[Adonthell-devel] Re: Re: Creature IDs

[Kai Sterker]

On 7/11/06, Andrew Phillips <address@hidden> wrote:

Hope you don't mind if I cc this to the devel list as well, so that
others might join the discussion. Also, it's safer there than in a
mailbox on my local machine ;-).

> On 7/11/06, Kai Sterker <address@hidden> wrote:
> > So this would be some of the information required by a creature
> > template. Some sort of weight that tells an auto-level-mechanism which
> > attributes to level how much. We could possibly combine this with a
> > random component, so that for example 2/3 AP will be distributed
> > according to the predefined weights, while the rest will be
> > distributed randomly.
>
> That's an interesting idea. What if the creature is assigned a
> character level that breaks the assigned to random ratio? If the
> creatures get 3 AP per level, they would all need odd levels above 1
> to make a 2/3 split work. Should advancement cost less for creatures?
> 2 AP, for example?

I shouldn't think so. First of all, creatures would probably also get
the initial 12AP
(http://adonthell.berlios.de/doc/index.php/Rules:Creation), plus 3
more for each level. We could then calculate the number of
advancements possible and from there the 2/3 with rounding to the next
integer. So we had something like

 Level    Fixed        Random
    1       3 (9AP)     1 (3AP)
    2       3 (9AP)     2 (6AP)
    3       4 (12AP)   2 (6AP)
    ...

> > Which brings me to a topic I had in mind for quite some time, but
> > hadn't really mentioned before. I think, all
> > attributes/properties/skills etc. should not be stored as plain data
> > types, but we should have a class that encapsulates one attribute/...
> > with all the information that belongs to that attribute. Information
> > to store would include:
> >
> > * name of the attribute
> > * current (base) value of the attribute
> > * caps for the attribute (min, max values)
> > * modifiers to the current value (from spell effects, damage, potions,
> > diseases, ...)
> > * weight (as described above)
> > * AP cost for level-up
> > * ... (possibly even more)
> >
> > A little problem I see with that approach is that the information
> > above has different scopes. Some is valid for all attributes of same
> > type, other is valid for all creatures of same type and the rest is
> > valid only for individual creatures/characters. This is mainly a
> > problem of editing these values, so we'd need some logic for this in
> > charedit.
>
> I agree that we need at least one attribute/property class and one
> skill/ability class.  Since properties are dependent variables based
> on the value of the attributes, the two can be rolled up and
> calculated together.
>
> I've also been thinking about how to implement these kinds of classes,
> since my chargen code increasingly begs to be refactored toward OOD.
> It gets a little more tricky with skills and abilities
>
> > Also, there might be slight differences between attributes,
> > properties, abilities and skills that need to be taken care of.
>
> The biggest variable that I can think of is the race of the character,
> as it directly impacts the upper bounds on Abilities and the lower
> bound on skills.

True, although these bounds are well-known and fix, so charedit (or
the character creation code) could read them from a predefined table
and initialize the abilities accordingly.

Kai