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16

Wish list / /challenge machanics for arena NPCs

« on: July 15, 2010, 10:27:27 am »

Allow me to introduce a simple idea with a quote from an older discussion.

Quote from: Sarva on April 15, 2010, 08:39:53 am

I'll just note this. The idea of the arena is that is is a place where fighters come to engage in combat to test and improve their skills. The arena isn't really designed, or intended for ranged combat at this time. As Durgrem mentioned since some mobs are a little out of balance we are tolerating some wall killing but when the mobs are properly balanced wall magic killing isn't going to be acceptable in the arena. If you want to do that sort of thing to practice your magic then find a place out in the wilds to do it. Remember the idea and spirt of the arena is it is a place that fighters do battle with each other in the pit and some times for the entertainment of others watching form the stands. Not very entertaining watching someone standing on or behind a wall safely firing magic at a mob

A small visit at the arena or a look at recent forum threads shows that this subject is still relevant.

The suggestion, point by point

Make arena NPCs such as gladiators and mercenaries impervious to attack by default.
Offer players the mechanics to actively challenge these NPCs, either via the /challenge command or an NPC dialog option.
As soon as the NPC accepts the challenge, he will attack. This is to prevent those two or three free hits players get by cowardly attacking from behind.
Allow the NPC to yield, i.e. to switch back to an impervious and passive state as soon as the challenger fights unfair, i.e. the gladiator is damaged by ranged attacks.
As part of the /challenge mechanics, a victorious gladiator may have the choice to spare his opponents life.
Make the NPC reject challenges from characters that have recently been defeated or fought unfair. Also refuse challenges if the NPC is not at full health.
Instead of the /loot mechanics, the window for the selection of quest rewards could be used to choose from some randomized items.
In return, a defeated player whose life is spared could lose some tria, or maybe one of the weapons the character was wielding.

17

Wish list / Another suggestion to determine character stats

« on: June 26, 2010, 06:17:52 am »

I notice there is a lot of discussion of how the stats system (str, agi, end, int wil and cha) could be (re-)implemented, be it about character creation, final limits and plasticity, the process of gaining training and practice, correlations and synergies, prerequisites for or benefits from skills etc. etc.
Some of these threads have very good approaches, but there is little consensus.

As this is an interesting topic, I have put a bit of thought in this and came to only one solution that seems convincingly simple and yet leads to some effects that seem to be desired according to the various discussions. So allow me to put this here for discussion and excuse if a very similar thing has already been subject to older threads I could not find here.

For now we have a profile of base stats for each race, some additive contributions from character creation and a process of training that boils down to simply paying some tria and PP for reaching the same hard limits on each stat.

My suggestion is to establish a construct where each implemented skill has its own profile of stats, similar to base values for each race. Whenever the character gains another skill rank, his stats are evaluated as a weighted average over the profiles of the race and all trained skills. The base values from the characters race may have a weight of 100 and each skill will have a weight equal to the trained rank. (Just to explicitly define weighted average: The players profile of stats is then equal to the weighted sum over all profiles, divided by the sum of weights.)

In the way I express myself, this might sound fairly complicated at first. But think about it, doesn't this seem an intuitive and simple way to couple stats with skills?

Obviously, it is not a simple task to define well balanced profiles for each skill, but it would allow for a lot of flexibility and introduce some natural concepts of progressive, practice based training, synergies between certain skills and stats, as well as relative limitations to opposing or contradictory skills. Training a certain skill may improve some stats while degrading others, for which the character currently has higher values than those associated with that trained skill. In return, some stats can be useful when gaining practice for skills. If we assume significantly higher stat values on the skill profiles than on the races base stats, the latter will act as a blind count. This means that training a larger number of skills can enhance your overall stats, but the benefit will get indeed smaller and smaller with each additional skill. If a character wishes to have a highly specialized stats profile, he, she or kra will have to stick to a suitable set of skills. Someone who rather tries to learn a broad variety of skills will have well averaged stats, but none of them will be exceptional. One problem I see with this is the current implementation of character creation. With the proposed system, character creation should be limited to adding starting values for skill ranks. If boons on stats were added, one would have to take into account a profile of starting stats for each character, which seems highly impractical and encourages specific choices of character creation.

