Crossfire Mailing List Archive
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Rewrite (was Re: Classes, Race, Experience proposal)




	This was sent to me directly, the author asked me
to forward it.

------- Forwarded Message

Return-Path: Tero.Haatanen@lut.fi 
Delivery-Date: Thu, 26 May 94 11:04:07 -0700
From: Tero Haatanen <Tero.Haatanen@lut.fi>
Subject: Re: Rewrite (was Re: Classes, Race, Experience proposal)
To: smurf@soda.berkeley.edu (Scott MacFiggen)
Date: Thu, 26 May 94 21:03:44 EET DST
In-Reply-To: <199405261657.JAA14437@soda.berkeley.edu>; from "Scott MacFiggen" at May 26, 94 9:57 am

> 	Alot of the code is just fine, but some areas are pretty
> bad.

Yes, I have to agree. I hope that someone could summarize what they 
think as a those areas that needs most cleaning. And hopefully can also
present some solutions to clean them. I think when/if client/server
comes, most server code relating to X stuff is cleaned anyway.
 
> > So if a re-write is done, what will really be changed?  The topic was
> >initially brought up making it so that the class specific stuff could
> >be easily separated.  The thing is, can that be done in a reasonable

Separating class related things can be very hard problem to solve
even if not thinking amount of coding needed. If thinking the current
system where there aren't any main differences between classes and 
stronger class system where barbarian can't use some wizards item,
then supporting both features would require changes everywhere including
archetypes and maps. I don't mean it isn't possible but can cause 
many problems and probably requires the different archetypes and 
maps to each different class system. It seems already hard make
all #ifdef's working correctly.

I don't have any objection if someone is really going to do it
but I don't believe that re-write will happen :(. Also making
decision what is the game mechanism and what are the rest of game
isn't totally clear division either.

> >So I guess the first questions should be:  What do we hope to gain by
> >a major re-write, and is this feasible under any situation?
>
> 	One of my major beefs with crossfire code is the wasted
> space.  It seems whenever someone adds a new feature, they add a new
> entry to the object structure, stuff like that.

Hey, I removed two variables from the object structure when making the
container code! But seriously some features needs new entries to
object structure but I would hope that those would be consistently
used. One example that comes to is can_apply, which is char and
boolean flags can_use_*. Those have similar meaning, but still
handled totally differently.

One thing what I want to see is more generic c-code part, so
that most thing can be defined archetypes and maps. I mean use
the info from object and don't hardcode it in the source.

BTW. Has someone thought skill system where players could learn 
different skills (eg. fighting, casting, lock picking, searching,
using a bow) using them and than class could determine how hard
learning is. So it would be nearly impossible for barbarian to 
learn even easy spells but becoming good fighter would be easy. 
Of course there could be races like humans, elfs, dwarves and 
these would have own modifiers to each skill.

 -Tero

------- End of Forwarded Message