[crossfire] How to integrate old stories in the game?

[Nicolas Weeger]

Hello.

>   Yeah, but as said, that looks likely script based garbling.  In a more
> real sense, if the character is not literate enough, they might not
> understand the message or in fact misread it.  And randomly replacing some
> words may not do much - you could probably replace a fair number of words
> with the message still being perfectly clear to the end user.

Nice idea, but considering how many people work on content, it'll be hard to 
write decent texts :)
Also, using script-based scrambling make it possible to have different 
versions for different players, so people can have fun comparing.



>   I'd almost rather just have the server dump all those to the messages
> file, and then go through and so some cleanup.

We need a way to generate messages from the archetypes, though, so when 
archetypes change we don't forget to update messages.


>   We don't have any way to uniquely identify a message.  There are
> different ways this could be done - a 256 bit hash of the message contents
> would do a good enough job, but that leaves you with a value that is fairly
> meaningless to look at (and if you fix a typo in the message, that no
> longer identifies that as the same message)
>
>   If we gave titles to each message, you could use that - however, who is
> to say you might not want several things of the same title?  Best would
> probably be to make a unique identifier in the messages file, that could be
> named to give some clue, but also be made differently (book_of_monsters1,
> book_of_monsters2).

Let's go for a hash solution for now. After all if you fix a typo, that is 
indeed NOT the same message :)



>   An interesting effect of giving each message a unique identifier is one
> could use that to track literacy.  One shouldn't really get experience for
> reading the same message, even if just found in a dungeon.  Likewise, there
> really shouldn't be anything that prevents a player from giving/trading
> something they read to someone else, and that new person getting exp.  But
> that is currently not allowed because otherwise the same player could read
> it 100 times and get 100 times the exp.  If you know if the character has
> read that message, they could only get the exp once, and giving it to
> someone else would only be useful if they haven't read it.

Why not. But then we'll need *many* things to read, to level up.


>   This could almost be used to create real libraries within the game :)


Someday, maybe :)



Nicolas
-- 
http://nicolas.weeger.org [Mon p'tit coin du web]
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