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Re: CF: Are these bugs?



Mark Wedel wrote:
> ...
>  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.
> 

    Hmmm...  So, you're saying that all gods should empower their priests to
Turn, Command, Banish, and destroy (Holy Word/Orb) undead?  I assume
Devourers would still be an exception, and perhaps Gorokh.  Should they all
have equal power over undead, or should Valriel and Gaea be better at
destroying and turning undead and worse at commanding them?

    To make all gods (with specific exceptions) equally opposed to undead,
just add undead to their slaying field.

    I'd prefer to make certain gods particularly opposed to undead (Valriel,
Gaea), others aligned WITH them (Devourers, maybe Gorokh), and the rest
nominally opposed.  To do that the Holy Effect attacktype should be changed
to do extreme damage to enemy races (as it does now), and normal damage to
undead, unless they're listed as a friendly race, then set damage to zero
for anyone else.  The Turn Undead attacktype might be only half as effective
if undead aren't specifically an enemy race, and Command Undead could be
made half as effective if they ARE an enemy race.  What about Banishment?

    Either way, I'm willing to make the changes and submit the patch if a
consensus can be established.  Opinions?  Votes?  Comments?


> > 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.
> 

    Actually, I didn't have much trouble completing most of it as a single
player.  I just can't get past the rusty door on the Mage side because the
rusty key is behind a broken door on the Warrior side.  According to the
map's author, Hisanobu Okuda, some triggers were broken by version 0.95, and
are currently being updated.

> >
> > 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 believe this is an attempt to limit weapon power

    That's what I was guessing.

>  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.)

    Currently, only the weapon you're actually using is considered at all. 
I like this idea of removing magic.  If your god notices that the weapon
you're holding is enchanted to slay a friendly race, the god might smite the
weapon, removing that race from the slaying field, or perhaps removing the
whole field, and maybe lowering its magic value by 1.  The weapon's title
would also be removed.  Similarly, a weapon with an attacktype the god is
vulnerable to might have that specific attacktype removed.  Further prayer
might then convince the god to bless the weapon with his/her/(it's?) own
attacktype and/or empower it to slay enemy races.  Since there's only a 0.2%
chance per point of wisdom and level bonus (+1 per 10 levels/points) of
divine intervention on any given prayer action (at an altar), and then a 50%
chance that the weapon will be ignored anyway, that's going to take a lot of
prayer.
    I've been playing around with this code anyway, so if a consensus can be
reached, I might already have a patch for it.

    Issues:

1) Should divine intervention at an altar remove weapon attributes (slaying,
attacktype) that are offensive to the god, even if the weapon is not
specifically sacred to the god's enemy?

2) Should the whole slaying field be removed, or just the friendly race(s)?

3) Should the weapon be damaged in any other way (-1 magic) by this
reprimand?

4) Should the priest lose any experience in the process?  (Angry gods tend
to do that.  See praying at someone else's altar, using a weapon sacred to
the god's enemy while praying over the altar...)

5) After the offensive attributes and title of the weapon have been removed,
and another divine intervention prayed for, should the god consider it like
any other weapon for improvement?

6) Should a god similarly smite a weapon sacred to another (non-enemy) god,
removing that god's name, even if the attacktype and slaying field are not
offensive?
 6a) If such a weapon is struck, should it lose any blessings bestowed by
the previous god?  (attacktype, slaying, luck - for Lythander)
 6b) Should the whole slaying field be removed or just the enemies of the
previous god?

> 
> >
> > 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).

    Which reminds me, why doesn't Word of Recall work any differently for
higher level casters?  It takes way too long to be used as an escape spell. 
I changed mine to work faster based on the caster's wisdom and level.  I can
diff a patch for that if anyone's interested.  I need to test it some more
first, though.

>  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).

    In many heated battles, I find that I've hit the Fire button a few times
too many, and if that heal spell had gone off a fraction of a second
earlier, I would have survived.  Perhaps we need an interrupt command to
flush the command buffer?  That could be prepended to critical bindings, so
that "interrupt; invoke heal" would abort any icestorms you're about to
cast.

    On a barely related note, I'd love to see a repeat command that would
keep doing the specified action n times, or until it is successful or you
interrupt it.  Much safer than holding down the 's' key and hoping nothing
ugly shows up and eats you before you can stop searching for the trap you've
already found.

>  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.

    I thought I read in some text file, that there was an option to set the
server's speed.  Is there any such thing, and if so, where?


>  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.

    Ahhh... "cwindow"...  If cwindow is set to 5 during a fight, and I
decide I need to cast a heal spell immediately, regardless of what's in the
buffer, would "cwindow 1; invoke heal; cwindow 5" do it?  That might be a
workaround for the interrupt command I mentioned above.


>  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.

    Glad to hear it.  I thought maybe I'd set something wrong or compiled
with a bad library.  That's a really obnoxious bug.  Almost as much so as
the spell-reflection failure thing I'm trying to track down.


-- 
            -Dave Noelle,                 dave@Straylight.org
            -the Villa Straylight,  http://www.straylight.org
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