trollson

These seem like a reasonably balanced bunch of suggestions at first glance. I quite like the "torch" thing. Torches are usually suggested as light sources, which are not possible in this game engine. Now, linking them to perception modifiers is inspirational! Carrying a torch means you are more visible as well (more than the perception modifier you get). In fact, rather than give you the perception modifier, it should up the visibility of all entities within a radius (decreasing with radius). A torch could also add a small amount of fire damage, even off-handed, though it would have a high degrade chance. I doubt it would come under "Engineering" (or any skill) though that skill seems to be a place to stick anything new at the moment.

Overload is usually handled by decreased mobility. In EL terms, you cannot move when overloaded, and penalties for all actions (skill use). However, while this prevents OTT muling, it would allow for OTT storage characters; trading would have to be disabled when overloaded to counter this. Really though, even with this there would have to still be a cap. Personally though, I'd prefer to see CC increased through devices which give their own limitations, such as backpacks (no capes, combat penalties) or wheelbarrows & handcarts (2 handed equip) -- I'd love to see Dwarfs leaving the mines pushing wheelbarrows, or a merchant trundling along the road with a hardcart (cannot go indoors or underground).

An enhanced vial that is required for certain exotic concoctions?

Change it so you cannot equip items requiring the nexus level. The game already copes with items equipped without the required nexus during resets. Could always recalculate the armourment bonuses giving appropriate penalties for (pre) equipped items where you lack the nexus. This could also apply to the reset situation.

Fossils are not found in living trees.

True, you can reliably mine ore and sell for gold, to buy any know expense. This can be planned for. Except you cannot plan to get them; its down to luck. Which is no good if you are planning a project -- you have to budget for buying them off the market, which opens up to supply & demand. Any you do make or find is then a boon. There is a key difference, which is the limited supply due to spawns, which then puts you in competition with others. ~40 characters can sit around a single flower and all harvest as much as they want, but only one person can take a spawn at a time. So there is no intrinsic cost here? The price is arbitary, based on what people will pay, and on how much profit people want for their effort. Others may choose to undercut to take the business. The bottom line is the actual cost (which for mundain items close to zero) or what an NPC will pay for the item. If it was a pure gc making exercise, then there is a separate valuation which of "best price" which is the best price for the ingredients limited by the NPC buy-sell range. This is an interesting calculation (I did have a spreadsheet for this once). However, it doesn't work because the economy isn't cash driven.

We've been around this block too many times... Market prices for harvestables, and derived products are meaningless in a game where basic resources are unlimited. All the ingredients for that Steel Long Sword are free to gather, with only a minor cost in tool losses. The only things that have a real cost associated with them are: Ingredients that can only be bought from an NPC (leather, sand paper). Rare or exotic ingredients that cannot be reliably obtained, where supply & demand do create a price. Creature drops which are in limited supply, controlled by spawn rates. Again, supply & demand will give you a price. So where does the "700-750 gc" price tag for the Steel Long Sword come from? How is this not pure profit if you want it? A reward for players time and effort? This is offset by experience earned -- this is an economy driven by experience points, not gold coins. Isn't the fun of playing the game a reward in itself? Sure, earning money in game is fun, but then you are in competition with others who do not value that -- and who is to say what is the "right" way to play? In a competive market based system, prices are limited to the range set by NPCs' buy-sell prices. NPCs have infinite supply & demand at fixed prices, so represent the edge of the EL economy where it meets some larger system. However, players are free to ignore NPC's buy-prices in closed-house production plans; so again raw materials are valued at zero or less (depending on what value you place on xp), and thus for derived products. "Fixing" prices for goods in never a good idea. In EL terms; NPCs could buy and sell items for the same price, effectively setting a fixed price for it. That then removes trade between characters -- just do business with the NPC, who always has a supply/demand. But closed-house production still bypasses this. The only way to impose value on raw materials is to limit their supply, maybe resource spawns similar to creature spawns. But that produces its own set of problems. EL doesn't limit resources, and to change this would be a fundamental change.

What a novel suggestion. I'm astonished that it hasn't come up before. Oh wait... "Right handed/Left handed" "South Paws" "Left Handed" ... Search. If you can't be arsed to search or do the minimum research, then don't bother posting in Suggestions. Summary Fighting a left handed ("sinister") opponents puts you at a disadvantage, since training and practice are against right handed.This disadvantage applied to two left-handers fighting as well, since they are not use to it. This only applies to fighting other human(oids) though, not against creatures. ie, Left hander has defense bonus when fighting human(oids). [*]The ratio is about 7:1. [*]The graphics would have to be flipped somehow to represent this. Should be trivial transform. But this information would have to be passed for every actor (an extra bit, again not too heavy). [*]If it was a free choice, there would have to be a down side. If it is a perk, then it needs to be expensive enough to prevent all PK'ers taking it. [*]Is the effort worth the results? If this was implemented, then something else wouldn't be.

Unlike poison, you should only be infected with a disease once, after which you develop an immunity to it (for game play, you don't have to survive ). This requires that characters can have 'tags' or markers attached to their character record. Not sure whether this is supported, but it may also be required for an infected or disease carrier marker. (Quests may already use tags, but may use some other mechanism). Disease effects need not be limited to health (game attribute); they could affect other attributes or skills. For example, reducing your current Attack level. Attributes and skills recover to their full strength at 1 pt/minute, plus the potions which normally boost them can be used to speed up recovery. If Attack/Defense are being reduced by disease, then combat experience really needs to be based on skill level values rather than current values to avoid exploit (as discussed here).

