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Re: Misc thoughts.



 ACtually, the starting stats bonuses/penalties do determine the max for
that stat (it is 20 + bonus).  Thus, a barbarian (with penalty 6 int I believe)
can have a max int of 14 naturally.  Magical items can still raise it above
this.

 Other notes:
Improve weapons:  Having quests that raise it is an interesting idea.  The
way to limit this would only allow a player through the quest once.  Some
code to do this would be needed - perhaps add a special portal through
which only character who have not done the quest can pass.  At the end
point (where you get your weapon increased), add an invisible object to
the players inventory that contains information stating the quest was
completed (perhaps using the slaying field like special keys do.)  This
should be done for most all quests that have good items.  The difficulty is
for quests that do not necessarily have an great ending item, and what to
do when a party completes a quest with only one good item.

 Differing skills systems:  Hard coding it is a lot easier.  But there
is no reason that hter can only be 4.  Just add some define with
the nubmer of skills, and add code where appropriate to adjust the
experience of the skills.  If a skill system is adopted, there will always
need to be at least some code support that needs to be added.


 Composite images for walls on top of floors:  This is a lot of work, and
still difficult to do.  In maps do you add a floor+wall archetype?  And
for client, it still needs to know what the objects are.

 Best solution is to clean up the object structure.  Walls and floors (and
non alive objects in general) are probaly about 80% of the objects in
use (rough guess - a more definiate number can be found by looking at
the 'malloc command).  But these objects don't use a lot of the what is
stored in the object structure - stats, speed, immune, weight,
carrying, pickup, etc.  What should probably done done is make the
stats structure dynamically allocated when needed, and store a lot of the
other fields in a 'monster' structure, that is also dynamically allocated.
This would probably reduce the amount of space for objects to under 100
(maybe even 50) bytes for things like walls and floors.

 Maps:  The maps do play some into making certainly classes easier.
The maps that are jsu spirals or single widith passages are good for
both spell caster and non.  Figthers can go through, knowing that they
never will be fighter more than 2 monsters at a time (and only 2 at
the corners.)  Mages go through with the bolt or cone spells, hitting
a line of monsters.

 If you make the map quite curvy, at least you take out the mage aspect.
But things like the newbie tower (with 2 wide rings) are still great
for mages.  Go in with most any area of affect spell, and kill lots of
monsters quickly.

 But any map with generators is open to abuse.  The mage sits around in
a corner, behind a door, or like place, waiting the for the number of
monsters to grow, when he then hits a large number with some spell.

 Anti magic areas:  This seems to be a favorite of a lot of mapmakers.
My thoughts on this is that the monsters should have the same limitation
as the players.  This is true for somet things, but for abilities of
monsters, it is not.  IT seems to me that most monster abilities are
more magical in nature (example - conjurers have the ability to summon
creatures.  This should probably be a spell ability, and not natural
abilty, and thus, conjurers should not be able to summon a creature in
an anti magic area.)

 OTher thoughts:  Spells which replace potions should be few and
far between.  REstoration is a nice spell, buy why would you ever
buy a potion of restoration when a scroll of it is cheaper.  Heal is
a handy spell, but with the price of healing potions, I cant ever see
buying one.  And there is at least one quest where you can get an immunity
to fire spellbook (which means that you have no need for potions of
fire resistance.)

Hp/SP regeneration: One thing that is wrong is that you gain these
back based upon your speed.  Thus, if you are really slow, you will gain
hp and sp back slower (so taking off armor gains sp in 2 ways - you probably
will be moving faster, plus armor reduces the rate.)  This should probably
be fixed so that you gain at the same rate no matter what your speed
is.

 --MArk