Elgoran

Hmm, didn't know where this belongs, most probably into a ForumPM to radu, but i don't think he has to be bugged with every little thing. Okay, i made a lil bashscript that checks a list of playernames for their online status. It's the very first script i ever wrote, so people with a weak stomach should probably not read it. When i was done, i began to doubt the legality of the whole thing though. Left aside the annoyance factor. On the one hand, it uses information readily available to everyone, namely the players online page, and merely refines it. On the other hand it pretty much copies the functionality of the buddy list, just outside of the game. And to put someone on your buddy list, you have to ask them for approval for a reason. Also, since the script wgets the whole page every minute, it might cause a non-negligible rise of traffic if used by several players simultaneously. But then again it's ~40 lines of code anybody could have written... So you see my dilemma, any clue might be helpfull. Thanks in advance, Elgoran.

Allright. Talked to radu and redid the thing. ELcheckerv0.4 now also has the instance checking feature. Any testing and feedback to improve it's usability would be welcome. The only drawback is that it uses lists of instancers i host and since i couldn't find a complete list of all players in EL, it'll slowly find more players with each daily update.

Part 2 of this lil thing is the instancefinder maybe. You call it with a 60, 80, 100 or 120 as parameter and it'll print and write to a file all online players suitable for that instance that don't have priavcy enabled. #edit Removed the link for now. Gotta ask radu first wether running wget once for every player online is okay or not.

Two further questions on this topic from me: First: From what i heard i concluded that all the special effects of your equipment that are triggered by hitting in close combat are also triggered by hitting with an arrow. Can anybody confirm/falsify this? Second: Are effects that are triggered by getting hit constricted to normal close combat hits or can they also get triggered by other special effects (e.g. bone of death effect, igitd retaliation) and/or succesfull ranged attacks? Thanks for your answers in advance, Elgoran.

Allright. Feeling a bit more secure now, thank you. :-) Also modified it to use the fd-list now -> way less bandwidth used but a bit more laggy as well, since that list doesn't get updated as often. If anyone feels like testing and/or improving it: here it is btw.

Have to object to the idea, sorry. I don't think mini events were introduced just to have everybody spend ~1 million gc to get rid of 'em again. And for those who're desperate to get rid of the main effect of mini events, to make you stop harvesting, there are harvester medallions. And those are a superior, since continuous, moneysink.

+1 Most simple solution And on the topic of magic protection vs. resistance: imho magic protection is used against special attacks (cooldown, mana burn, etc.) and magic resistance is used against spells (harm, MD, etc.)

