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Re: CF: Stupid monsters?

On Feb 6, 10:31am, Christian Stieber wrote:
> Subject: CF: Stupid monsters?
> Hi,
>
> another issu concerning "moving towards 1.0": monster stupidity. Okay,
> it would be asking for too much to make monsters more intelligent
> (like using doors, or using spells according to what they "see"). But
> it should not be too difficult to make them appear a little less
> stupid --- for example, prevent them from casting useless spells such
> as "marking rune" (isn't it cute to kill a wizard and find all those
> marking runes around the place?), detect magic, identify etc., or
> reading all the scrolls they happen to pick up (sometimes you enter a
> room with nothing in it, stand close to a wall and get all those
> "demon reads scroll of identify" etc. messages), or even picking up
> everything instead of just the stuff that is "better" than what they
> are currently using (armor and weapon).

 A lot of this has to do with adding more information into the spells -
currently, there really isn't any easy way to know if something is an attack
spell - some guesses can be made via spellpaths, but not quite perfect.

 When spells are redone into objects, it probably makes sense to add a field
which determines spell type (maybe set of flags).  Something along the lines of
attack,defense (protection), healing, informative, misc. Monsters would pretty
much only end up using attack, defense, and healing (and only healing when
damaged.)  If spells end up being objects, it might even be possible to make it
smarter (might be able to determine what type of healing spell it is easier.)

 granted, we could do all of that right now, but it would have to be hardcoded
in.

 Monster pickup should probably be changed also (however, there are some
monters in which I think the vacuum cleaner effect is intentional).  If we make
some determination as to what weapon the monster will attack with, we can
probably figure out if a new weapon is better or not.

 (maybe have 2 sets of pickup flags - pickup if better, and always pick up,
so that the greedy orcs would always pick up gold, gems, but only pick up
better
weapons and the like.)

 Having monsters use doors would be possible - problem can become map design
and playbalance.  If a map designer makes something with a bunch of doors
figuring out the map would be interesting, but a monster ends up taking all the
doors down so you just have a huge group of monsters, it greatly changes the
map.

>
> Also, every now and then wizards (and maybe other spellcasters) cast
> flowers. I don't think that's correct -:)
>

 It could be they fumbled a spell (maybe they shouldn't?

> An old bug is still there: my nohup.out file is cluttered with messages
> "Arrow had no map."

 Probably more a useless debugging message than an error.

>
> We also found a way to crash the server. I don't really know what is going
> on, so I can't be more detailed --- it definitely has something to do
> with X. I can reproduce the crash with some hackish software that we have
> written to relay X connections (so we can use external servers despite
> our firewall); if anyone is interested I can send the program and/or
> crash your server -:)

 X code really wasn't designed to run multiple displays at once.  If you run
with the -sync mode, performance is worse, but chances of a crash are lessened.
 If you run without that, performance is better, but crash chance improves.

 Either way, I am not too worried, as the X code will eventaully be removed,
and doesn't seem to be a lot of point spending time trying to track down
various problems with it.


>
> Christian
>
>
> --
> Christian (Icho/Gandhi/Ribald @sunbroy53.informatik.tu-muenchen.de, 13325)
> [to unsubscribe etc., send mail to crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no]
>-- End of excerpt from Christian Stieber



-- 

-- Mark Wedel
mark@pyramid.com
[to unsubscribe etc., send mail to crossfire-request@ifi.uio.no]
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