[crossfire] Gameplay notes

[Mark Wedel]

On 08/29/10 12:58 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>> 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.
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> Or there needs to be more damaging spells in those skills :)

  Maybe, but that can be hard if one still tries to keep within those boundaries 
of the skill - sorcery is a bit easier since many misc things can go there, but 
summoning is trickier - one can add more summoning spells, but it may just be 
that summoning itself is going to be less powerful than shooting up a fireball.
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>>    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.
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> That's not necessarily bad, but maybe some workaround could be thought of.
> Note that even if the disease was somehow restored, it would have to run its
> course for all missed ticks at once...

  I'm not sure it would be correct to run all ticks at once - just as right now, 
the rest of the map does not run all ticks at once (monsters regaining sp/hp, 
generators generating, etc).  It's never really explained from an in game 
perspective on why nothing happens when the map is swapped out, but many games 
do that (I'm single player games here, when the player leaves an area, in 
general, it will be the same when the player returns, even if that is a quite a 
while).

  Trying to run all ticks at load time would likely create performance problems, 
as now you have to do all that processing at once.  A better (and simpler 
solution) would just be to increase the map swap out time to something like 10 
minutes - most likely, if a player doesn't return within 10 minutes, unlikely to 
do so (or if they do, that is probably still long enough any spells/diseases 
they created have run their course).

  That would also have some performance impact - more memory and cpu time to 
process that map while in memory, but that is probably not a problem for most 
modern systems - the amount of memory systems have has gone up dramatically - 
the cpu one might be more an issue.

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>>    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.
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> I would turn that into a quest.
> If you're an undead, and wish to enter Navar, then you need to prove you're
> worthy entering, by doing some chore - go kill bad monsters somewhere?

  That works - there could also be hidden entrances (sewers, smugglers, etc) 
which would entail some amount of work to get in.