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trollson

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Everything posted by trollson

  1. Water Lvl

    What do you think happens to all those books after your character has finished reading them?...
  2. Meat

    Anybody else find it somewhat worrying that you can put raw meat in storage? I've had a pile of the stuff there for ages -- it must be pretty rank by now...
  3. I don't think that skinning would add much, but a tanning skill to manu leather would be very useful...
  4. Water Lvl

    Well what about a toilet level as well? ...which increases over time (food consumption), and when it reaches a limit you have to find the only toilet in EL... Toilet paper available in shops for 1gp per piece...
  5. This is a hotch-potch of ideas while sitting here harvesting, waiting for death-by-cabbage. Various degrees of involvement, and not necessarily thought through to their fullest extent (so no change there...). I don't claim any of them are cool (or any uncool spelling or the word )... Contents Dancing by Moonlight. Curse of the Werewolf. Temorary Curses. NPC Spawning. Keep on Mixing. Illuminated Signs. Torch Wielding (Villagers). Closer Camera Angle Indoors. The Slight Inconvenience of Dying. Dancing by Moonlight Add moonlight to brighten up the nights a little, and give a monthly cycle to the game. The moonlight would fluctuate over the course of a game month, which would be, say, 28 game days, nicely mapping to one real world week). Curse of the Werewolf OK, I see that lycanthropes have been suggested before. My take on them would be as a curse (negative perk): Chance of changing, outside at night, dependant on moonlight. All possessions dropped when changed. Wolf form run as normal wolf (maybe average stats of character and a wolf). Revert when either killed or daybreak. Still get any experience earned in wolf form (A/D). Temporary Curses Like negative perks, but do not bestow any bonus picks, and only last until: the character is killed (though this is too open to abuse due to lack of any real inconvenience of death). pays a suitable donation to a god (or other authority) to have the trait removed. For example: Characters killed by a werewolf may pick up a temporary werewolf curse. NPC Spawning In addition to creatures and monster spawns, generic NPC types could be spawned as well. The only form I can think of right now would be Town Guards, who would wander around and attack hostile creatures, keeping the streets safe at night. Players should be discouraged from attacking 'friendlies' though, picking up an outlaw trait (red name and antisocial) on the current map. Guards vs. monster spawns would form a local 'danger' economy. Keep on Mixing Without wishing to allow unconstrained mass production; so long as a character has the ingredients and food in their inventory, there should be an option to keep manufacturing (and eating). Only items in the character's inventory would count -- not any in storage or in an open bag. And of course, and other activity would stop it (cf. harvesting), such as refilling the inventory. Not the most exciting activity to keep clicking on Mix a hundred times... Illuminated Signs Somebody hang a lantern on those bloody signposts! How long have I spend fumbling around in the dark trying to find the right pixels to click at night... Torch Wielding (Villagers) ...for that matter, does the illumination model allow moving illumination sources? Could a character wield a torch (as a weapon) to give a bit of light? I guess a torch would do some damage as well... Closer Camera Angle Indoors Just a client thing? Make the camera angle tighter, closer, when indoors and underground. I just think that it would give a better atmosphere (more claustrophobic). The Slight Inconvenience of Dying Reading some of the forums here, it seems that players expect that their death-bags should be sacrosanct and waiting for them on return from the underworld. So what is the inconvenience in dying? I did consider dying to be a way to get rid of temporary curses, but it would be too easy for a character to unload at storage and type "#suicide" for an instance cure. Death -- you gambled your characters life and lost. So forfeit something. What about experience points? Lose say 10% overall experience, distributed at random over skills. No need to drop levels -- define levels as the highest experience attained instead. [[EDIT:TYPOS]]
  6. Bombers Meet Summoners

    I thought they did? Must have been a fluke, but while practicing on IP I went to attack a bunny out of range, and my deer seemed to charge it. Then again, they do go off and attack creatures of their own volition. As for the idea -- I would have thought summoning infered that the creature exists somewhere in "nature" (even if only on the plains of heck), to be summoned forth. Creating a new unique creature sounds like a different kind of magic? Conjuring?
  7. Thinking Too Much...

    Good point... lets vote on it
  8. Thinking Too Much...

    Maybe, but remember that the player wouldn't be in control -- the Wolf AI (i.e., the server) would. Other players could attack the wolf form as normal (somebody could end up wearing your skin! ).
  9. Monsters

    Yes, this will really please the non-Fighters in the game... Maybe there could be a "Kick Me!" perk you guys could take? ;-)
  10. Wraith

