Groovy Gyrocopter Pt. 2

Groovy gyrocopters!

After a weekend of watching the Mad Max trilogy, I wanted to start working on the Mad Max zones for SOT. While working on the gyrocopter captain, I thought how awesome it would be if he flew you to Thunderdome once you bought him fuel! Of course, that would require scripting. Don't fear. Import Groovy libraries and already have all my mobs now running around hollering Groovy! Sick....

And we're back

No matter how many breaks... I still come back ;)

Made a lot of progress getting everything setup on the new box. Installed a new Subversion repository and imported the backup from the old machine. Also Installed latest MySQL release and was able to import database from old version. Sotmud lives...

More ideas

Health and Mana Recovery

Character at start will regen 50% mana and health after combat. After each succesfull kill the percent increases by 1% up to 50%. Death resets this back to 50%. If the character is hungry and thirsty the base adjusts to 25%. Therefore a character with max benefits (kill spree of 50+) can only recover up to 75% after a battle.


Special Attacks
Crit has chance (1%?) to reward character with special attack point. Special attacks are level based and dependant on class. Dying removes special attacks. Character can only have a limited amout of special attacks dependant on level. Special attacks reset on death.

Traps
Traps can only be set by thieves and are a learned skill. Traps will hold a mob or another character in a room for a set amount of time and may or may not do limited damage. Thieves also will have ability to sense traps, also whether traps exist in adjacent rooms and if they have victims stuck in them. They will also be able to disarm traps. Trap charcters cannot move while trapped but can be attacked.

Combat timer
Starts at infinite but as level increases, the time to respond in the combat menu is decreased. Certain potions and items may affect

Argument to redesign the mob table

Currently my mob table has columns for hitpoints, mana, moves etc for every mob. I being to question how this will scale as it becomes necessary to adjust the difficult. It would be unwise to assume my initial formula will be correct and I'll never need to adjust the difficulty of mobs. As more items, spells etc are introduced I'll continually have to tweak these settings. My first thought was to save the level of the mob which would for most mobs determine all their statistics. I wanted certain mobs stats to deviate from these level derived states, so I planned on having values that would over ride these default levels. The only problem here is if I would ever adjust the global formula, My mobs with offsets will not scale. To better handle this, I feel that the new mobile object will store level and Percent modifiers for every statistic. A Percent modifier of 100 will represent an equal alignment to the level statistic. Double the level statistic would be 200 or half would be 50 and so one.

Here''s an example of why this would help. Lets say I have created a level 10 mob whose default hitpoints would be 200. Suppose I feel this mob has greater Stamina (maybe 220 or 10%). If I go ahead and store the offsets in the database I would be storing 220. When that mob loads will fetch his HP value of 220 regardless of level. Lets say a month down the line I decide that a level 10 mob should have 300 hitpoints (the base formula is changed). Now I'd have to back and find all these mobs that had special offsets. I'd have to editMobs and from 220 to 330 and that would be tedious. If I instead had stored 110% HP offset. He'd immediately load with 330 Hitpoints without any modifications by a builder.

Here come the numbers

I've been playing around with formulas and finally and the inital outline for my game balance. This is a great feeling, as its been something I've been worrying about over the past month. I really had no idea where to even begin, but finally something. Its sure not be perfect but at least its a start. First here's the plan for level, damage, and hitpoints. I based everything off a 10 round combat sequence.

Level, Damage, Hitpoints
1, 2, 20
2, 4, 40
3, 6, 60
4, 8, 80
10,20, 200
20,40,400
30,60,600

This is based off an AVERAGE character. An average character would "defeat" a mob his level 50% of the time. The Damage and Hitpoints can sway 50% in either direction. For example a level 2 character well equipped could do 6 damage and have 60 hitpoints, but a poorly equipped level 2 character would be doing 2 damage with only 20 hitpoints. This is set for the average player of the average class. Obviously a Warrior is going to have more hitpoints, however as a result he may less damage dealing capabilities. This is much needed when designing mob difficulty.

Critical Chance
Critical Hits happen when a character hits for above average. When above average a player will crit 10% of the time. This makes the chance a character will crit equal to 5%. Crits will do double damage.

Chance to Hit
Equally leveled mobs will hit each other 75% of the time.For every level of difference the percentage will vary by 5%. So a player fighting a mob two levels above him will hit 65% of the time, the mob will hit the player 85%.

Armor
Armor can reduce the damage where Armor of 10 will reduce incoming damage by 1 point. Armor of 100 would reduce incoming damage by 10 points.

First Armor set

Spent the weekend forging some armor. Made great progress on editArmorSlot, wear and eq commands. Also added support for get all and wear all. Here's the first armor set.