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Re: CF: Alchemy and costs of generated items

Mark Wedel (mark@stealth.eng.pyramid.com) wrote:

>  I think more maps
> need to be updated with the useful recipes (granted, I could look through the
> recipe file, but if you are trying to play honestly...)

Not sure about the "usefulness" of the item, but the firetemple (one of
the newer maps) has a whole "story" around a recipe for something (lots
of "people" researching that recipe). Of course, one needs that information
to get to the useful items...

>  I am also not sure how easy it would be to do, but giving some bonus for
> actually having a copy of the recipe. A lot of the game is already player
> knowledge and not character knowledge.  For alchemy, once the player finds out
> the recipe, and and all of his characters could use it.

Easy. Make an archetype "recipe", and move recipes from scrolls into
objects of that archetype. The alchemy spell could check whether the player
has such an object.

Having more specialized archetypes would also have an additional advantage:
one could add specialized shops, like an "alchemy" shop where you can only
sell ingredients and recipes. Right now shops are just "specialized" in one
direction.

Of course, the whole shop system could be reconsidered. It's quite
interesting to see that you can drop all sorts of useless garbage into
any shop, and even get money for it. Or that you enter a shop, find
that it doesn't have what you want, come back an hour later, and the
whole inventory of the shop has changed. That's what I call strange.

>  But this also brings something up in the formula - while rare objects should
> be costly and may not be, the rarity of the item should also be taken into
> consideration when computing those cost values.

Don't forget that some objects, such as a demon icor, can't be
"stored" (i.e.  you cannot pickup all demon icors and put them into
your apartment until you need them, since they will rot away). A
recipe that has two such items, without a map where the monsters close
to each other, is impossible to do...
(Actually, the apartment thing might work due to the buggy tempmap loading)

>  I think a lot more could be done with the alchemy code - I remember one of the
> old ultima games where certain ingrediants could be found by searching in
> certain places at certain times.  Addng stuff like that, or mining for some
> minerals in deep mines, etc could add some color to the game.

Great :-) I already have some simple realtime code added to the game;
any suggestions for timed items? Maybe just a new attribute
"create-time 10-15", so the item only gets created between 10:00 and
15:00, and is ignored at other times?

We already have items that cannot always be found. Although it is rather
difficult to implement, one could use the same technique to create maps
where several items can be found, but only very seldom. On the other hand,
this kind of thing causes people to deliberately crash the server, to
avoid having to visit the same place over and over again... which won't
help for timed items. And, once the X code is removed, the only way to crash
the server (that we know about) is hopeing that the teleporter bug hits
again... and, according to Murphy, it won't hit once you _want_ it to hit.

Mining needs new archetypes, too --- we need rock that can be removed,
along with a "slway rock" weapon and (prefereably) damaged weapons (so
that hitting rock with your sword will damage the sword a lot and the
rock just a little, and eventually break the sword).

Christian


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