Crossfire Archive
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Re: CF: Where is non-standard maps?

On Jun 30,  1:12pm, Christian Stieber wrote:

> Some people here made it. Not that interesting, but neat, and quite
> complete. I think it's still the best source for demonspawn shields
> (anyone seen dread knights in the standard maps?).  Of course Grey
> Island has dread knights, too --- but who wants a Demonspawn shield if
> you can have a Greyshield?

 Dread knights were a more recent addition (probably added in for some maps),
and thus don't generally appear (they are not in any random monster lists
either, although perhaps that could also make some things more interesting -
one
time you go to some dungeon, the room is full of red dragons, another time
titans, etc - up to the map designer of course).

>
> >  Goldcity.
>
> Is available, too. Rather incomplete, though --- I even took it
> out again because there was nothing to do at all (at least we didn't
> find anything).

 Yeah - it was in the standard distribution for a short time (looks cool).  It
got removed on Brians request/note that there wasn't anything to do - it was a
starting ground.


> Be careful with Lepred's bag --- the weight limit is generally
> considered a bug among some of my players since it causes a lot of
> problems. I'm trying to figure out some patches to get around the
> weight limit problems.

 What is the weight limit problem?  I will note that crossfire is generally
'open' enough that people can pretty much mutate items/create new ones as
desired.  However, if they choose some insane values for some stuff and various
problems arise, I don't know if I consider that a bug in the program or a bug
in the map.

 I don't think having crossfire do strict sanity checking and reset values
becuase it considers them out of whack would be especially welcome.  Things
might run a little better, but probably several items might get adjusted in
ways the maker did not intend.

>
> Or maybe somebody just fix the bag bug :-) Activating a bag and
> dropping it sometimes empties the bag onto the floor (which is good),
> but often it just kills the items.

 I think this is the first I have heard of this bug report.  IF stuff doesn't
get reported (or gets reported in overly vague terms (ie, bags don't work
properly)), it is very difficult to track down the problem.  Specific examples
of what happens and how to do it are very useful (If I can reproduce the bug, I
can fix it.  If I have no idea what the bug is....)


> Fixing this would be a good start
> to handle the weight limit problem (although having to take everything
> out of the bag to process some items is not the best way of handling
> things.

 Is the 'weight limit problem' that stuff in the bag can weigh so much that the
character can not hold it in his inventory?  That isn't really a bug, but I
suppose it is annoying if all you plan on doing is dropping the item.

 Would some method of taking an item from the bag on dropping it directly on
the floor (bypass players inventory) fix the 'problem'?  I don't see any
problem with playbalance in that - current server sort of lacks an
interface/mechanism todo that.  But I believe something like that could easily
be one on the client (or at least more easily done)


> Maybe some "drop <regexp>" to take things out of the bag and
> drop them on the floor? And some getmax <item> to get as many items as
> you can carry (like "getmax platinum" when you go shopping).

 Unfortunately, that gets a little more complicated when dealing with
containers (it is pretty trivial to see what the player can carry, but with
containers, you would need to see if that platinum is going to go into a
container, and then see its weight depreciation to figure it out.)  Not
especially hard to do, but pretty slow, since the entire inventory has to be
searched at least once to see if it is going into a container.


> Plus
> other changes to avoid taking things out of bags at all, like automatically
> looking for money contained in pouches (often asked for... I haven't done
> it yet because I didn't like the idea to accidentally buy something),
> but due to the weight limit problem and the existence of Lepred's pouch
> it might be worth implementing :-)

 Automatically using out of pouches/bags is one of those big yes/no personal
issues.  Some people like the idea of all tha being done, and others like to
use things like pouches and sacks to protect items from accidentally being
used.


> There is another dungeon by florian but I didn't try that since I
> don't like to install maps that require archetype and/or treasure-list
> changes (back then I installed pupland because I considered it worth
> the hassle). This might be an idea for crossfire --- read a directory
> with archetype and treasure-list files, instead of just reading one
> file.

 Easier addition has always been one of those things asked for.  Run time
addition is a problem since many values are hashed or sorted, and to resort
would mess up all referances to them (ie, object says image id #298 is its
face, but we run into new images, the list gets resorted, and #298 is now
something completely different.)

 Also, many structures are malloc'd for the number images/whatever expected.

 Now all of this can be overcome in one way or another, but really probably is
not worth the effort just to add run time additions.  Especially since pre
runtime generation is pretty easy.

 The scripts should already generate all the files that might need to be used
(ie, archetypes, faces) provided the archetypes are there.  However, I will
concede that if some set of maps is just adding 20 new archetypes, you need the
entire arch distribution to rebuild.

 Perhaps I can see about adding a merge feature to the collect.pl script (ie,
collect.pl -merge /dir/with/new/archetypes).  I know that the images files are
pre done alphabetically, the the server resorts that anyways on load up, so I
don't think that is a problem.  Such a merge won't worth the server xpm images
due to the way they are stored, but will work fine for the client side
xpm/pixmap/whatever.


-- 

-- Mark Wedel
mark@pyramid.com
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