PlaneShift
Announcements => PlaneShift News and Rules => Topic started by: Talad on January 15, 2012, 06:23:03 pm
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Happy new year to all PlaneShifters! We start the 2012 by bringing you three news for crafters!
- The first news is that we implemented leather working.
There are two phases to it: making leather pieces and crafting a leather armor. A crafting manual is required for each and those can be acquired through quests. The leatherworking skill allows you to make leather materials (all those hides in your inventory will come in handy). Leatherworking tables with a puncher and water barrel have been added by Hirenn in Ojaveda and the Grotemeys in Hydlaa. Then the existing armor making skill in combination with the book "Making Leather Armor" will enable you to make a full array of leather armor: gloves, boots, arms, pants, and torso (gloves to start and the rest at increasing skill levels). You can even now make a leather cap. - The second news is that we decided to merge the skills for making axes, knifes and swords into one skill called "blades making". This will allow a crafter to build all blades without the need to rank up in each individual skill.
We applied the following rule to set the blades making skill to your existing chars. We took the max between axe/knife/sword and assigned it to blades making, plus we gave half of the sum of the other 2 skills as a bonus to the new leather working skill so you can have a good start with it!
To learn leathermaking you should visit Hirenn in Ojaveda and the Grotemey family in Hydlaa. - Third news is there are now several new shield making manuals available via quests. Can you find them all?
We also added a speak perception to NPCs so they should be aware of when you speak with them and not run away.
2012 will be a fantastic year for PlaneShift! With tons of great additions, we can't wait to work more on it and see your feedback!
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this is good news, and once again, no small feat.
I hope to see more additions which help to facilitate and guide RP rather than those that distract players away from it.
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Sounds great! Let's hope that the rest of armor making is coming soon too.
One question about shield making books. Why are there so many of them? In case of swords, there are just a few, for regular, superior, and even more advanced ones. While for shields there is a whole bunch of books. Can they be merged for similar categories (like swords), i.e. regular, advanced, very advanced etc.
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Big thanks to the skunkworks project. They got the leather working stuff sorted out. Made it very quick to implement. It's good to finally see something come from that. Hopefully it will encourage further work like that in other areas. Kudos to everyone who worked on it. \\o//
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One question about shield making books. Why are there so many of them? In case of swords, there are just a few, for regular, superior, and even more advanced ones. While for shields there is a whole bunch of books. Can they be merged for similar categories (like swords), i.e. regular, advanced, very advanced etc.
Yeah, felt the same way (only after many months of work on the quests. :P ) Should be beginner, intermediate, and advanced with different shields being available for each, rather than one for each shield. But it is how it is for now. We'll consider such things in the future I think.
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when items have the same combinations they cannot be merged
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Ah right. Each book is defined by its own transformations table. But with 11(! or even more?) new shield books, plus all old ones it getting over the edge :D
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I don't get it. If I had sword/axe/knife making at 30/15/12, my blades making will be 30, and leatherworking will now be (15+12)/2=13~14?
Someone confirm this or explain it...
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You're good at maths, Mishka :P
and my leatherworking... well, don't count on Boeven's Leathers opening soon.
I was writing a pamphlet rich in considerations and Pindaric flights, and a lot of off topics, then I suddenly decided to save your time. And mine.
Cheers to Talad and others who spend their spare time to play with code, as players do, with satisfaction I hope. :flowers:
@Mishka: I quoted myself in other forums for the precise purpose of being able to quoting myself while googling my quote.
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This raises a few questions.
Blade making depends on the Metallurgy skill ; will there be a 'Tanning' skill in the future?
Will you, in a similar process, merge shield making and armour making (maybe distributing alchemy skills in the process and whatnot) or have you definitely abandoned the idea of balancing shields?
When you implement Mace making, will you merge it with the blade making skill in some Weaponsmithing skill?
I absolutely agree with LigH here; it's obvious (and well accepted) that you're forced to make some people unhappy on each update, but this is highly demotivating.
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we won't think of merging armor with shields they are two well different things.
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we won't think of merging armor with shields they are two well different things.
It really depends a lot on what type of armour we're talking about. Both plate armour and shields use the very same techniques, layering metal then hammering it into shape. Articulating the parts is a whole other question.
If you want two things very different, we can take a chain mail shirt and a steel plastron. Will there be a distinction 'Mail working' / 'Plate making' ?
What I see right now is that we have three different skills for crafting defensive equipment and one for offensive equipment.
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no armor making covers leather, plate, chainmail and helmets related to them
the first goes with leatherworking the other go with blacksmith
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Can we have tanning crystal acid be available in stacks? currently Mrs. Grotemey has only single units. Stack purchasing will be much more convenient.
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Sure. I added now a stack of 20. Sounds ok?
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Great! Thank you. Much better. 65 would have been optimal but I am not complaining. I'm not likely to have that many hides at one time. I just like to buy in bulk :)
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Can you please add a stack of acids to Hirenn as well? Thanks!
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A bug in Hirenn's quest: http://bugs.hydlaaplaza.com/flyspray/index.php?do=details&task_id=5508
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What pieces are needed to make caps? It's not in the book.
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then you lack the skill to do it...
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I notice that knife making and axe making are still listed in my job skills list, I expect at some point these will be removed as they were merged within blade making. I do wonder if there were quests specific to those skills which will need to be re-triggered. Level 15 seems to be a level which brings new quests for crafting and both those skills were below that threshold prior to the merging but my blade making is 22 and I haven't seen any such quests. I am not sure if they ever existed or if they exist and I just haven't seen them yet but I did just discover the shield making quest involving shield spikes, not that that is particularly relevant except that that particular NPC has no other new quests for me.
