I was browsing through DBT and the idea stroke me that it might be a good idea to replace the crufty pseudo-id system in ToME with a skill-based identify system, in addition to classic scroll/spell identification.

What this would do is that people with a good weaponmastery would know what weapons do, with good combat skill would know what armors do, with good magic/magic-devices would know what wands/orgs do and so on. Each item would have a required skill level to trigger the auto-id. Or maybe even two levels, one for basic ID and one which triggers *ID*.

Comments?

Chatter

Orvin: I like this idea very much for ID, but suggest a slight alteration for *ID*: egos, activations, etc. that are related to magical schools should auto-id according to the player's skills in those schools. For example, a fire brand might auto-id if Fire>10. This could be in addition to or instead of a level at which there is full auto-*ID*.

DarkGod: So that ID and *ID* would come with a skill, but some specific properties could be discovered by other skills?

BucketMan: That would be a neat...identifying different item properties as you go. If you want to go that route, you might also consider allowing properties to be identified through use. For example, every time you kill an orc with an orc-slaying weapon, you have a chance to learn about that property. For any of this to be especially meaningful, though, heap and easy scroll/staff/store based sources of id and *ID* might have to become less common. In Dragonball T, there are no id scrolls or stores at all, and the only people who can reliably identify everything are specialists. (Technomancers).

DarkGod: Yeah but who's gonna wield an unknown weapon? I have commited an auto_id subsystem that does handle the old auto_id flag and auto id by skill(either id or *id*, and it is possible to set multiple skills with multiple levels). Its syntax should be compatible with your own dbt_id subsystem so you should be able to use it in next alpha without any changes to your items.lua

ShrikeDeCil The key first step is figuring out if it is cursed or not. If it isn't cursed, fiddling with it isn't character-threatening. On another note, there's an upper limit on skills that seems fairly low if you're going to start making everything a skill. It seemed to have something to do with the textual _length_ of the all-capital placeholder text. That is 'SKILL_MANEUVER_IN_LIGHT_ARMOR' would put me over the limit, 'SKILL_BOB' would not. (After I added some 93 other skills) Making it an error somewhere in how LUA auto-increments/stores the table converting between numbers & named constants. Double ick.

NeilStevens: I favor keeping the skill-based pseudo-id we already have. Changing things for the sake of change makes me sad.

DarkGod: We do not have pseudo-id currently.

NeilStevens: I'm talking from a game design perspective, not a code-in-progress perspective.

Developers Corner/Replacing pseudo-id (last edited 2007-04-07 04:46:16 by ShrikeDeCil)