Ideas

Well - I figure armor skills would encompass everything defensive (not including shields). Dodging, protecting armor, armor protecting you... just like weapon skills influence everything including damage, to-hit, and speed. What I'm uncertain about is how it should be broken up: should it all be one skill? A couple skills? Different skills for different armor types, or different skills for different aspects of armor use?

So it's not totally thought out. However I think the key things that would need to be influenced by armor skill would be mobility and damage reduction. These two can be further broken down: mobility includes armor's adverse effects include dex and agi penalties as well as the PC's ability to dodge incoming attacks, while damage reduction encompasses both the likelihood of it's triggering as well as how much damage is actually prevented.

An additional complication is balance. If we simply add armor skills as another benefit to the player, we will be reducing the difficulty of the game. All relevant equations would need to be modified, and/or the skills would need to be given to enemies. The second option is the worse of the two. I suspect it would lead to longer, boring-er fights with a lot of misses and a lot of swords bouncing off armor.

As a rough draft I've divided the skills into three categories:

Mobility - Mobility would be trained by having attacks miss you, and by moving around. Being encumbered and having agility penalties would slow it's training significantly. High skill in mobility would improve your dodge chances, and increase base move speed. ((This could be balanced by reducing the base dodge chance))

Armor - Armor skill would be trained by having damage reduced by armor. Having more damage knocked off would train it faster. Higher skill levels would increase the chance of armor protecting you (not a sure thing), and increase the minimum (and maybe the maximum?) damage knocked off when it does trigger (normally armor blocks rand(50-100)% of it's AC worth of incoming damage). Specific armor bonuses might also apply? ((This could be balanced by reducing the minimum amount of damage armor prevents.))

Endurance/Encumbrance/I'm not sure - This one would be trained by running around with heavy loads, while wearing bulky armor, and so forth. It would reduce the penalties associated with such actions - less combat and hunger penalties for carrying large loads, smaller agi/dex penalties from chain/plate armor. I'm not sure about this skill, the dex/agi penalties don't necessarily have anything to do with the weight of your armor, but more how much it gets in your way when you try to move, an effect that could be compensated for with practice wearing and moving in armor, as the above skill. ((This could be balanced by increasing those penalties slightly. I don't envision this skill having THAT dramatic of an effect - running around while stressed will still be a fast route to a swift death))

Anyways. Thoughts?

For the record this could easily be a single skill, encompassing what I believe to be the two most important aspects of all this - minimum damage reduction, and armor penalties. This would also alter the balance in a more predictable way, by reducing the number of variables being altered. Additionally it would change the uses of armor - lighter armor would still be effective, but heavy armor would become competitive, and possibly even better if you put in enough time training in it.

A really interesting suggestion. Could it also reduce maximum damage from critical strikes?

So if we had the armorer skill in game, the player would start off with AR 10

Just for example, AR 20 could:
- reduce minimum damage by (AR - 10) / 10 = 1 pt,
- reduce max damage from critical strike by (2*(AR - 10)) / 10 = 2 pts
- affect the dexterity and agility penalties in a similar way

I don't know what realistic equations would look like, they'd probably need to account for the type of material of the armour. Would you be interested in implementing this only for armour that is ironalloy? Or across all material possibilities?

Then there would need to be some sort of training mechanism...

Warheck, I don't like the idea of the skill having flat effects on damage reduction. I was thinking something more along the lines of, for each level of armor skill, the minimum damage reduced was raised by a small percent - perhaps 3-4%? A more detailed example of what I'm thinking:

if (attackHits && armorBlocksSomeDamage)
then {
float armorEffect = rand ((50 + armorSkill*3), 100) / 100  //The code currently works similarly, but without the armorSkill bonus.
int damageBlocked = bodyPartAC * armorEffect 
int damageTaken = incomingDamage - damageBlocked
}

Also worth remembering here is that certain armor pieces overlap - namely, cloaks overlap all body parts, and torso armor overlaps arms and legs. I think these overlaps only apply half the normal AC however. That last needs verifying.

Does this make sense?

I do however like the idea of reducing the power (or frequency?) of incoming critical strikes. I'm not sure exactly how crits work as they stand however; that would be important information before we start theorizing about how we can monkey with their mechanics.