    Over-eating makes you fat... :-) Increase food limit should be detrimental to coordination (agility), etc. But this could all be balanced by, say, +5 food limit for 1 pick (which could otherwise have been spent on attributes). Or some potion to boost food above the limit (feasting? haven't used it myself). Not that this is really necessary.
  11. Whats the point of putting all those mazes in the game, when you can just go to the map window and let the pathfinder work it out for you? I only just noticed that there was a maze outside Vermor Castle, even though I have been there a number of times! Each time I just clicked X on the castle and watched my progress from above (or made a cup of tea). Some squares should be marked as impassible to the pathfinding algorithm; such as mazes, and secret paths. Players would still be able to walk over them, and select destination squares from the 3D display, so long as the route could be plotted within some finite radius (perception?). This would, of course, frustrate me in getting to VC or the rubies <_< But the map-makers efforts would be more appreciated...
  12. Logging

    [PEDANTIC] Shouldn't the title be 'login' or 'login-ing'? Logging is something else... [/PEDANTIC]
  13. England

    St.Paddys day is an excuse to drink lots of Guiness. What would St.Gs day be characterised by? Lager and curry... (Northerner living in the South -- it was all true!)
  14. Constellations

    Any mirrors in the game?
  15. Greetings, Before I start this evenings delvings, I thought I'd finally get one idea out into the forum (one of several). I don't know whether this fits into the current architecture (probably not!), but it may be of interest all the same. In the current game, the world is defined by the 3D maps, with instant travel between (ships, teleport, death...). This does mean that the entire continent is relatively small -- as a character could walk across all maps in less than an hour (I suspect, but haven't tried!). It also means that the continent is divided into traversable/mapped areas, and untraversable/unmapped areas. My approach would been to start with a fully traversable large scale map -- movement on which would be more akin to the map view in the EL client, and not rendered in 3D. The information required for these large scale maps would just consist of the map image, and some coarse terrain definition. This would allow the clients to determine the best path between two points (as I understand it, the server currently has to perform path finding on the 3D maps?). The 3D rendered areas would then be mapped onto rectangles on the large scale map. If a traveller's path enters one of these areas (as determined by the server given the client generated path), they enter the 3D map at the equivalent point on its boundary. Interesting features: New 3D areas can be added as desired without changing the traversability (constrained only that they do not overlap, and reflect the large scale terrain). These 3D areas do not need to be declared -- they may require players to stumble upon them. It scales! The world can be as big as you want, and the detail can be added over time. Opportunities: Ships still provide direct 'safe' travel along known routes (major towns and cities). The land equivalent would be wagon trains or caravans. Factor in movement speed on the large scale maps; mode of travel -- foot, horse, boat, wagon, eagle -- different terrain costs (again, client side calculations). Following roads would be safe, but travel off roads may spark a random encounter (server held monster maps!), for which stock small 3D maps for each basic terrain type could be used. The large scale maps may come in different scales, allowing more detail in interesting areas (+/- buttons on the map window?). See OpenGIS software, or any online map database for examples (far more complex than we would need!). Implementation notes: I am not proposing that players are made to sit and wait while there character trudges hundreds of leagues of nowhere. While the movement should not be instantaneous, it would be sped-up relative to movement across 3D areas. Some other costs could be applied to restrict transcontinental unsupported travel (food, gold?). Once a client discovers a detailed area, it should be added to the map view for easy navigation and revisit. The spark for these musing was me revisiting Middle Earth RPG modules by ICE, which start with the huge continent of Middle Earth, and then go into incredible detail in certain areas. The maps are really superb works of art. If we tried to do this in the current EL framework, then we either detail a tiny corner of it, or reduce the scale and lose the grandure/epic proportions of the place. Most of these modules are available as PDF on the web now -- though I don't know their copyright status. Anyway, time to get back to some serious harvesting...
  16. Large scale maps

    freeone300: OK, a simple example: One 'coarse' grid point on the continent may represent 100x100 area in 3D. Assume that we just need to put trees 'randomly' into this 3D grid, with say 10% chance that a square will have a tree. Random number generators really only produce pseudo-random sequences of numbers, according to the particular algorithm inside them (see: Knuth volume 2). They are typically started by setting some seed value. Now, re-use the same seed, and you get the same series. Use any other seed (even +/-1) and the series should be completely different. So, take the position of the large scale grid (say, a latitude-longitude pair) and use this to get a unique seed for the random number generator used to roll for the trees. The same 3D map can be regenerated at any time given the same seed, and the same 'forestation' algorithm. So, in a large forest, each 100x100 3D area would have a different scattering of trees, which would be the same each time it was re-visited. But this map does not have to be stored between visits. This method was used to great effect in games such as Elite (c.1982?), and Elite Frontier (c.1990?) -- the latter included a map of the entire galaxy, at least at a scale of several million star systems, but fitted on a couple of floppies! Of course, you need a well designed algorithm to create decent random terrain; but this has been done many times before..
  17. Large scale maps

    crusadingknight: I think that having to pre-generating even sparse elm files would produce a lot of data for a large continent. I didn't mean to suggest random generation on the fly, but generation according to a predetermined algorithm, using random number sequences with determined seeds. Both the server and client would use the same method (and I assume that it is the server which determined whether the avatar has walked into something?). For example, given coarsely determined geography, an algorithm could be written to generate repeatable but simple terrain for the 3D area at a sample point given (where one sample point represents a reasonably sized 3D area): The coordinates of the sample point, used to seed the pseudo-random number generator(s). The geography defined at the point -- terrain type, altitude, secondary features (road, river). The geography of the surrounding points, to handle transitions. Think of this as an ultimate form of compression, rather than random generation!
  18. Large scale maps

