Re: CF: ice cubes

[(Raphael Quinet)]

On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Hwei Sheng TEOH <> wrote:
> [...] How "realistic" is it to be able to pour water (or any liquid for that
> matter) on the ground and be able to collect it all back into the bottle? :-)
> I guess I'm thinking about how exactly does a player collect something like a
> water elemental's residue? Certainly he won't be able to collect every last
> drop... which means that some of the stuff will be lost if the player pours it
> out and tries collecting it again. Or maybe just make it simple and disallow
> pouring out completely, and only allow transferring into another container.
> (or make pouring out completely waste the liquid).

I would keep it simple and disallow pouring out or allow it but waste
the liquid completely.  The good thing about disallowing it would be
that players would not accidentally drop some valuable potion by
clicking in the wrong place.  The good thing about allowing it and
wasting the liquid is that one could empty a bottle of water to
collect a water elemental's residue or some mineral oil (if we create
pools of mineral oil).

> Also, we'd have to differentiate between containers like bookshelves and
> cauldrons -- while cauldrons may contain objects other than liquids, they can
> also hold liquid, so that we can pour out the contents of our potions into the
> cauldron when brewing something. But I don't think you'd want to let players
> "store" liquid in a bookshelf. :-)

Good point.  So we need a flag that tells if a container can hold a
liquid.  Similarly, we need a flag that tells if a container can hold
a solid, because you probably do not want the players to store their
arrows or rings in a bottle (although it could be argued that they
could put magical dust in a bottle, or even some scrolls).  If the
weight of the potions and water is adjusted to a realistic value of
0.2 Kg (not taking the encumberance into account), the bottles would
probably have to be able to hold between 0.2 and 1 liter of liquid and
that is 1 Kg, so the limit on weight would theoretically allow a
player to also put any light object in a bottle.  Adding a flag for
solid objects would prevent that.

> >  The problem is actually applying it.  If you have to open the container, and
> > then apply the liquid inside the container to drink it, that makes things more
> > difficult, especially in combat.
> > 
> >  I suppose you could add a new command like 'drink'  which does both those
> > steps.
> 
> Hmmm, interesting point. If we make these bottles exactly like other
> containers, how would the player, during combat, tell exactly which bottle
> contains what potions (if there's more than one bottle with the same colored
> liquid)? Does he actually have to open the bottle to find out what's in it???
> Or should we treat them specially and change their names according to what
> they contain? (eg. "bottle of healing potion" or "flask of magic power potion"
> etc.)

I like this idea very much.  And this matches what you would do in
real life.  An empty bottle is just a bottle.  Fill it with water and
now you call if a "bottle of water".  Pour the water out, and now it
is a "bottle" again.  Fill it with oil and it becomes a "bottle of
oil".

We could also do that with other containers, if some of them are
limited to a single object (e.g. a "bag" filled with "magical dust"
becomes a "bag of magical dust").  So we could have a flag that says
"this container can only hold one object at a time and takes the name
of the object that you put into it."

This could even be applied to existing objects such as the "quiver of
arrows" or "quiver of bolts".  Except that in this case the container
would not be limited to a single object, but to any number of the same
object (i.e. one object with nrof >= 0).

We could even go for the general solution and apply it to all
containers: if a container holds only one object, append "of <object>"
to its name, with the optional "s" if nrof > 1, so you could have a
"bag of rocks" or a "pouch of diamonds".  Hmmm...  Sometimes the
singular is not good.  I don't know if it would be good to have a
"Luggage of zombie's corpse" or a "bookshelf of note".  I'll have to
think a bit more about that, but hopefully you get the idea.

[...]
> >  That said, I don't see a problem with adding such containers.  I think having
> > specialized bottles might be overkill (ie, this can hold a magic power potion,
> > but will mess up your oil of speed).

I have another idea: some liquids (such as mineral oil, but not water)
would stick to the bottle and mess up whatever you pour in it next.
In this case, emptying a "bottle of mineral oil" would leave you with
a "dirty bottle" instead of a "bottle".  That would be a separate
archetype (or yet another flag for the container).  And if you try to
store anything in a dirty bottle, then the results would be bad.  We
could even make a special case for water, so that pouring water into a
dirty bottle gives you a normal bottle of water.  So if you want to
re-use that bottle of mineral oil, you have to wash it first.

-Raphael

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