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

[Mark Wedel]

Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> Hello.

>>   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.

  I agree.  Unfortunately, a lot of the messages that are generated 
automatically from archetypes look like they are automatically generated.  Maybe 
just a better function for writing the descriptions is needed - I think right 
now it just calls something like describe_object(), which works fine for 
describe stuff in your inventory, but doesn't look that great when describing 
monsters in books.


>>   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.

  Literacy skill rebalance is still needed.  There are many areas where it is 
broken (including no/few high level books, so literacy effectively gets capped 
at some point.  But maybe that is reasonable).

  If we know roughly how many unique messages there are in the game, one could 
use that to balance it.  Lets suppose there are 2,000 unique messages in the 
game.  If we also make the assumption that level 20 is about as high as you can 
go in literacy, that averages to 100/level.  Of course, the character isn't 
going to find every message in the game, some may not get max exp (characters 
literacy is higher level than the book he is reading).  But you could perhaps 
say based on that criteria that 20 unique readables should amount to a level, 
and thus set the exp on that basis.