…and while i am at it… tried to teach NPCs to drink healing potions and vodka.

the code needs further testing, but basically, if some vital body part is in danger, or hp < maxhp/2, NPC will try to drink some healing potion (if it has any in the inventory, of course).

and if NPC is paniced, and has some alcohol, it will try to drink it too.

in theory, you can now give some healing liquid to your allies instead of throwing the bottles at them. note that dumb creatures (like puppies) simply cannot open the bottle, so they will not drink in this way.


ok. after some fixes i observed mistress drinking healing potion i gave to her, and growing a new arm. yay!

currently, NPC will always drink the whole potion. this prolly should be fixed later: intelligent NPCs could taste just enough to be healed. but even in it's current form it is much better than throwing healing potions to allies!

also, there is now a reason to give healing potions to spawned monsters: they know what to do with them!

by the way: if you'll manage to befriend Kaethos, and give him a healing potion, he'll drink it, and grow a new leg. this is because intelligent monsters will check if they're missing some limbs, and consider this as "need healing" situation. (yes, just checked this. it works.)

also, i can't see why smith and tailor could not upgrade your items. hey, they definitely have their whole houses filled with different materials! so let's try this: the harden check is the same as for the player (Int), and the price is like `Item->GetPrice() * 2 + Item->GetFixPrice() * 4`. both of the conditions looks prohibitive enough to not allow player to get super-durable weapons or armor.

of course, it is usually possible to buy SoHM from librarian, but PC Int might not be high enough to use them. and of course, SoHMs are usable on any item, while s&t will only upgrade weapons and armor. let's put our gold to some use!

p.s.: ok, Attnam smith is able to harden things up to meteoritic steel, and tailor up to ommel hair. looks legit for me. they also want big enough amount of money for their work, so it is hard to abuse this. need to check Aslona NPCs too, and other smiths/tailors. but i think that i'll keep this so far, i like it.

moved all quest-related talks to `TryQuestTalks()`, and gave Kaethos his love to sci-chat back. now any NPC could have high sci-talk chance, and it won't interfere with quests.

tbh, i doubt that mana concept fits to IVAN, at least as i see the game. even if i'll ever implement "wizard training route", it will only allow the player to direct their wands in more than 8 directions, that's all. as Yancakes wrote: "Our hero is a schlub! A fast learning one, but a schlub nonetheless." there are more than enough games with classes, magic systems, and such. i don't think that we need to follow them.

IVAN is a complex game which hides its complexity under relatively limited number of options, so let it stay as that. new players need not to think which class to choose, which traits to take, and so on. and this is the first of many traps IVAN prepared for unsuspected players, lol. "look, this game is so easy!" the limited number of stats helps to better setup this "metatrap", i believe.

yeah. willpower is useless in k8I. mana was hidden in 0.50 too, and i always felt that it is something devs are not happy with. it is not used in original code (althrough it is modified by new ommel blood code, and 0.50 equipment bonuses). tbh, i am thinking about completely nuking those stats from the codebase: i don't believe that i will be able to properly balance them.

as for weight and height… it's fun to see, yeah. but most of the time they are not useful. inventory weight can be seen in inventory screen, and character weight currently doesn't matter. "Siz" (height) is useless too, i simply forgot to remove it. ok, height can be useful for polymorphed chars, but i'd better introduce special "character info" screen instead, akin to stethoscope.

the idea is that useless or mostly useless info should not clutter stats panel. and numbers should be slightly brighter than labels, it is easier to catch them this way. shading on all text was introduced for the same reason: it is easier to read.

IVAN font is quite ugly and small, it doesn't give enough space to break monotony even with 10-px line height. text shadow doesn't help much too. that's why i added shading.

also, there is another fundamental typography flaw in IVAN font: digits are of the different width. this is common flaw of many monospaced bitmap fonts, and it bites when the code tries to use such font for proprotional printing. so i had to uglyfy some numbers to fix this.

p.s.: and changed blue color of stats to greenish/purplish. blue is almost unreadable on my display.

thank you for confirming. i found it in in my crusade against `RAND() % n`, and decided to ask.

i think the rod should be just like a wooden stick. but… if you use it near the water, you could get a fish. as for buckets… dunno. prolly yep, good for blocking. but i believe that the bucket should have some other use too. just can't think out what it should be yet.

p.s.: and the bucket should be wearable as a helmet, of course. blocks vision, lowers Int permanently (because the hero should be very dumb to try this .

…and now we need medusa monster, which can be approached only with a bucket on your head.

k8I has Alien Queen. you can try at it — one-line flavor text for worldmap when Alien Vessel dungeon is generated (currently it is "You heard rumors about some strange creatures roaming the continent..."), flavour text for Alien Queen level, and maybe description of Alien Queen herself. currently there is no special texts for "Look" command, but it is easy to implement them, so the more — the better. ideally, we should have "Look" descriptions for all unique monsters.

p.s.: i am storing your texts in Fossil wiki (with links to the posts), so they won't be forgotten!

slightly changed status panel. if you don't see anything wastly different, then i did my work right.

even earlier. what i quoted is 0.43. and "fishing is fun" is actually all way back to 0.301 (just checked it).