Re: CF: oddity in the pup_land raffle #2

[Mark Wedel <>]

Seikoh Nishita wrote:

> I use teleporters to move "no spell field" at the "Tower of Ordeal" in
> Pupland. The entrance of it is on the 1st floor, and the center of the
> 1st floor enclosed by fences is the goal. But at first time, players
> cannot go into the area because of "no spell field". At the end of
> this quest, players come back to the 1st floor. After they pull a
> lever, no spell fields are moved by teleporters, and they can arrive
> at the goal by the spell, "dimension door".
> 
> At the first time I made this map set, I made two alternative maps for
> 1st floor, one had "no spell fields", another didn't have them. They
> didn't have teleporters. But I think current maps (with teleporters)
> are simpler than they used to be.
> 
> I'm not sure I need pits to drop "jungle" and "lever".

 I'll have to think about it.  The ideal way IMHO would be to enable spell
fields to be connected objects - if you pull the lever, they turn off.  This
also has a nice affect that if you turn the lever again, they turn back on.


> I thought of some "stage effects". I wanted players to see some
> mysterious world in their vision(the world is made by some tough
> monsters.) When they kill the monsters, the mysterious world made by
> monsters will disapper and they'll find they are in a simple ordinary
> room.

 In the current rewrite, as I have progressed, exits are background type
objects, and are not meant to be carried.  My guess is that when the
equipment/creature code is written, it is going to be assumed that anything in a
monsters inventory is equipment, and thus the right thing can be done with
that.  If a background is in some monsters inventory, not sure what will happen,
so I can not say this will necessarily work.

 I currently don't have a good work around for the warped world.  If warped
reality is something that i really desired, I think we might need to
re-investigate some objects or whatnot.


> 
> Actually, I'm not sure a new flag are needed for invisible stuff.
> When I made maps on the old version of CF, if I wanted players not to
> see invisible objects, I put them under the floor after I removed
> invisible flag from them. (If they had the flag, they made flash by
> the "show invisible" and players wondered if there is something
> special.) And they didn't have any problem.
> 
> If you think of renewal of all map set in the future, we can make maps
> in this manner without the new flag.

 The problem this created is not all maps do as good a job of hiding invisible
objects below floors.  In many maps, objects that are not meant to be seen (by
show invisible), are at the top.

 So what happened at one point, which broke a lot of maps, is to not make
certain object revealed by show invisible.  However, this created the situation
where some of the pupland maps were not solvable (because some of hte objects
that got hidden you need to see in order to complete the pupland maps.)

 My latest thought, and I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier, is to
look at the arch and the object.  If the arch says the object is invisible, in
addition to the object itself (of course), then always keep it invisible.  If
the arch says it is a visible object, but the object itself says invisible, make
it visible.

 I think this will do the right thing in almost all circumstances.  The only
time I could perhaps see this not working is if there is some invisible monster
(in the arch) - this could never be made visibile with the spell.


> Magic walls can invoke magics quickly, and sometimes they make server
> work too hard. (as a result, players cannot move quickly.)
> To avoid from such problem, I used boulders at the map "/pup_land/magic".
> 
> At first, magic walls cannot invoke because of closed gate. When the
> gate is open, they can invoke. After a while, a boulder moves in front
> of them, and they cannot invoke again. I wanted to close the gate
> instead of the boulder, but it couldn't because magic spells above it
> prevented it from closing.

 If it can not be done as of now, I will change it so that magic walls have a
speed value and use that for how often to cast.  So if things cast to often,
just lower the speed of the magic wall.

 This does not work in the case where you may have circular loops (for example,
there used to be a map in santo dominon called bullet mania or the like, and
basically, it set up loops via directors.  The bullets would live for ever, and
bring the server to a crawl pretty quickly.

David Andrew Michael Noelle wrote:
>
>     This reminds me of something I've been meaning to suggest: rather than
> having anti-magic fields under all gates, walls, and doors, which results in
> the odd phenomenon of doorways being unholy and magic-proof, why not just
> make all gates magic-proof when closed but not when they're open?  Locked
> doors could be made magic-proof so that they can't be teleported through,
> but once they're unlocked (removed) they no longer interfere.
>     Most maps wouldn't even need the anti-magic and unholy tiles if their
> walls and doors had a magic-proof flag set.  Those archetypes are just flags
> with an empty object wrapped around them, so why not just set the flag in
> the object that requires it?

 Doors will remove any magic blocking as they are removed. So this works OK.

 What gets tricky with gates is that they have the state changes.  So if a gate
is supposed to block magic when closed, but not when open, you need to store
that information someplace else in addition to the normal flags - otherwise, the
gate opens, you clear that flag, but when the gate closes, you have no idea if
it should block magic again.

 This is not hard to add - it is already done for many aspects of gates that I
redid for 0.96 (speed, blocks view to name a few).  But I'm just pointing out it
is not as simple as just clearing the flag when we open.
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