[crossfire] Material

[Mark Wedel]

On 04/17/10 12:05 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> Hello.
>
>> Quite some time ago, it was enabled on Metalforge but removed due to
>> player complaints.
>>
>> What people didn't like about it was merging issues in their inventory
>> window.  They would (for instance) have 8 different Boots of Speed all
>> because they would not merge together to be Boots of Speed x8; the
>> material types (different hides; dragon, wolf, serpent, etc.) was
>> determined to have caused this.
>
> My opinion is that almost all archetypes should have a fixed precise material,
> eg fixed wood, or metal, or other material.
> Using random ones should be limited to specific cases, including maybe quests
> items...

  I agree.

  But if random ones were really desired, it could be done via treasurelists.

  for example, if you wanted gold swords, silver swords, bronze, etc, as a 
random treasure for a quest, this could be done as a treasurelist which lists 
those different archetypes.

  One of the other problems/issues with the material code is that you would fine 
stuff in all different materials, but from a player perspective, it had no value.

  The item attributes for the different materials was pretty much always 
trivial, so the fact you had a pine bow vs an oak bow had no real value (there 
wasn't any compelling reason to want one of those vs the other - more likely 
what is more important is which ever one was more magical).

  If alchemy/crafting skills were heavily used and made use of that, this might 
of had more relevance.  But few players use the smithing skills, and I'm not 
even sure if in most cases there was any recipes that used the various specific 
materials.


>
>
>
>> The goal or hope of the original developer for this feature was to
>> implement task quests in the game like find a NPC a stone amulet, a gold
>> sword, serpent skin leather armour, etc. and then collect a reward.
>
> Indeed, this could be done.
> This can already be done, though, through the 'materialname' and 'material'
> things.
>
>
>
> Currently, right now, the material is used for two things:
> - when animate weapon is used, to give resistances to the golem
> - for throw saves to know if an item is destroyed or not by an attack

  IMO, a lot more could be done with material, but that would really get tied 
into the alchemy/crafting area, and is a different conversation.

  But just brainstorming on that (not suggesting that anyone hop on doing this, 
but just recording while fresh in my mind):

All mundane (non magical/normal objects) are going to be made up of some number 
of base materials.  All the base material (wood, iron, stone, etc) would come 
from someplace - in the forest, you could harvest wood.  One could add some type 
of mining to harvest stone/iron from dungeons.

  With that, you could then make the basic items - an axe for example.  The 
materials in the finished items would also be what items you would get if you 
recycled the materials - for that axe, you might be a piece of wood and hunk of 
iron when you salvage it.  Players should be able to make all these basic items 
- now for the most part, they probably would not want to.

  Now from the game design point of view, you would look at the different 
possible materials and determine if that material is significant enough to be 
its own object.  For example, one might determine that an oak bow and ash bow 
are close enough there is no reason to differentiate them, so you just have 
generic bows made from wood.  But one might say that yew is special enough that 
it gives wc+1, so that is given its own archetype.  In this way, maybe bows show 
up in 2 materials, vs half a dozen with the old material code, but the 2 
varieties are different enough that there is value in that yew bow

  What this does give is also base crafting needed for these items - for that 
bow, you would need wood and maybe a strip of leather.  If you had a piece of 
yew wood, you would make a good bow.  A lot of these recipes would also be 
intrinsic - in that the player/character would know the recipe without having 
found it - if I'm building a bookcase, I don't automatically fail if I don't 
have enough wood - I'd realize pretty quickly I need more wood and get some more 
- same would be true for a lot of these basic crafting.

  With the basics done, you can now start to work on items using magical 
materials.  For example, you may say that mithril is 50% lighter than steel.  So 
if chainmail normally takes 10 chunks of iron, you would need 10 chunks of 
mithril to make mithril chainmail, which would be like that iron chainmail 
except for 50% lighter (which would adjust some other things like spell 
encumbrance also).  Using dragon hides instead of cow leather hide gives you 
better leather armor - maybe some resistances, better AC, etc.

  The problem with all this is that it is a lot of work.  But the crafting arena 
needs a lot of work (or did last I looked), and needs an overall good design - 
these basic formula give some way for characters to build up exp in those skills 
to make better items, and by starting with the the basic materials, characters 
would have no problem finding enough wood, iron, etc, from the hordes of 
monsters to craft to their hearts content.