I must say i agree with the message delivered by this post. The way i see it is the following: From reading the post mortem comments i concluded radu didn't even have the idea of opening the shop himself, but was somehow driven into it by the players. I think every mayor mmorpg, so a game with a persistant world in which at least a 4 digit number of players compete in, does have exchange rate for ingame items/characters/currency vs. RL money. Be it official or unofficial. This arises from the differing value different people from different countries give to both sides of that transactions. The big commercial games try to prohibit unofficial trades of that nature of course, but from what i heard, they're about as successfull as the people fighting movie/music piracy. Now, EL does have an official shop and leaving aside the optical improvements and simply supporting the game, you can in a way, buy power there. You can not buy pure power though. You have to sell the items from shop ingame, which takes a bit of time and despite what people might think at one time or the other, is limited. If you had a million rostos enter the market at once, their price would drop. And if you consider the combination of nexus removals and hydro bars to be the essence of power, you'll still have to find someone selling the stones to you, even if you bought the bars from the npc. Because of this, you can't simply make a new character and boost it with some 1000$ to make it pr0 if you only buy from the shop. (Leaving aside the skillleveling here) This i consider a measure to protect the consistency of the game. Now, even leaving aside sales of complete characters, which will be dealt with in another chapter, on the unofficial side there are people selling power in a purer form and even cheaper than the shop. It was stated that the shop should be made more competitive with those, who only exist because they can undercut the shop and sell power in a more refined form. If you think gc sellers could do any business if their prices were higher than those of the shop, try selling a greatsword for 50kgc on the market when NPCs only demand 40. Like the NPCs ingame set an upper (and lower) limit for the price of items, so does the shop set an upper limit for the RL money cost of gc. If the shop tried to compete with the gc sellers, it would ultimately lead to the scenario arising from acidics comment. By the time the shop had prices that were so low the gc sellers were unable to undercut them and were forced to close business, everything in this game would be so cheap to get, working to achieve it ingame would become futile. On the other hand, it was questioned why the possibility to buy/achieve power through nexus removal stones/hydro bars exists at all. Although i normally agree with Korrode's posts, i have to state here that i do consider this necessary. The skillevelling in EL is openended. No matter how much experience you gather, you could always use more. (From what i heard there's a cap at level 178 due to using signed ints for exp or whatever, but it was not really intentional and radu had stated somewhere that it would be removed if ever hindering someone) When it comes to PP, if someone made it to having all attributes, positive perks and nexuses at maximum, it might be not too hard a task to implement several levels of an expensive perk(like 10 or 20PP) that allows you to raise your attribute cap a bit. For gc though, there wouldn't be much use once you own every piece of equipment and decent supplies. Sure, you can boost your experience gain by buying books and ingredients for mixing or to waste in a school, etc., etc., but even that is somehow limited because you still need time to burn through your bought stuff. Buying readymade pickpoints in my opinion is way more appealing to players and gives toplevel and more important really rich characters something to do with their gc. Not only might this make the difference for a player with a topchar wether he continues playing and earning gcs or not, but also slows down inflation by lessening demand for said ingredients a little bit. Charactersales are a bit more problematic, but as stated above, i don't think they could be stopped even with unreasonable ammounts of work. When a player decides to stop playing and has a highlevel character, there's a chance that character won't leave the game, but get sold to another player. Thus, even if EL had a high constant flow of new characters joining the game, the mean level of a character ingame constantly rises. This is normal and happens with most games i think. Since EL has no maximum level however, it is affected by the problems arising from that fact in a more serious way than other games. One is inflation, a topic i heard radu is constantly busy with. Confining it without nullifying the appearance of progression might be a tough job though. The other is incentive. Constantly adding challenging tasks for characters at levels you didn't even consider achievable is hard and timeconsuming. For instance many monsters were added to the game in the course of the last one or two years that don't have their own sprites. Something in my opinion done out of necessity and not because planned so from the beginning. One of the answers to this problem lies, as much as some players seem to despise it, in PK. In EL there will always be a player or a group of players that can kill you. And if not there will be after a certain period of time. Thus, strengthening PK and making PK maps more appealing even to strict nonPK players might be a good thing. There are many ways to achieve this. A simple way would be to put more superior spawns and good harvesting spots on PK maps. A more complicated way would for instance be a concept i'm working on atm, involving PK, estates and guildshared property. Edit: As an incentive for levelling noncombat skills to where the sun doesn't shine: For mixing an experience bonus or better yet a small version of the recycling day effect could be added for every 100 levels you're above the recommended mixing level or so. For harvesting i don't know and i don't care atm, i'm going to bed. Summary: The shop is fine as it is. The option to buy PPs is necessary. Making PK maps more appealing is a good thing. I shouldn't write posts at 4am. Start the flames, Elgoran.

I'm not completely sure if this works and if the name was made available again instantly, but the text command #killme_yes should do the trick.

Hmmm, i don't have a clue about hardware prices in the US, over here computer parts have gone up quite a bit lately though. I paid almost 800€ for my new box. Love it though. ^^ I never owned a laptop either, so i can only be of help for desktops. You should be fine with a dualcore processor, or if you can get one, a triplecore. Amd seems to be a bit cheaper there than intel. If you can, don't buy a boxed cpu, since you might want to get a custom cooler atop of it anyway. For graphicscards ati seems to be cheaper than nvidia, i still stick to nvidia though, since i had some issues with ati drivers in the past. I also took a motherboard from gigabyte's ultra durable series. It wasn't exactly cheap, but on the whole board i didn't find any of the usual film capacitors. Since you're looking for reliability, this might not be the worst advice. Well, that's all that comes to my mind right at the moment, let me know if i took the wrong direction and you want more specific suggestions.