Thanks for your feedback...

18

In-Game Roleplay Events / The Bataireacht Bout - Rules, Comments and Discussion

« on: June 12, 2010, 06:09:02 pm »

Latest poster

Time and Place

The Bataireacht Bout shall be held repeatedly in accordance with the interest of the spectators and competitors.
The place to meet shall be the gates of East Hydlaa.
upcoming and past Bouts:
- Third of Treman [Wednesday 16th of june, 21 GMT]: Open Rehearsal
- Sixth of Treman [Saturday 19th of june, 14 GMT]: First Bataireacht Bout
- Fifth of Quinthal [Saturday 28th of august, 20:30 GMT]: Second Bataireacht Bout

Statistics

	Victories	Rounds	Bouts
Xitop	14	19	3
Chessire	10	12	1
Luu	7	12	2
Caraick	6	12	2
Kisoji	4	8	1
Ova	3	3	1
Gilyare	3	6	2
Racip	2	3	1
Fuge	1	2	1
Maisent	1	7	1
Glaciusor	1	7	1
Fay	0	1	1
Sulaika	0	1	1
Heleckie	0	2	1
Zonthek	0	2	1
Henetra	0	2	1
Kaipaber	0	2	1
Boeven	0	3	1
		52	3

Rules [with updates]

To participate, contestants have to buy a ticket. Tickets are sold by the coordinator and cost four circles. Upon joining, the fighter's name will be added to the table of participants [i.e. he will be invited to a group].
Duellists are summoned by the arbiter in the order they enlisted. [The group window serves as a queueing list with the coordinator and arbiter on top, followed by the two current duellists.]
If both fighters wish to raise the price money and have come to an agreement, they may deposit some cirlces before the duel begins. This money will go to the winner of this round.
[When the arbiter asks whether you are ready, two jumps signal that you are.]
The duels are carried out in the traditional Ynnwn Bataireacht style, in which both fighters wield pairs of quarterstaffs. Other weapons and combat styles, such as kicks and punches [melee], as well as the use of mounts or magic are strictly forbidden.
The arbiter ends the round as soon as one duellist manages to strike at his opponent. [Each attack event counts, no matter how much damage is inflicted or whether it is monitored as miss, dodge, block or hit.]
[The defeated fighter is asked to /yield promptly.]
The victorious duellist wins a price money of at least four circles and has the right to keep fighting. One additional circle is awarded for each consecutive victory of the defeated fighters current winning streak. The defeated duellist will be removed from the list [i.e. dismissed from the group], but has the right to buy a new ticket any time he, she or kra likes to.
Fighters who refuse or miss a duel can get a refund of their ticket from the coordinator. [This also holds for people who crash or are AFK at their turn.]
[If the arbiter or coordinator crashes, all participants will be re-invited in order to re-establish the previous order.]
There is no fixed number of rounds, the tournament can go on as long as there are interested fighters. However, the coordinator has the right to refuse the sale of further tickets after a certain amount of time or to individuals disturbing the tournament in any way.

Betting game rules

For everyone who would like to win a circle without fighting, a betting game will be held.
The goal of this game is to toss a circle as close as possible to one of two sticks located at the side of the ring.
The sticks represent the two current fighters, and each circle thrown indicates a bet placed on the corresponding duellist.
[In fact, we are not going to measure any distances of dropped items, but a /roll will decide who was closest.]
The left stick [chosen by /roll 100] will represent the challenger of this round and the right stick [indicated by /roll 2 50] stands for the winner of the previous round.
Once the round is over, the circle closest to the stick representing the winner determines who can keep all bets placed.
[Please, use shortcuts with two lines to /drop and /roll at the same time right next to the two sticks.]
[You can guard the circle until the round is over and walk off once the winner of the betting game wants to pickup his prizes.]

19

Wish list / Regeneratve buffs

« on: March 15, 2010, 12:46:59 pm »

Obviously, the ideas I would like to put into some context here are not new at all and can be encountered repeatedly and scattered over some dozen of topics in the wish lists. Still, allow me to put this together here for further discussion.