    Right I see what you mean. I was thinking in terms of data structures as usual By entropy pool, do you mean the method of using determinable seeds to generate reproducable pseudo-random patterns? (ie, the placement of trees in the woods is random, but returning to the same woods, they are in the same positions). This has always been a favorite of mine, since Elite days I like the suggestion -- so long as the terrain could be generated on the fly. Any generator would have to be able to cope with linear feaures (roads, rivers), as well as terrain boundaries.
  19. Large scale maps

    crusadingknight: Then what would the 3D view show when there is no underlying 3D data? My assumption here is that there would be a complete 2D map, even if just at the continental scale. The sparce-ness being the presense of detailed 3D areas.
  20. Large scale maps

    crusadingknight: QED Well, sparse files exist on both Windows 2000/XP (NTFS 5) and Linux (not sure which disk formats). But I don't think that is what we want here, since sparce file support cannot be guarenteed on all platforms. There are plenty of ways to register areas in a larger space -- either by rectangular areas in some quad tree (?) hierarchy, or even just a RLE array of integer keys to mark areas covered by respective detailed maps (each of which would add a maximum of 4 x MAP_Y_SIZE integers to the total size). Presumably monsters wouldn't be able to leave their respective detailed/3D maps for the same reasons that they cannot leave them at present. Just allow each boundary square of the 3D map to serve as a portal. Then add a condition that if there is no underlying 3D map for a players 'world' position, then the 3D view is not available. A few improvements to the EL client map view, possibly more map scales, and the client route planner (calculated by the client, but vetting and walked by the server)... There, easy peasy. PS: Notes on moving to resource syncing for Unix/Linux: Resource directories would have to move to under '/var/', since may not have the right to write to '/usr/...'. Could implement the sync as a daemon (service on Windows). Allows background synchronisation, and satisfy multiple concurrent users. Could even use bittorrent to load spread. Some sort of signing (PGP) of resources to ensure that they are 'official' would be needed (ie., originate unmodified from EL HQ). Dependancy tracking -- maps may require additional new objects to be added to the local resource cache.
  21. Large scale maps

    crusadingknight: Back home now, so I have had a look at the elm files. As shown in your listing, the largest one is some 2.1M (map11_insmsch.elm). However, these files are highly compressable -- bzip2 reduces them to an average to 7.5% if their original size, the largest one to 157K, which is not an infeasible download -- in the scheme under discussion these would only be down loaded on first encounter (say, 5 minutes on a 56K modem). Hmmm, this line of thought will end in a directory replication segment in the client...
  22. Large scale maps

    crusadingknight: I would envisage that a 3D area is only downloaded when first encountered (or updated if change was permitted). The area represents static information, so can be cached by the client. There shouldn't be any reason to try to hold all maps in memory (is that what is done in the current client implementation?). I must admit that I haven't checked the size of a 3D map. Surely a lot of data is replicated -- stock objects being reused? If bandwidth from the game server is at a premium, then just return the URL of some other repository. Grum: This would allow cheating. All pathfinding is done by the server, so that noone can define his own private teleports on the map, walk through mountain, etc. No, why should this be the case? Since, as you point out, there are no dynamic obsticles, path finding is a case determining the minimum-cost route between two points. The server would still have to perform the movement along this route. Teleportation would not be possible. The worse cases would be that the route is suboptimal (crossing mountains rather than using a pass), or invalid (walking into the sea without water wings). The result would be slow (or costly) movement, or premature termination of the journey, with wet trousers. Roja: I only suggested this as a means to make life a little more interesting, or to discourage walking through the wilderness (or encourage, depending on the player's intentions!). The nature of the encounter (distance) would vary depending on terrain and perception, and need not involve an involuntary fight. For that matter, I have had encounters in EL which where pretty much involuntary (and brief) random encounters on entering a new map! Roja: Sure, but as I understand it you either have to do an entire continent of joined 3D maps, or have areas which players cannot enter until they are detailed. I guess you could connect maps via 'wagons/caravans' to cover long range/instant land travel as per ships for sea travel.
  23. Large scale maps

    Thankyou Lynanna, I don't see why this should be too ambitious. Leaving aside coding issues for the moment (comments on the current architecture anyone?), the initial "world" resources would just require a large-scale continent map and associated meta-data. This would serve as geographic framework into which areas could be detailed over time. Initially play could be limited to a manageable corner of the continent (though players would be free to wander aimlessly around the wilds). It does require that the client be able to download/update 3D mapped -- I am not sure whether this is currently the case, but I imagine it should.
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