-28 -germany -student -long history 1. simply addicted 2. - 3. Was looking for games in some repos, might have been LGDB 4. A lot, several hours almost every day. 5. Tried some other mmorpgs and still play lordswm and warpfire now and then(if browserbased games do count here). I stick with EL because it's free, it's fun and i have a character here that i already put much time into. 6. No. I like to play considering EL a "closed world". Also i'm too poor. XD

Dunno, when you're mining gold or diamonds for example you might be cautiously scraping the rock away with your pick rather than bashing at it with full speed. But i don't want to discuss which animations would be appropriate and which would be not. That is something i also meant when speaking of inappropriate pictures: I think it doesn't matter if the animation makes sense in all cases. If a player doesn't care to face the harvestable, just let him hit the air then. The animations don't even have to necessarily look good. They're just meant to make the game look more busy, so that when a new player enters a highly populated area he doesn't think "D'uh, in this game everybody's just sitting around." #edit: What ProHibited said. He posted while i was still writing.

Hmmmm, speaking of which: A friend of mine owns a Nokia N900, did anyone already try to compile the client for maemo?

Hmm, i think that would defeat the purpose, since then your char would be harvesting, but everybody around you would still look like a wax figure.

I found this one kinda nice: http://www.theswain.com/Flash/MWC.htm But my all time favorite (besides EL of course) is clonk. Awesome mix of genres.

Same explanation as the fact that you can mine iron and mix the iron with FE and coal to an iron bar - in the mine - without anvil. Umm, I don't really think anvils are used to make metal bars, a blast furnace is much more suitable for that task. But point taken, realism shouldn't be seen too dogmatic in a fantasy game anyway. Anyway, i don't think anything's wrong with the rare bars atm. If circumstances led to players being unable to compete with the NPCs considering the price of an item, so be it. If this trend continues though and hydrogenium bars become something bought mainly from the NPC, we'll have lots of unemployed hydro runners and bombers protesting on the streets. XD

Darn. Big calculus test coming up, so i'm unavailable for now. Terribly sorry for turning down 2 offers already, forgot to update this post. Will return more reliable. From: germany Timezone: middle europe (GMT+2)

Hi folks, i'm selling off some drop books, if you need any, make me an offer. 1 Book of Titanium Molding 4 Book of Titanium Smelting 1 Stars Medallion Building 2 Moon Medallion Building 3 Isla Prima Ring Building 3 Portland Ring Building 15 Book of Crafting Potion 14 Book of Potion of Summoning 2 Book of Magic Potion 2 Book of Potion of Manufacturing 1 Book of Iron sword of fire 2 Titanium Short Construction 8 Book of Iron Axe Construction 1 Book of Serpent Sword of Thermal 5 Titanium Long Construction 7 Book of Steel Axe Construction 4 Titanium Serpent Sword Construction 5 Titanium Chainmail Torso Construction 2 Steel Shield Construction 1 Book of Titanium/Steel Short Sword of Thermal 2 Book of Titanium/Steel Short Sword of Ice 1 Book of Dwarf Fighting 1 Book of Elf Fighting 5 Book of Humans Fighting 4 Book of Bear Summoning