Ah I see now. I still don't have a good picture of the fight mechanics myself. I'd need a thorough source-dive before being able to see where things would fit together.

I think all the attribute penalties are sitting in bodypart.cpp, while the function takehit{} lives inside char.cpp and that'd be a starting point. I think critical strikes are determined whenever a general Enemy->TakeHit( function is called. A strike is critical if !(RAND() % Master->GetCriticalModifier()) is true. GetCriticalModifier() returns the CriticalModifier for the char, and intrestingly the only two characters in the game with a CriticalModifier other than 20 are Ivan and the Imperialist (each have 4).

So you'd check if a hit was critical by using if(Critical) then { reduce damage } somewhere inside character::TakeHit in char.cpp

So how would this work in relation to the damage/armour types that was planned? Piercing, blunt, blade, chainmail being better against piercing, platemail being better against blade, etc.

As far as I can see, the only bit where DAMAGE_TYPES (that is BLUNT, SLASH and PIERCE) is checked is inside character::AddWeaponHitMessage(...) which is in char.cpp.

There is some useful code in that function that distinguishes between the three damage types. That code could be copy-pasted to the right place so that the damage type associated with the attack is minimised in the event that the character is wearing the appropriate armor.
Beyond this I see nothing in the game's present code that actually imparts a distinguishable bonus (or disadvantage) according to damage type, making chao's suggestion above a truly novel feature.

You could also take the Mount & Blade approach and make it so that the less "rigid" the armor is the more it protects against blunt attacks. Of course one would naturally think that'd mean cloth armor would be best against blunt, but that'd be too unbalanced when you go up against something with an adamantine warhammer with, say, ommel hair armor...

I suppose you could make it so blunt type weapons are more proficient at breaking rigid (i.e low flexibility value) armors due to, well, them being blunt weapons made for doing that after all.

I don't know about that. I'm a proponent of more detail and realism in my games, but you do have to draw the line somewhere - if we make the mechanics too complicated people will have a harder time playing it.

However, in the interest of simplicity, you could make the armors and weapon types play rock-paper-scissors a bit...

High-flexibility (light) armor is more effective against blunt damage (perhaps a 20-40% increase in AV?), but is easily torn up by bladed weapons. (This would include cloaks!)

Chainmail (medium) armor is more effective against bladed weapons (again, bonus AV?) but is weak to piercing (AV penalty?)

Plate (heavy) armor is more effective against piercing damage (Maybe a small chance to negate the damage entirely? "The arrow glances off your plated armor!" Needs to be low, maybe 10% +2% per magic plus, -2% per magic plus of the enemy weapon) but vulnerable to blunt weapons (Perhaps some of the damage simply bypasses the plate armor?)

Best to keep it simple though... Also, I would welcome the addition of chain gloves and boots, as well as an alternative back-slot armor.

I did say "planned". Back when Erno and I were trying to get development going Kahvi told us that different damage/armour types were planned.

Hmm... how about starting as a different human either by choice or randomly? Starting types could be:

-Vegan: Increased DEX and AGI. Vegan status allows to only eat fruit, bread, and stuff like that.
-Hardworker: Increased arm STR and AGI (Happiest banana grower).
-Slacker: Increased END (Thanks to the Encourager) and PER (From avoiding the Encourager).
-Hauler: Increased leg STR (Why carrying one banana stack when you can carry two?).
-Worshiper: Increased Wisdom and INT but less physical stats. Already knows a God.
-Smooth Talker: Increased CHA by a nice amount but less physical stats.

Also, some of the Status you can get could affect what you eat too:

-Vegan: Can only eat fruit, bread, and stuff like that.
-Lycantrophy: Can only eat meat, blood and bones. Removes Vegan Status. Cannot get Vampirism.
-Vampirism: Can only get nutrition from blood. Removes Vegan Status. Cannot get Lycantrophy.
-Leprosy: Won't throw up from eating spoiled food.

We already have the "talents" which allow your character to be better at (or worse at) developing certain stats. They can be found on the wiki over here.

I do like some of your ideas here though - knowing a single god at the start (probably Silva to stay in lore) would be neat, but I'm not sure we should restrict food types depending on status.
Instead, perhaps you would just vomit profusely if you ate something you weren't meant to? Vegan vomits up meat, werewolf vomits up fruit, Vampire just straight can't eat anything... but if we're going to have him live off only blood we're going to have to modify code to allow dipping of bottles in corpses for blood or having him be able to bite by default in order to gain nourishment, which might be a big pain to code.