Why do I post this now? The magic system, the behavior and stats of mobs, the edibility of food and the crafting transformations for cooking and baking having undergone significant changes to allow a game experience that feels more balanced and reasonable. Still, since mana and both types of stamina are no limiting factors (effectively unlimited), offensive spells at the higher levels of masteries are clearly superior to combat arts of comparable ranks, and the production of food is not truly encouraged by game mechanics (pending fixes for quality and prices of food are another topic).

So why do I call the subject regenerative buffs?

The only such buff which currently regenerates one or several quantities over time is relaxing sleep, imho the main reason for magic being so greatly superior to the combat arts. Judging from the spell description, the caster should not be able to take any action without losing the regenerating effect of that buff. I am convinced the dev team is perfectly aware of this, yet I wonder why it has not been changed yet. The reason for putting this statement here is that I assume this spell to behave differently for the further discussion, such as forcing the caster to sit and debuff as soon as he, she or kra stands up. In this case, the amount of mana available during a battle or hunt would be limited by the supply of consumable items, such as potions and - possibly in the future - other goods crafted with the use of alchemy, herbalism, brewing, cooking or baking. The problem with this is the way such items currently work. Consumable are arbitrary amounts of items with a one shot instant refreshing effect. This allows hilarious scenarios, for instance a severely wounded person eating several dozen of raw fish withing the blink of an eye to be healed instantly. So what about giving those items regenerative buffs instead? Of course, the problem with buffs and duration of time are complexity and stacking behavior. But with the current spells, repeated casting of an active buff results in "nothing happens." The same could be done with potions, food etc. Thus, if the different types of regenerative buffs are kept at a small number, and variations (duration, regeneration rate per time unit) of the same type of buff just override each other, I don't see any problems here. Of course, the quality of the crafted items could then determine the variation within a certain type of buff. These concepts do not only hold for the magic system, as the analogy with health and physical stamina is straight forward. Furthermore, this could lead to a natural balance between magic, combat and crafting, not only when hunting animals, but even for player vs player mechanics.

Thanks to the patient reader for taking a look at this.

20

PlaneShift Mods / BoNeeMods

« on: December 29, 2009, 11:52:44 am »

BoNeeMods is a package of player made client modifications for Planeshift.

It consists of various widgets and utilities, a skin and some fanart textures, which all can be used independently. All mods are hosted on LigH's webspace as well as on GreatShift. The latter contains some further informations and can be commented in a separate topic here. In the following section, I give a list of some contents with (mostly) links to LigH's mirror.

1) BoNeeWidgets: Some compact GUI layout, suitable for moderate and low resolutions
2) BoNeeSkin : A crystal themed GUI skin (which also contains the above widgets)

3) BoNeeMaterials, some fanart textures. The collection is split into several small packages, which are the following:
Azure Robes, Blue Robes, Brown Robes, Crystal Robes, Dark Robes, Plates, Red Robes, Faces, Clothes, Dresses and a trivial patch for fynwnn robes.

4) BoNeeKeys: A collection of user commands and key bindings.

Redone from scratch, intended to provide a very clean keyboard layout even for excessive numbers of shortcuts.

Thanks to Neeno for his contributions to the BoNeeSkins and to LigH for hosting the files.

Detailed information on the contents and instructions how to use the packages are found in the contained README files.
The description pages on GreatShift give further information previews for each mod.

Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize and summarize the following points about modding the textures (materials.zip) of your client:

Always make a copy of your Planeshift/art/materials.zip before modifying it
Use a file archiver that allows you to drag and drop the modified files into an existing zip archive - don't unpack the zip if you don't know to repack it in the very same way.
Always copy back the unmodified materials.zip before running the updater - else it will download the entire file.

Neeno has provided some remarkable workaround for the above procedure, but this will require to compile your client from the sources on SVN.

If you have any problems with the files, feel free to send me a PM.

Thanks in advance for constructive comments.

21

Fan Art / Boni's Scribbles

« on: December 09, 2009, 07:56:05 am »

Greetings everyone.

Here are few simple ballpoint pen scribbles I would like to share, nothing special. The previews are linked to the full size images.