Re: CF: Are these bugs?

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

David Andrew Michael Noelle wrote:

> 2) Undead
> 
>     Only priests of a cult that considers undead their enemy (or unaligned?
> priests) can banish them or slay them with Holy Word, but any priest (of
> sufficient level) can Turn or Command them.  Should Turn Undead and Command
> Undead be usable if undead are neither friends nor foes?  Lythander and
> Mostrai, for example, should have _no_ power over undead, while Gaea and
> Valriel should be better than "unaligned" at turning them, but not so good
> at controlling them.  Devourers on the other hand, should be able to Command
> Undead especially well, but unable to turn them at all.

 The undead issue goes back to before their were multiple gods (and I guess
still applies if you don't compile the multi god support).

 The races and gods really needs to be revisited and cleaned up quite a bit. 
The current undead, and turn undead, is probably largely borrowed from AD&D.

 The current gods were added without any real background (how did they come to
exist and represent the various factions they do).  Furthermore, I think there
may be a bit too much emphasis on having the gods try and cover all aspects as
well as have opposed gods and what not.

 It many earth mythos, you have the various gods that overlap in powers quite a
bit, and not necessarily all of them have a god that opposes them (and in some
cases, the mythos might be 75% good, with the remaining 25% evil and it is
really the good vs evil that oppose each other)

 On the other hand, undead are supernatural in nature (much more so than things
like goblins, orcs, and most other creatures), so it makes some sense that
certain things are likely to repel them (vampires shy away from crosses).  Is
there an animate dead spell in cf?  If not, there probably should be, otherwise
where are all these undead coming from? (animate dead could also be an
interesting way to use corpses).

 But back to the point - being undead are supernatural, it makes some sense that
many more religions may have power over them than just the god of light (or
whatever).  While many gods may dislike other creatures intensely, there is
probably a somewhat universal agreement among the gods that these undead are
horrible abominations of nature and should be destroyed.



> 4) Pupland Raffle 2

 I believe this is a map that requires multiple players to successfully complete
- that is a feature.  Unfortunately, it can make things tough if you are one
player.



> 
> 7) Your weapon still hungers to slay enemies of ... nobody in particular
> 
>     Gods only grant slaying power to weapons that aren't already enchanted
> to slay something.  Any particular reason for that?  I don't see why Valriel
> should decline to make a Dragonslayer also slay demons and devils.  It would
> just become a Dragonslayer of Valriel.
>     The gods' refusal to bless each other's sacred weapons already prevents
> one weapon from being blessed to slay the enemies of multiple gods.  There's
> no problem with adding a god's attacktype to a magical weapon.  If it's just
> a matter of merging the slaying fields, I have a patch for that.  I'm
> testing it now and it seems to work okay.

 I believe this is an attempt to limit weapon power - the idea being a player
shouldn't be able to bring in a super powerful sword with gobs of magic already
on it and have it improved even more by the god.

 Doing it that way was probably not the best way to handle it, but a reasonable
way.  A way to balance it better might be for the god to remove magic other than
his own (so other attacktypes that are not the gods may be removed, as well as
protections, immunities, etc.)  However, if that is done, then it should only
look for weapons laying on the altar, and not ones in the players inventory
(although the later could be fair in some sense - if you are using a weapon that
has powers in disagreement with your gods, your god is not likely to be happy
about that.)

> 
> 8) Speed Buffer
> 
>     When a player runs, but can't move, the movement is apparently buffered
> so that they'll move faster once they're no longer blocked, to catch up with
> where they would have been if they weren't blocked in the first place.  I
> don't know what problem this buffered speed is supposed to solve, but I find
> it a problem in its own right.

 This is both a bug and a feature.

 One problem is it is difficult to differentiate between important commands
(like drink that healing potion or cast word of recall) and not important
commands (move north).

 In many heated battles, you do something and you want to make sure that action
happens - you don't want to take the chance that action is dropped.  As such,
all commands are buffered (to some extent).

 The other issue is just client performance and speed - if the client waits for
an acknowledge from the server before sending the next command, you lose 2 x
latency to the server for any action.  Unless you are closely proximated to the
server, latency time is likely to be at least somewhat high.  Consider that each
tick in crossfire is 120 ms, if your latency (one way) to the server is 60 ms,
you are effectively moving at half rate.

 The client actually deals with this intelligently - it keeps track of how many
unacknowledge commands it has sent to the server, and stops sending new ones if
it gets too high.  This is controlable by the player - that is what the 'cwindow
command in the client does.  If you set it to 1, you will get no buffering
(client sends command, and waits for it to be processed before sending the
next), but lose performance.  If set too high, you get too many commands
buffered.  For most people, around 5-10 is probably pretty good.


 The move really fast after you kill the monster is an old bug, and likely to
get fixed in one of the 96.x releases.
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