The ability to eat bones when inflicted with lycanthropy will be very useful indeed.

Oh nice. I had no idea there were talents.

About the food refusal by vomiting. It looks more complicated to implement but it sounds a lot more better that way. And yeah, vampires are not even in the game so true that. I would still love a feature like that since the game files already make some races eat certain things than others can't.



Edit: As I mentioned before. I'm altering the easy to mod script files. This is what I have been able to do so far:

-Golems can use equipment now. (I've found some of them carrying weapons so this makes them more dangerous/useful)
-More canned food. Kiwi, Pineaple, Carrot, Pork and Beef.
-Cheese is a new food available in lumps and loaves. (Never seen a loaf of cheese before but I have no idea how to add new items)
-Food items generally take longer to rot. (Makes the game easier but food rots way too fast, IMO)
-Vomit has a different color. Vanilla one is too green. (It got a nice orange color now!)
-Carnivorous Plants are edible now. (They give a little nutrition. It's mostly there to clean the dungeon from their corpses)
-Canines can no longer open doors.
-Different names for some materials. Nettle, Wool, Linen, Hide, etc. (I get confused easily by weird names, specially in materials)
-Cloth and Leather materials have their own upgrade tree. (They go thru their upgrade tree but eventually upgrade to the same last material upgrade)
-Cloth, Leather and Metal materials have different stats and reqs. (I'm trying to make them more unique and difference from each other more noticeably)
-Torso Armor and Cloaks have a chance to spawn with weaker materials. (Will add the rest of the armor pieces, eventually)
-Added more aliases for some items to make it easier to wish. (I'm also thinking about adding some misleading aliases to get wishes wrong)
-Some flesh materials are stronger and can be hardened with scrolls. (Human flesh not included)
-A lot of materials can be used in the creation of Golems.
-Removed the chances of parasites in Pork and Beef.
-Rat, Dog, Jackal, Goblin and Orc flesh might contain parasites.
-New Amulets. Tele Control, Poly Control, Searching and Invisibility.

I'm not sure if some of them are too overpowered or make little sense so I'm posting this for a bit of feedback. :3

Feedback:

-Golems can use equipment now. (I've found some of them carrying weapons so this makes them more dangerous/useful)

Given that golems can have insanely large stats, this could be HORRIBLE if they pick up the right equipment! I kinda like the idea though, although things like Valpurium golems or that one spider silk one are going to be nigh-unbeatable if they pick up the right stuff...

-More canned food. Kiwi, Pineaple, Carrot, Pork and Beef.

Don't see why not.

-Cheese is a new food available in lumps and loaves. (Never seen a loaf of cheese before but I have no idea how to add new items)

You could make a new sprite for it and just have the cheese loaf be a cheese wheel.

-Food items generally take longer to rot. (Makes the game easier but food rots way too fast, IMO)

Food rotting makes canned food that much more valuable. Being forced to eat things you might not normally adds something to the game, imo.

-Cloth and Leather materials have their own upgrade tree. (They go thru their upgrade tree but eventually upgrade to the same last material upgrade)
-Cloth, Leather and Metal materials have different stats and reqs. (I'm trying to make them more unique and difference from each other more noticeably)

How exactly are you doing this? Like, is cloth now the lowest protection, highest freedom-of-movement upgrade path with metal at the top and leather in the middle?

-Torso Armor and Cloaks have a chance to spawn with weaker materials. (Will add the rest of the armor pieces, eventually)

Interesting, there's not much out there weaker than leather or cloth so what are these? Have you also considered wood materials?

-Added more aliases for some items to make it easier to wish. (I'm also thinking about adding some misleading aliases to get wishes wrong)

Useful. I hope you covered "armor" being confused with "Armor of Great Health"?

-Some flesh materials are stronger and can be hardened with scrolls. (Human flesh not included)

Interesting, although I don't see this being much use. You'd have to change an item's material to flesh first if you were to take advantage of this, but flesh rots pretty fast and you'd probably be better off changing material to something better. Might be good for golems though.
Also note that if you change one of your limbs to a different type of flesh it does not boost your stats based on its attributes.

