1 in unexpected places...)
> 
>   But it seems this zoom of the client still has some relation
> to movement - so how do you handle that?  In a sense, are you
> just adding multiple levels of maps?

We can think of this as a sort of mipmapping.  When you zoom out,
you're essentially making the images smaller, without changing
anything else in the map.  However, some objects may have
optimized images for the new zoom level, so we use those
instead.  And some images are configured to disappear below a
given zoom (or in some cases, above a given zoom -- think a
"village" or "forest" object, smallworld-style).

The thing with simply scaling things on the client is that if
zoom 3 is 10x farther than zoom 2, then things like grass and
mountains will look stupid.  But then again maybe not.

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
                  http://lalomartins.info/
GNU: never give up freedom              http://www.gnu.org/