Hello, i did a quick search on the forum, but wasn't able to find something similar. I was puzzled by the fact that the development section of the forum had subsections for mapmaking and sound/fx, but none for graphics/artwork. The combination of given pieces of artwork seems to already be distributed in the form of mapmaking done by some players. The creation of textures, 3d and 2d models seems to be carried out by Roja alone though. At least i wasn't able to find any contrary information. On the one hand it's nice to have all the graphics used in EL of a piece. On the other just a single person carrying such a huge workload can't really add to the speed of development and there might be some hidden artists among the players just itching to contribute. Sure, one could maybe pick all the information needed from one's installation of the client, but art people aren't necessarily computer people. (I know some of them and they definetly ain't. XD ) So here's my suggestion: How about creating and publishing templates for specific pieces of artwork on the forums with examples to look at. For a mob for example: File type and rough size of the 3d model and file types and sizes of the different textures used, all neatly packed together into a zip-archive with all the data used for displaying a goblin. Analogous for all the faces, haircuts and skin tones for player models, items, etc., maybe Fedora could even make something like a template for creating animations. Players would then be enabled to send in their creations in a standardized format, changing Roja's job from creating all this stuff alone to something more like a decission maker like Radu is for the client code to my information atm. A lot of artwork to choose from definetly comes in handy and even if putting some into the client would increase its size by some extent, i don't think the majority of players would mind, since for most people hard drives with a few GB of space are pretty common nowadays. To create an incentive for players, contest could be held, e.g. the one who creates the winning new looks of the casty gets a nexus remo or something. Of course the copyright/-left stuff would get a bit more complicated, since artists might object to having a "made by Roja" next to their work. Yet i think the distribution of artwork might greatly add to the game's attractivity. Best regards, Elgoran. Edit: whoops, just noticed there already are/were some people contributing artwork to the game, still, my suggestion might make it easier to do so.

Hmm, sounds like something better solved by the "grab item list from sto"-feature that i recall being mentioned as not working yet in an earlier version of the client, since then you'd have to click only once(or twice maybe, counting the rightclick to open the popup) to get the desired quantity of items from your sto and could even get several different items at once.

Hi Liquid, the feature you are requesting seems to already be worked on. It's the button called item lists in your inventory. The function to grab an item list from sto wasn't implemented yet though, but i recall a similar text being there when you right-clicked the button and a message saying "Not working yet" appearing when you used it in an earlier version of the client.

Ummm... yeah, looked it up in the manpages. Seems i was misinformed there. Sorry. Anyway, i feel like this discussion has taken over the thread. Its topic is still urban legends of EL though. So could a forum mod maybe select all the posts about random number generation and move them to a new thread? (Dunno if this even can be done, but would increase clarity tremendously)

Hello people. Yeah, i'm selling some stuff again. Means of contacting me are post here or PM ingame. 60k iron ores 210kgc(3.5gce) 40k coals 85kgc(2.12gce) 3k steel bars 165kgc(55gce) 4 enrichment stones 48kgc(12kgce) 3 binding stones 42kgc(14kgce) 3 serpent stones 30kgc(10kgce) 50k valerian 65kgc(1.3gce) 38k daffodils 38kgc(1gce) 21k raw meat 100kgc(4.76gce) 1070 white rabbit furs 9kgc(8.41gce) That's it. Have fun shopping.

Just a little comment regarding probability: First off: I have no clue how radu implemented the dropchances for rare items, poisoning chance of toadstools, etc. . Every mayor programming language does have a function called random(minValue, maxValue) though and that's the way i'd do this. Also when the last server crash occurred, radu mentioned something about using this function somewhere, so chances are he also used it for the issues at hand. The numbers generated by those functions are not true random numbers, but use a timestamp and some calculations to give you a random number from the specified interval. Regarding shroomies though this means that, e.g. the function used has seconds as smallest unit, if you click multiple shroomies inside the same second, the number generated will be the same for all of those, making you get poisoned multiple times. With the exception of this little drawback random functions generate random numbers though. This means, getting back to the rare drops example, if the chance to get a rare drop is 1/15000 and you already slew 14999 fluffs without getting one and now slay Nr.15000, the chance to get a rare drop from it, you guessed right there, is still 1/15000. This is all purely hypothetical though and sorry for smartassing. Cheers, Elgoran.