-Removed the chances of parasites in Pork and  Beef.

Why, may I ask? These are raw loafs of meat just sitting on the dungeon floor, after all...

-Rat, Dog, Jackal, Goblin and Orc flesh might contain parasites.

Excellent.


Mostly some nice changes but I don't think it's very balanced over all in my opinion. Script modding is fun, and there's a LOT of stuff you can add to the game without touching the code - even NPCs, dungeons and new weapons and items.
So don't be afraid to have a little fun with it, but balance is going to be a big issue.

Yeah careful with the game balance.
You can create vampires by giving such a character a special bite effect. Just use the code from SPOILER ALERT. Click here to see text. to reproduce the life-drain effect as a bite effect. (Check CLIVAN code to see how this is done).

Trickier still is to introduce a PC state (like Hasted, Lycanthropic etc) called Vampirism and allow the player to drain life using his bite attack, and reprioritise this attack as the default unarmed attack. I balanced this out in CLIVAN by making it so certain PC's stats (wis, int and cha) would deteriorate faster (probably needs to go a bit faster).
Then think of a way to allow vampirism to propagate though the game (obvious one is chance of receiving vampirism if getting bitten by a vampire).

Well, I have only encountered early ones but I guess you are right. Are NPCs able to equip anything they come across or only weapons? It's also specially useful to have a golem pet too. I just tried it.

I have to make it a new item, right? I tried but the game doesn't allow it. I thought I had to add it in the define.dat but that doesn't seem to be the case when creating a new item, only with stuff added via Config in the item.dat file.

I didn't changed it much and it only affects fruits and the materials used loaves. Food lying around in dungeons could have been there for a while, I guess.

Pretty much, yeah. Generally, cloth protects less but is more flexible, light and easier to harden. Leather is average in most aspects. They both will harden to Kevlar (might change the name to Plasteel). Metal will be the opposite to Cloth initially but I'm thinking about making the fantasy metals be good in all aspects. I will try to balance things coz the later materials spike stats too much. They will be still better but the difference won't be as monstrous.

Well, I first thought about making parchment the weakest but nah. Also:
Cloth: Nettle > Woolen > Linen > Silk > Pleather > Plasteel
Leather: Hide > Leather > Hardened Leather > Studded Leather > Pleather > Plasteel
Metal: Tin > Copper > Bronze > Iron > Steel > Plasteel > Undecided next metals

So all materials will eventually upgrade to Plasteel and continue in a single upgrade tree. I was thinking about making the last metals be all attached to a god and have a separate upgrade tree that only gods can upgrade but I doubt that is possible. It's a nice thought, though. And I haven't really thought about wood at all. Maybe have them for low lvl weapons and shields and a low chance to have them in armors. I could also have wood materials be something between leather and metal and work in a similar fashion as Cloth, Leather and Metal upgrade trees.

Will do now that I know about it.

Well, this is mostly for limb upgrade, since they have the advantage of healing with time. I had no idea changing limbs to another flesh material won't change stats. Is there a way to make it so it does effect stats or it just cannot be done?

Well, I thought loaves were processed/baked food but since it's raw meat, I guess you are right. :3

Also, balancing is the most difficult thing about modding for me. Good to see I get feedback for this game. Thanks!

Edit: I didn't see this one:
Nice. I didn't thought it was possible to add something like that but I see it was already done.

You shouldn't have to. Assuming you've added cheese loaves under "loaf CONFIG CHEESE" for example, you can just add a line in under that to reference a different sprite position on item.pcx:

  Config CHEESE;
  {
    ...
    BitmapPos = X, Y;
    ...
  }

The only way would be to remove the IS_ALIVE tag from a particular flesh entry. However, this would mean any monster with that flesh type would be unable to gain stats and would lose them through damage to limbs.
What's interesting is you can put the "CAN_REGENERATE" tag on any material you want, making it possible for, say, golems (and artificial limbs) of that material to regenerate HP if you had some ENORMOUS LAPSE IN JUDGEMENT.