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i see no quest based on that.
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OK :) thanks for checking.
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Other than the magic ways, there's only 2 quests which have skill prereqs and they are cooking quests. In the future, who knows? There are plenty of places where it makes sense to have skill prereqs.
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I've been thinking back on the earlier point about shield crafting books. It would make much more sense to me if the specialized books we are now seeing contained nothing but the assembly instructions and recipes for any parts that are unique to that particular item. We already need a book to heat our raw materials, another for parts common to all equipment of a certain type wouldn't be too much trouble for players. Then if changes need to be made to parts they wouldn't need to be propagated through a dozen books. Maybe it is all references and not a problem as it stands but it would make the books more legible.
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Done on Hirenn.
What other mmorpg you can make a request and it gets implemented few hours later? We are magic... :sorcerer:
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Having duplicate entries for intermediate parts saves you some time on switching books around. Since one mostly works on one shield type at a time, less books will be needed in the end for it.
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All the common intermediary parts are already in the base shield books. I think it would be easier to have a stock of them available as recommended by NPCs and then just consult your easy to read specific manual when accessing your storage.
I don't know about you but I suffer extreme information overload trying to scan through the myriad unhelpful lines to find the particular ones I need to use. For that matter since the various parts all have the same recipe between the different materials they can be made from it would be much better to have "shape x shield bands from iron, steel, bronze, or gold heated ingots on the anvil with a hammer" in one line rather than in 4 lines mixed in with a lot of other stuff. In the case where different materials become available at different skill levels the materials not yet possible can be left out of the description.
Seriously the way these books are presented is garbage. I started to make manuals that made sense from editable books and if I could keep them in mind then I would finish the lot and give them away to whoever wanted them.
You are talking about the saving of one book in inventory, you make all your parts from the parts book then you switch to assembly book, complete the work and in the meantime you have a handy reference that is fully legible to make sure you have enough parts for what you want to make.
I am sorry for the strong language but that is how I see it. I lose more time looking for the recipes I need for the parts than I ever would switching books. These books appear to be nothing but an unsorted database dump, it can't be that hard to add an 'order by' switch can it?
Really I know how hard the developers are working on this stuff and I am certain there are issues I do not understand, I just get frustrated.
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I have to agree with Bilbous. Surely there is a way to make the books at least a little easier to understand. And someone really needs to get on the whole price thing with crafted items. Bad enough 300q stock goes for the same price as items made from it. But now long swords and short swords aren't even worth the material made from them.
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The data you see in the crafting books appears to me to be a raw dump of the combinations. I have never looked at any of the crafting books and assumed that they were the intended final formats of those books. They are hard to read now, but transforming that text into something clearer is something that can be added to the system and applied to all crafting books.
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Yes, crafting books are just transformation tables dumps. Desired format should include human readable recipes for end products. For example:
Item P1:
Combine 3 ingredients I1, 4 ingredients I2 / perform action A1 / ... (the whole chain) -> End product P1.
But that requires some additions to the actual data which will require lot's of manual input I suppose. For example indicating which objects are in fact end products for such recipes, and which ones are starting ingredients. Having such data available, one could write some graph traversing for building optimal recipies (paths) for each combination of start products -> end product, which will allow to generate human readable crafting books. So far this automation lacks input data to build those paths.
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No question about it, on the test server, I went and made all the shields to make sure they could be completed all the way through. I'd say 90% of my time spent on it was searching through the books to find the amount of metal I needed to make something. It was very frustrating. It's easier once you know what you're doing but that first time when you're trying to figure it out, the books are not very helpful.
Talad mentioned that it was a GSoC topic to deal with books but it wasn't picked up. Let's cross our fingers that we'll have another run at it this year and someone will work on that.
It's also not very realistic that the entries in the book change once you reach certain skill levels. There are two things in play here: the tasks you can do with the book on your mind, and the process for actually doing them. Cooking recipes are the best example. Imagine a cook book with a random selection of things you CAN do, rather than a step by step recipe to make a specific dish from beginning to end. It wouldn't sell very well. ;)
Right now we just have a list of tasks available and not proper step by step instructions. What's worse is you can't even do a word search. You have to eyeball many lines of text to find what you're looking for in a font that's not the easiest to read. But it's a well known issue and should be addressed at some point.
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Of course the /study command does make things easier to read. When ever I need to read one of the crafting books now I always use the study command since it makes it easier to read for me.
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In my experience, players preferably use in game books written by others to avoid the hassle with the crafting "book" (dump). I have seen several nice cooking books in the past years, for example.
I wonder if it makes sense to step back from the "should look like a hand book" style and use something more abstract, like the magic window with all the glyph combinations. There you have different columns to get your list sorted by ways, realms or spell names. Maybe a similar thing could be used with processes, tools, ingredients and result items. Combinations might need a different format, though.
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Of course the /study command does make things easier to read. When ever I need to read one of the crafting books now I always use the study command since it makes it easier to read for me.
Ah, that's I was looking for, but I couldn't remember the command name. :P
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when you've finished trashing database space with useless discussion we are searching for someone willing to do this:
http://planeshift.ezpcusa.com/pswiki/index.php?title=Improved_UI#Improvements_needed (Crafting books: )
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2011/01/15? :oops: ;D
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Actually study does a good job of making it clearer, whether it's just smaller font so you can see more it at once or whatever, I find it much easier to figure things out with it.