[crossfire] Gameplay notes

[Mark Wedel]

On 09/ 4/10 12:58 AM, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>>    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.
>
>
> For summoning, maybe a fix would be to make base monsters tougher, so they can
> really help the player kill things, and not just hit 2 times before being
> destroyed...
> Maybe increase hp a lot, like tenfold?

  That seems reasonable, or perhaps other adjustments like better ac or better 
armor.

  One weakness of lots of monsters is their armor rating tends to be pretty low.

  I think right now, summoning basically just uses the 'stock' monsters and 
makes some customizations to them.  One could see why they are pretty weak - 
player is expected to kill dozens of them, so it is going to be a lot weaker 
than the player at same level.

  Probably best to make up a separate set of monsters archs which are used for 
summoning - these may have same name, but are tougher - this lets one tweak them 
a lot better than trying to adjust the code that makes changes to do the right 
thing, because I could imagine for some summoned creatures, giving them a huge 
number of extra hp would make them way too good.


>>    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).
>
> For low level diseases like leprosy, it can easily take>20 or 30 minutes to
> kill a monster...
> So a player casting that and exiting the map to be safe could not use the
> disease to kill.

  They would have to return to the map so it stays swapped in.  That said, one 
could argue that if one is not on the same map, maybe one should not get exp for 
kills on it.


>>    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.
>
> I really don't think it'd be that bad, but maybe experiments are in order.
> The first step could be to move swap time to a settings, so admins can
> experiment.

  I expect for vast majority of systems, increasing timeout won't cause any 
issues.  Beyond timeout (which can probably be modified while the server is 
running with no real bad effects), there is also some counter for max number of 
objects in memory - that would also need to be a setting.