About vampires: should be easy enough to allow for transmission - we could just copy over what Lycanthropy uses so you have a chance of catching it if you get bitten.
We could also be really lazy and just straight up copy Lycanthropy and have Vampire as the monster you polymorph into which has huge skill in Bite and Neerc-se Ulb code attached as suggested - the difference being that a Vampire would be a humanoid able to use equipment. With large enough bite skill, the game should default to biting in unarmed combat but I'll have to test that.
"You suddenly feel quite anemic"

EDIT:
Prioritising biting can be done in the script after all. Just put " AttackStyle = USE_HEAD;" under a character's entry.
To test biting I had these lines put in under playerkind:

  KnownCWeaponSkills = { 1, BITE; }
  CWeaponSkillHits = { 1, 20000; }
  BiteCapturesBodyPart = true;
  BaseBiteStrength = 100;
  AttackStyle = USE_HEAD;

Which should work perfectly fine for a Vampire if we're going to use the "polymorph into vampire" version of vampirism I mentioned above rather than having it as a passive status effect. Perhaps have CONFIG VAMP under playerkind in an attempt to have the player's stats carry over, except now with added bitey lines above?
Note a base bite strength of 100 is not very strong at all - it's half that of a Bat, Ostrich or Dolphin, and one third that of a carnivorous plant. Default bite strength is calculated as your base unarmed strength divided by two.

Oh that worked. I made a silly mistake the first time I tried adding it as a CONFIG item. I put it outside the { }

It works now:


The vampirism is starting to get really interesting. Polymorph does sounds easier to implement since Lycanthropy already works like that.

Also, what does BiteCapturesBodyPart does? It adds the severed part to the inventory or makes the character automatically eat it?

BiteCapturesBodyPart means that if the character reduces an enemy's limb HP to zero, it will tear the limb off and drop it on the ground at its feet.
This takes any equipment on said limb with it, making it far worse than simply losing the use of an arm - you'll both be losing equipment AND have to regrow or reattach the limb to get back to full fighting-fit state.

About asking for "armor" and armor of great health.

Normal armour is synonymous with plate mail. It depends on the material.

If I remember correctly, CLIVAN has a vampire inside of it. You can get Vampirism through eating it's body.

Hmm... so the CVS is the best option if I want to make my own variant, right? The only issues I need to fix before starting in there are the 19 unarmed skill and the Valdemar spawning chance. No other issues?

I like the idea of gas grenades. Is it possible to make explosive nades by adding gunpowder as one of the possible materials?
I'm also gonna try using the Kobold meat effect and see if I can use it to make stun grenades or make a sedative liquid with it to coat weapons to knock monsters unconscious.

Also, I'm thinking about generalizing some flesh materials... Some of them are just different in name and since there isn't much that can be done about them I could just make like for instance Animal Flesh, Mutated Flesh, Plant Flesh, etc. That way Golems made of those materials would only be Mutated Flesh Golem instead of Mutant Bunny Flesh Golem.

Edit: Hehe... The stun grenades work like a charm. It seems Kobolds are unaffected but it works for most. I'm not sure what god should be associated wit this gas. Legifer, maybeh? :3

Config STUN_GAS;
{
Color = rgb16(140, 158, 240);
NameStem = "stun gas";
Alpha = 200;
AttachedGod = LEGIFER;
BreatheMessage = "It smells funny here.";
Effect = EFFECT_KOBOLD_FLESH;
StepInWisdomLimit = 8;
}

There is also a chance you can catch vampirism from being bitten by a vampire.
When unarmed, the bite attack alternates between hitting and biting in this ratio:

truth humanoid::Hit(...etcetera

	if(StateIsActivated(VAMPIRISM) && !(RAND() % 2))
	{
		Chosen = USE_HEAD;
	}

I think it is 50% of the time an unarmed attack results in a bite when being a humanoid afflicted by vampirism.

How about a confuse gas grenade?

Config DIZZY_GAS;
{
Color = rgb16(189, 179, 155);
NameStem = "hippie smoke";
Alpha = 200;
AttachedGod = NEFAS;
BreatheMessage = "It smells like happiness here.";
Effect = EFFECT_CONFUSE;
StepInWisdomLimit = 8;
}

I like it!
I had an idea a while back to have the dwarven gas grenades not tell you what was inside them, or instead have "smoke grenades" which were filled with different types of smoke with different effects (or no effect!) but you wouldn't be able to tell until you threw them - even the colour of the smoke would be the same so you couldn't tell just by looking at it either.

This too would be easily implemented with nothing but script editing.