Machine intelligence for IVAN.

I agree that should we allow more mobs to use wands, we need to be very careful with balance. Tying wand use to Int sounds good. Maybe the higher a monster's Int, the more often can their AI use a wand?

I actually just recently tried to replicate this behaviour in my dev branch. We'll see if it turns out OK.

But in general, I'd be for some improvements to enemy AI and them being more smart in combat. Of course, we need to make sure they're not so smart it becomes too hard for the player.

Some other improvements off the top of my head:
* When there's space, mobs should try to encircle the player and not stand in a line and wait for their turn to be murdered.
* Some A* pathfinding would be great.
* Once we have throwing mobs or ranged weapons, shoot-and-run mob would be nice, as you mentioned.
* Mobs picking up and using wands. Some already can use wands, but they won't pick them up, AFAIK. This needs to be carefully balanced, because wands are deadly and we don't want kobolds in UT1 blowing the player to smithereens.
* Mobs picking up potions and waiting to sip them when they're hurt. Now they just drink them when they find them.

The INSTALL should hopefully be up to date.

Depending on your OS, on Linux compiling is quite easy (that's what I'm using). There were also saome threads about using Visual Studio on Windows and about compiling on Mac.


Darkness is scary, as it should be.

If you want to circumvent this, you could give the player some emitation (ie. make the player glow ). That will simulate night vision, as there will be alaways at least a bit of light to see by.


Hmm...

Looking at the code, I can only see weapon skill, move ease (burden state), Dex and Per contribute to thrown to hit (see item.cpp line 160). So yeah, no throwing skill involved.

Oh, BTW, I noticed that your Perception is already used for searching, so you do get better at searching with higher Perception.

I was wondering if we have any pixel artist here that would be willing to help? I'm currently working on a new quest that will add a few new locations and other stuff, none of which has a sprite yet, and my artistic skills are, well... limited would be an overestimation.

What I would like:

* A mighty seaside castle of a king.
* A small camp (several tents, probably).
* A ruined castle/fort.
* A cave entrance.
* A pyramid.
* A small fortress/tower.
* A ship - the player will get a ship to sail the ocean and I would like to change the sprite while onboard.

And the black market could probably use a better sprite.

BTW, if anyone wants to have a look at the very WIP branch:

Aslona

IDK why people keep saying armour of great health is a trap, I'm using it quite often. Its AV got buffed a bit, I think, and the extra HP is quite worth it, IMHO.

Metal gloves and boots give much, much more AV for the same Intelligence requirement as cloth. It's not a trap, but a choice: take hit to attributes for high AV, or take lower AV for no attribute hit.

The disappearing valpurium sword, well...

What gear do you feel is a trap? There was already some rebalancing of various items to make more play styles possible and to have no useless gear.

Not yet, but it will. I hope to finish the patch for the next version.


Note that sirens use the same check for taming your allies as when you tame monsters, so very strong monsters (eg. angels) will probably resist the charming. It's probably still a better idea to have several weaker pets kill a siren than to let a strong pet solo her, though.

It's already quite easy to purchase it in a dungeon shop.

Similarly to Enner, haste yourself, teleport to the frog and blast it with an offensive wand. Not safe by any means, but it works.

Yep, magic items train Mana, so using horns etc. will eventually increase your Mana.