Proposition for developers: new NPC special

[ChaosSlayer]

(this is rather long read with posability of many grammar errors - my appologies)

I am looking at NPC special flags such as:

O Immune to non-bane damage
W Immune to non-magical damage

and I am thinking how EQ1 original desiners went wrong at very cretaion.
If you remember original Magic weapons were very rare, the idea was mundane weapons would have better stats (specialy dmg and dly) but magic
weapon make you able to hit some special creatures.

But eventualy every single weapon in game was magical which entirely ruined the idea.

I am thinking how this inherited flaw can be fixed.

How about cretaing a special flag (call it Z) that will make npc immune to non-bane weapons OR to non magical weapons.

The diffirence here versus just setign npc to both O and W flags, is that such NPC would need to be hit by a weapon which must be both, bane AND magical at the same time.

The Z flag I am proposing will be "bane OR magical".

How this will affect the game: esentily this will allow you to make all non mundane npcs, like ghosts, elementals etc etc to be set to a Z flag.
WHich means that you woudl have to either- brign a special bane weapon vs them, OR brign a magical weapon which will be unvirsely good vs ANY type of mob. Truly magical weapons could them be made EXTRIMLY rare

Once again, compared to what we have now, if you would set mob to bane only- magic weapon is useless vs it, and vice-verse, if mob is set to magic-only, regular bane is useless against it (unless bane weapon is ALSO magical at the same time), which IMHO is bad, cuase then such bane weapon (due to been magical) will also work on many other cretaures.


(of course there is an alternative way to achive this effect in current set up - such make all special mobs bane only, and remove magical weaposn from the game complitly - this however prevents us from having a weapon which is universality good vs everything even if it has poor stats. I am also thinking if it is posible to make a magical bane weaposn with normal dmg of 0 - so its would do 0 dmg vs unintended targets while - but I am affraid that game won't consider it a weapon at all...)


As other posabilities- it would be nice to have wider array of bane spells. (liek vs undead or elemental) but also expanding to insects, other body types, race-bane spells etc.

[ChaosSlayer]

I may have posted this in wrong forum - but its too late to fix that mistake I guess.

But anyway - do any of the Devs have an opinion on this subject?

thanks =)

[ChaosSlayer]

I have thgout of more interesting thigns that coudl be implemented and decided to keep everything in same thread.


IDEA #2:

I see that Graveyards just have been implemented. From what I uderstand, the GY is where your corpse pop out after time expires in zones like PoP.

Why don't we use this as foundation and implement a GY as players local respawn point after death?

If you have played EQ2 - when you die, you don't respawn all way in Qeynos - you respawn at one of the safe spots in the same zone. This would be a nice feature to have in Emu! When killed, a player will respawn in GY of the zone instead god knows where. The bind can then only serve as travel home device.


IDEA #3:

Factions and illusions. I noticed how primary faction are set up. Is it posible to add more races to the primary factions list? It should simply be a few extra collumns, but if doen so - this will allow for great number of faction altering illusions and forms in game!

IDEA #4: skill points . How about creating a variable/rule which determines how many skill points a person gains per level up?

IDEA #5: a rule to make AAs avalable at other lev than 50? Like lev 10? Also, turnign AAxp gain OFF and instead giving a player 1 AA per level automaticly?

IDEA #6: rules to set HP gained from STA, mana from INT/WIS, total ac from raw ac modifier for each class separatly? As well as a rule to set if specific class gains mana from INT or WIS? As well as rule sets for modifiers for all other stats to things like dodge, mitigation etc.

thanks =)

[KLS]

The last two there are kinda prohibited by the client sadly. You could give an AA point per level and I think they might(definite maybe I dunno I've never tried!) be able to spend them but switching AAexp is not allowed below 51.

And the client calculates it's hp and mana without any input from the server; we can only try our best to match the hp and mana server side so they sync.

A lot of these wouldn't be that hard and would probably make good custom content for people who wanted them. I'm still spending most my time trying to implement features on the server that we're missing from live though... but like I said many of these wouldn't be too hard if you wanted to try to take a crack at them.

[ChaosSlayer]

Thank you for taking a look =)
Wanting to take a crack at it and been able to - is 2 diffirent issues =)
I am afraid my C++ not as good as yours =(

But oh well, if you guys decide to do some custom features - keep my sugestions in mind

Oh one more thing- don't treat the "Life" as Bible - the "life" had its shortcomings since day one. IMHO - you have the opportunity here to do BETTER than "life" - and you should use it to the full extent =)

[AiliaMorisato]

KLS, found a packet we can use to override any stat caps and client calculated functions such as max hp/mana/ max stats/max ressits/ac/ atk.

Currently doing pretty much half of his list on the edge server.

[ChaosSlayer]

AiliaMorisato - what you saying is very good to hear!
I hate stat caps with a passion (or anythgin hard coded for that matter) since they hinder my ablity to make customizations.
I hope that official Emu builds will eventualy be coded to allow rules to be enabled to kill all sort of caps and hard coded calculations once and for all

[AiliaMorisato]

Hehe, dont count on it anytime soon in the official builds, but if your interested in coding it into your current bianaries im willing to help ^^

[KLS]

Hm that's interesting, (and sorry I haven't been able to be around much!). And yeah I'm not sure how much of this could be applicable to the official source but it might be nice to get it out there so people who run custom servers would know how to do it. =)

[ChaosSlayer]

How about this small implementation?
Currently the game will not recgnize any spells with ID # greater than 10,000

This severely limits ability to make new spells, wihout deleting a whole bunch of old spells, which automaticly cuases problem for all NPC spell lists which based on old spells, and prevent doing customization step by step (I need rathly 350 spell ids per class just to begin with)

Could you please increase the size of the variable that holds spell ids up to say 20k?

Thanks =)