gmane.games.crossfire.maps

Item breakage

Nicolas Weeger — 2012-04-15T17:36:59

Hello.

I've committed a change that will break the weapons of Occidental Mages.

The change seems relevant to me, because it helps distinguish 'attacks 
something' and 'is attacked by' events, to react differently.


I'm not sure how common are such weapons, but they should probably be fixed by 
DMs when needed.

The fix would be to change the inventory's 'event_apply' 's subtype from 2 to 
33.



Regards

Nicolas

Testing faces?

Jason Wright — 2012-04-04T02:09:20

I have some new faces I would like to test on my server, and was
wondering how I go about it. Do I add them to the Arch .tar-ball then
compile on my server, or is there a simple way to drop them in to see
how they look?

Tecslicer,

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Long ago submission

Jesse F. Hughes — 2010-06-10T14:28:31

Hello.

I submitted some maps back in October and I see that they are still
unreviewed.  Was I supposed to announce these or something?  This is my
first submission.

Thanks.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?limit=25&func=&group_id=13833&atid=313833&assignee=&status=&category=&artgroup=&keyword=&submitter=&artifact_id=&assignee=&status=&category=&artgroup=&submitter=&keyword=dark+cave&artifact_id=&submit=Filter

Alfalfa Quest

Brendan Lally — 2010-05-16T01:04:45

Hi All,

I've added Alfalfa as a 'proper' quest under the new quest tracking
system, in order for this to be done coherently, I've had to make a few
changes.

Alfalfa refers to fleeing her bedroom when orcs burst in, however her
old home has neither a bed nor any orcs.

In order to rectify this, I have created a separate set of maps for
alfalfa's house, based on the same floor plan as the easy house across
town.

This house starts out locked, the first thing that happens in the quest
is that the player is directed to get a key from another character in
the barking mule. - I do have this in mind as somewhere where a Cha
bonus could come in for quests, currently the key is just given to the
player when they ask for it, but this could be the trigger for another
sub-quest for a low Cha character in the not-too-distant future.

I have moved the old alfalfa's house across a square, and called it
Eric's house, Eric is in jail for graffiti-ing, so I have removed the
gate pass and added a guaranteed spellbook of marking rune instead.

I'm not seeking to unilaterally impose these changes, I've commited
them all to SVN now because I've not seen much response to maps on the
tracker in the past, this has been done with a view to being able to
easily remove sections of this quest easily should any objections be
raised.

I would be particularly interested in any thoughts around balance
particularly with respect to the rune of marking, it is after all a
guaranteed free spellbook on a low-level map. On the other hand, it is
one of the least powerful spells in the game.

Brendan.

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Quest additions

Brendan Lally — 2010-04-27T11:27:38

Following the release of 1.50 I have started adding some of the quests
I have been defining to the SVN repository.

I have put the list of quests that are defined on the following wiki
page:
http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:cavesomething:questification
Over the next couple of days, the quests with the status of 'Needs
playtesting' will be given SVN commit numbers. (with the exception of
the scorn nobility quests, which might take a little longer)*.

This isn't to say that I consider playtesting to be finished with
these maps, but they do need to gain a wider audience to find any bugs
that might remain.

I am trying to ensure that every quest or set of linked quests is
contained within a single commit, this means it takes a little longer
to take them apart (the quests and their responses are inter-linked)
but it does mean that if anyone wants to object to the way any given
quest is implemented it will be easier to revert it (so please, feel
free to do so).

Because of the nature of some of the dialogue trees that are needed, I
have had to expand or rewrite some of the speech for a few NPCs, I
am not a professional writer and welcome any suggestions/improvements
to these. 

Any feedback from the original map authors would be even more welcome
still; I have tried to maintain the original writing style as best I
can, but they will be able to do that more easily, and more correctly,
than I could. 

In a similar manner, because I have been defining these quests, I know
what there is to discover in them, and I would welcome any feedback on
whether any aspects of these maps require too much/too little
guesswork/luck/looking up spoilers to solve.

For this set of quests, I am updating both default.quests and the
world.quests quest definition tree. world.quests is used by the current
SVN head, whereas default.quests is used by the 1.50 release. I
consider the world.quests file to be the definitive one, the
default.quests file I am keeping up to date for compatibility reasons
only.

After these quests are in, there probably needs to be a discussion
about how long to preserve quest compatibility with the 1.50 server.
While 20-odd quest definitions in a single file is too many to be
comfortable, it is still (just about) manageable, once there are
30,40,50 quests in the one file, it will get very messy.

Finally, a style note; the existing quest definitions have all used the
second person for the status of the quests. 'you should...', 'you
must..' etc, for this new batch of quests I have been writing the
statuses in the first person, with the quest overviews in the passive
voice (I think that's the correct term for this style of writing). I've
done this for two reasons:
1) To my mind, the quest logging should be an extension of the player's
experience of the game and be written from their perspective. (ie, the
status updates contain the sort of information an obsessive note-taker
might scribble down whilst playing, only better ordered and categorised)
2) When I read the quest updates, an update that says 'you must...'
sounds more like an order, rather than a record of the player's state,
certainly my tendency when playing RPGs is to ignore orders and
explore/play sidequests instead.
I'm quite prepared to be overruled on this point, if it is decided that
second person imperative is the way to go then I'll rewrite the quest
descriptions to fall in line.

For anyone who is confused by the discussion of grammar above, it is the
difference between

Quest: Open the door
Step: You must use the key you have found to open the door.
and
Quest: Open the door
Step: I have found a key that will open the door.

Ask me on IRC if you need more examples.

*The scorn nobility quests are currently implemented using markers
against a player, in order to transition over to the quest-based
tracking, it will be necessary to create quest entries for players who
have already done part of the quests. because of the inter-dependancy
of these quests they are also candidates for having 'parents' added to
them, which will break compatibility with 1.50 servers. 
If you are running a big (lots of players) server against the SVN
mapset, then be careful with this.

Brendan.

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Sprite Recolouring

Brendan Lally — 2010-04-02T00:46:26

I happened to decide that the number of NPC graphics was a bit limited,
and it was a little boring seeing the same few faces used for NPCs over
and over again.

So I had a bit of a play around with various image editing tools and
discovered that I could use the colourmap tool in the gimp to remap the
colours that an image uses, and thereby change the colour of the
clothing that NPCs were wearing.

I've created an item on the tracker showing some of my experiments with
this.
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2980851&group_id=13833&atid=313833

Questions:

1) Are recolours worth adding as a way to increase variety of NPCs?

2) does the answer to question 1 vary depending on how they are
implemented? (lots of different PNG files, or a script to rewrite the
palette entries of a single png file, maybe as part of the collect
step)

3) If they are added, should there be some guidelines about
where they will tend to be used? (eg, light blues are
considered fashionable in navar, greens in darcap, etc)

Brendan

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