replies to letters

[Skud the Great <tvangod@ecst.csuchico.edu>]

Ok, time to add my two cents worth to the comments made.






>From owner-crossfire@ifi.uio.no Wed Jul  8 15:56 PDT 1992
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From: Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho@ifi.uio.no>
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Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1992 00:52:06 +0200
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To: crossfire@ifi.uio.no
In-Reply-To: Robert Forsman's message of Mon, 06 Jul 92 10:56:07 EDT <199207061456.AAifi.uio.no19935@ifi.uio.no>
Subject: Re: crossfire
Status: RO


>> A specific instance of generators gone out of hand is the mice in
>> the old house.  I found at least two generators and can often manage
>> to destroy one, but while I was, the rest of the place filled up with
>> mice and I couldn't get out.


**************An important note********************
The mice can generate without generators, yes, thats right, if you have one
mouse and no generators and you wander for a while and come back, the whole
room will be filled with them. This was orignally a bug, Frank mentioned it
to me, apparently, he liked the idea of monsters reproducing themselves, as
do I. The old house can be cleared easly, by using the scrolls one can find
there. There are two, use them to kill a large group of mice, then kill the
straglers before they reproduce.
**************An important note********************

>The mice in the old house are quite possible to get rid of if you have
>say 14 hp, a sword, ac 5 and speed 1.0. I'm not saying it's easy, you
>need to be thorough and watch your hp :)

>> In nethack, you don't usually get swamped in evil monsters that
>> often.  Generators were designed in to Gauntlet.  They don't play well
>> unless you have infinite stand-off capability Until this problem is
>> fixed, the game is unplayable.


With Gauntlet, you do not have spells though, such as Golems, these are great
for sending into rooms with lots of deadly things to take out generators.
Lightening and bombs are also useful.

>In Crossfire you have infinite run-away capability instead, unless you
>do a mistake :)




>> Firechests are a real pain to destroy.  We once worked on one for
>> about 3 or 4 minutes.


>Due to a bug, firechests aren't that hard - the fireballs thrown in
>your direction will not explode, so just keep hacking away at it until
>it is dead. Of course, this is one area where some tuning may have to
>be done.

hhmmm, well firechests are my creation, are you sure they do not explode when
they hit a player? Seems to work fine here. Fireballs will not explode when
they hit a breakaway wall though.
Keep me informed on this, if you are sure it is not working I will go muck
around with the fire_a_ball subroutine in main.c.


>If they are too difficult, either raise the points awarded or
>lower its hit points.

Yes, good point, I will describe below how to edit monster artibutes in a 
seperate post.
Until of course one can do that with the editor.



>> There could also be a key that means attack a square, but don't move
>> in (useful for holding a key position).

>This would be useful (especially for opening doors :). On which keys
>do suggest to put it?


> Also, the window seemed a bit small.  You may have a small display,
> but I usually operate on 1280x1024 or 1152x900 displays.  The bitmaps
> could be a little larger.

>>It's currently 988x482. I think that's rather large already! :) I
>>think I once heard Frank say that it won't get wider than 1024 pixels.
>>(Many of our terminals are 1024x768, so there 8) Height could be
>>changed if you have a better reason than that it "seems a bit small".

>There are two reasons for not changing the size of the bitmaps:
> - we would have to draw new bitmaps
> - the larger the bitmap, the more difficult/the more effort it is to
>   make it look good.

>If you were talking about how much you can see of your surroundings, I
>don't think that will increase, simply because you aren't supposed to
>look so far. However, Frank has started talking about adding light,
>but he hasn't found any good algorithms for the spreading of it.
>Please feel free to help out with this! Anyway, with light sources,
>perhaps the size of that window could be bigger, but that's my
>opinion.

Also a factor is the speed. the larger the window the slower the game will
move, a good example is the map editor. Try moving one square at a time.


>> And, why settle for bitmaps.  Use pixmaps!  There is a pixmap editor
>> for R5 in the contrib directory.  I've also written a paint program
>> (xscribble), but it wouldn't be as well-tailored to icon generation as
>> the pixmap editor.

>Crossfire is currently using a font, and a font must be monochrome.
>Monochrome support is definetely going to stay, so we would have to
>draw and keep one monochrome image used for the font, and one pixmap.
>Every pixmap would need to be in a separate file, too, leading to lots
>of small files chewing up disc space. The way it is now, you can
>delete all the bitmaps after you've assembled the font.  This is good
>for those not taking part in the development of the game.
 
Well, one would not necessarily need to put each pixmaps in the a different
file, why not make a large pixmap, will all graphics tiled on it. Then each
imagine could be copied off the pixmap into the window, this is how Ulitma
was done on the old Apple IIs.



>Using a font is fast: You can draw a whole line at once in monochrome,
>ie. minimum protocol overhead. When you draw one character, you send
>one byte, when you send a monochrome pixmap, you send 72 bytes, when
>you send a 16 colour pixmap, you send 288 bytes (plus overheads). Do
>we want to make resource hogs?

> Equipment is hard to come by (especially after you've been cleaning
> out a few dungeons and die).  The static object thing just isn't good
> enough.
> 
> There needs to be a way to have random monster encounters.  I can
> agree with certain things being static, but that should only be major
> encounters or artifacts.  Most mundane monsters should be appearing
> fairly frequently and randomly.  Imagine an orc camp that has a number
> of orcs running around in it and these orcs have random objects (like
> swords, clubs, food).  Then there's an orc chieftan with his
> bodyguards who are static and some static treasure.

I do like the idea of random encounters, does anyone want to help out on this
one, I am willing to look into it.


>> Also, the timing is a hateful problem.  I'm not sure there's a
>> decent solution to the multi-player realtime problem.  Games like
>> nettrek work because combat is fairly slow and there aren't many
>> opponents.  Nethack works by not being realtime, so that the player
>> can handle several opponents at once by thinking things out.  Ditto
>> with Moria.

>It sounds like you think there is a problem with Crossfire's handling
>of this. Crossfire assumes that everyone is active when they are in.
>You can never turn away for long for fear of dying of hunger. A pause
>button could be added, but such a feature is easily misused. But then
>again, so are savefiles in Moria and Nethack, or even DM mode in
>Crossfire.

Ok, the timing thing may be resolved when crossfire moves to a client/server
model. It would be haddled much the way lpmud is haddled. Players will login
to servers with their character's name and password. This will be a ways down
the road, as there are a lot of other things to do with Crossfire first.

If you have any questions or problems fill free to get a hold on me.
 
Thanks for your input.


Skud
Tyler
(tvangod)