[crossfire] Gameplay notes

[Mark Wedel]

On 08/28/10 12:24 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
<lots of good info removed>


> Summoning (to get create earth wall and create food)
> -----------------
<snip>
> Sorcery (to get town portal)
> -------------

The current spell stuff isn't great - the split of of one 'spellcasting' skill 
into 4 made a couple of the skills unequal - summoning and sorcery.

  I had mulled the idea to redo those skills again - perhaps into fire/air 
(electricity)/water (ice)/earth - not sure if that would be better.  In 
practical terms, probably is, since there would pretty much be damage spells for 
the 4 elements.

  The idea behind the initial switch was the number of spells kept growing and 
growing, making mages better and better to play (since there was no limit to 
number of spells one could have).

  I've had other idea for level/skill advancement, but that is outside this 
discussion.


> Small bugs or fun things found
> ===================
>
>
> One disease-related bug: when a monster is infected, and you leave the map, it
> will swap to disk after a few minutes, preventing the disease from actually
> having any effect. Even reentering doesn't seem to make the disease "run"
> again.
>
> Another swap-related bug: cast an earth wall, exit the map, wait a few minutes
> for it to swap, come back into it - the wall disappeared. Not confirmed, but
> seems to happen.

  Both of those are likely related - any spells/objects which are 'owned' by the 
player (in terms of using get_owner()) are cleared on map save.

  The reason behind this is that the ownership is a pointer to another object, 
so at first glance, not a good way to save it.  One could look up the player 
name of the object, and save that out, and look up that player when the map is 
reloaded.  If that player is no longer on-line, something would need to be done 
for these objects.  Note that one can also do weird exploits with this design - 
a character of moderate level creates a bunch of disease spells on map, wait for 
it to swap out, then delete that character and create a new character with same 
name, and have that map swap back in and get a bunch of exp - so one needs to do 
more than just check for name.

  I also vaguely recall that the objects owned by players were removed (instead 
of becoming owned by no one) because players were doing things like setting up 
bullet walls or other things to kill new players, then log out, resulting in 
PK'ing without any good way to track down who created the object in the first place.

>
>
> Navar claims to reject undead (at entrance), and still has a necromancer
> tower. Also Ghusta can enter all he wants.
> Killing guards at exit doesn't prevent you from exiting either.

  The gate at Navar is really on the honor system - if you say you won't do 
necromancy, good enough for them IIRC.

  I'm not actually sure how good it would be to restrict certain races from 
various towns - I'm not sure if there are enough about, such that blocking out 
an entire town would remove a lot of play opportunities for the character.

  My take on Navar having a necromancy tower and that check at entrance is that 
they are related - a necromancer (in that tower) did all sorts of terrible 
things, so they don't want any more about.

  I can't remember for sure, but I thought the townhall had a basic 'quest' (in 
the old term of quest in that an NPC tells you it exists) to go remove that 
necromancer/track down that problem.