It must have been lost along with the punctuation.

Far from being viewed as an error, that is a brilliant achievement -- the game world developing its own dynamics beyond what was intended by the developers. BBC News: Deadly plague hits Warcraft world BBC News: Virtual game is a 'disease model'

The example which I've heard used is, aptly, 'pt_PT' vs 'pt_BZ' (some confusion between Grandmother and Prostitute?) I suspect that this wouldn't really make a difference given the scope of the text being translated. If there is a 'pt' language pack, then its easy enough to add a 'pt_BZ' or 'pt_PT' later if there is a need.

Taking the first two characters of the locale isn't sufficient for some locales. For instance, there as sufficient differences between 'pt' ('pt_PT') and 'pt_BZ' to cause embarassment. Try to match the full locale, then look for more general forms, for example: 'pt_BZ', else 'pt', else default ('en'). On Windows "LANG" may not be set (it is not a Windows envar). Then, when you do get the environment string, it doesn't follow the ISO naming scheme, but rather some unsystematic method. So you have to translate from MS-jibberish into a more recognisable format. I've ended up using lookup tables to do this conversion. MS Language strings reference page (MSDN) There is a 'setlocale()' function in Windows CRT, but I am unable to find an equivalent 'getlocale()' if we had to determine the locale from the API rather than the environment. The last time I did an I18N/cross platform project I only had to set the locale, so the lookup went from standard ISO encoding to Windows strings, to 'setlocale()'.

Check the locale set by the environment on start-up? (Environment variable "LANG").

A time stamp on each line would produce too much clutter. I guess all you really want to know is if a chat message is recent or not. The client could inject '#time' on the quarter hour (or some interval, configurable). Some guild bots already announce the new hour, which gives a similar guide.

Mr De Beers I presume?

Then that is a short coming with the design of those games. It was certainly possible to be a pure-spellcaster in RPGs; in fact, a powerful (or just well played) mages could be the most deadly characters (see anicdote for example). Look also at mage characters in the literature of the genre, the original source material for FRPGs.

A transition to a low-information "anonymous figure in the distance" actor? This could be used to send/populate actors out to a greater distance than the detailed actor/enhanced-actor allows. Would be useful when FP-views mean you see further into the distance.

(1) is a no-no. Similar things have been discussed before, most recently in "Pair of Teleport Spells" (which is do-able within the limits of the game, but not desirable due to other design restrictions). There could be other rings which go to different places in a map, but each ring type has only one destination. It would be interesting, and possible, to have a set of rings which took you to destinations depending upon the continent or map you where on when you used them (or took you no where if no destination had been set). (2) Making books has been discussed before as well. I very much doubt Research Books, as we now have them, would ever be made creatable by characters -- they are a significant money sink in the game. It would be interesting to have very-very-very rare Research Books (not buyable, not dropped, something else...). Put one such book into the world, and allow the character who reads it to write more... or keep a monopoly? The idea, which you hint at, of how to create books is interesting. It could reuse the "Research Progress Bar" (which needs other uses!), except you get "rationality" progress each time you succeed in the related task. The down side to this is that the server would have to listen and check for almost every action, which may be cumbersome.

Bots could already colour their own messages, by inserting colour-control character into their text strings (assuming the server isn't stripping these out from client chat text?).

Having read this thread, I must agree that the failure penalty on TrueSight needs to be rethought. From the RP perspective, since True Sight enhances perception, then a failure that reduces (or zeros) Perception attribute seems appropriate (as this attribute is becoming more significant). I don't know if temporary reductions to Might also reduce EMU, but the game does support "overloaded" characters (following reset). There is no penalty for this (maybe there should be?).

I think that the allocation of tasks between the articifer skills is somewhat haphazard at the moment. What we could do with is a clear definition of type of activities each skill covers, and probably splitting some of the existing skills; Manufacturing, for example, covers both leather work and blacksmithing. Whether thread making comes under Crafting or Manufacturing would depend on such definitions. Engineering is a much worst offender here, as most of the tasks currently assigned to make more sense under existing skills: Nails are a part of blacksmith 101 (Manufacturing), while blackpowder originated with Alchemists! I assume that the reason for this is the need to justify the skill before its final products are available, and Eternal Lands isn't short of such anomalies. ...back to work...

Auto-opening a death bag has been discussed before, and rejected; you really don't want things popping up obscuring your screen when in hostile situations. Skipping the NPC dialog for storage is appealing, but it would prevent that NPC from being used for a quest or other purposes. I think all NPCs have a common interface for this reason? Now, if storage access was through interaction with some other map object, such as a chest or booth, then "use" could bring up the storage dialog.

As mentioned in the discussion, this would be futile since people who wanted to talk about banned subjects have a range of misspellings and abbreviations. The meaning is retained, it is still human readable and understandable, but you cannot stop talk on the forbidden subject without rather expensive pattern matching (which can then interfere with legitimate conversations due to false-positives). This is also censorship. While there is a valid case for expletives, once you start having banned subjects it all gets rather nasty.

Only if you don't move them the same as normal... Otherwise, well, add_command_to_actor messages (pain, move_nw, attack1, and so forth) ... I wouldn't bother with anything other than those 8 bytes. No actor actions or separate movement, etc. If the entity changes state, resend the 8 bytes in the next (periodic?) update. If you are sending the full position each time, and the client isn't interacting with the distant actor, its even possible to update less frequently than the movement clock-tick; the client can interpolate between previous and new positions if it needs to animate the distant actor.