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[Toady One]

I have a list of about ten things I need to do to get melting working.  I've done the first two, which means general fields are in place.  So you can have fields of evil, which could affect temperature and so on.  Right now, my evil field just makes the "gloominess" flavor of locations increase.  I'm not even sure if that is appropriate, since areas can be ungloomy, but still evil.  Perhaps the characteristics of each location should be independent, but places that are evil will have evil things living in them.

In any case, melting should happen within ten days or less.  Then I'll make spells that raise temperature.  He he he.  Ugh...  there are so many bugs and little issues to deal with before the release.  I doubt anybody will be able to make the spells they want, since most of the effects won't be coded, but Armok has always been an exercise in everybody's patience.

My birthday was last Thursday.  I'm 25.  Damn.

[Demon]

Happy birthday!

I'm turning 20 in 13 days...  Doesnt seem so old anymore...    :p

[Toady One]

Yes, 25 is kinda corpse-like.  Fortunately, there are many older people on the forum to keep me feeling balanced.  Although I will have to start using Metamucil to keep me feeling regular.

I did 4 more of those items above.  There's so much field crap.  For instance, Armok needs the temperature field to make the soil.  However latitude changes temperature, and you could make a creepy field that makes things colder.  Yet at the same time, since Armok reconstructs maps whenever you visit an area, the game has to access what the temperature was at the beginning to reconstruct places as you remember them.  Perhap you made the area less creepy, so the area would be hotter, but the soil type would still be the same as it was before, when things were colder.

Anyway, I ended up needing 6 different layers of values for the most complicated fields, plus 2 more layers to allow the values to flow locally.  Pfft.

Hmmm...  but aside from some other assorted quirks, I'm ready to melt stuff.

[spelguru]

Could you perhaps melt this light post my tongue seems to be stuck too? I accidently slipped and landed toungue first on it and now I can't get loose without either removing my tongue or the light post! I hate subzero temp light posts...

[ April 26, 2003: Message edited by: spelguru ]

[Toady One]

Is everything subzero in Sweden?  Or is it getting warmer now?

All of the field quirks have either been pushed off or finished.  Now I code melting.  And bursting into gas.  And changing skin to stone.  Anything like that should be covered.
I suppose every function a creature has will need to have working temperature ranges.  That is, even if you don't melt, your body probably doesn't work very well at high temperatures.

I haven't quite figured out how to handle some of the metaphysical stuff yet.  Suppose you are completely turned into stone.  Are you dead?  Or can somebody "turn you back" and you'll be fine?  Even with a slight amount of weathering, you'd probably be skinless anyway.  Skin constantly regrows and repairs itself.  Rock doesn't...  it would suck if somebody carved their initials into you, or used you as material to make several rat sculptures.  If somebody cast the turn-you-back spell at that point, would the rats become alive?  Or would each of them become a heap of human organ pieces?  In some weird systems, each rat might have a piece of your personality.  But that's a very future thing.  Speaking of which, I'll eventually need to code decorations for lairs...   Medusa, for example, would have both heroes and local wildlife statues around her lair.  For the game to create these things randomly, it would need to analyze the special abilities of the resident creature somehow.  If the resident creature died a hundred years ago, the decorations would be determined by history -- if somebody found Medusa's place now, it would have old Greek hero statues around it, not businessmen and stuff.  In a DND setting, if kobolds used to populate the area around an old Medusa lair, there would be stone kobolds, not whatver-the-current-residents-are statues.  I wonder what of this can be done.

Anyway, melting hopefully soon.  I have no idea what sorts of problems will arise, but there will be something.  I'm asking a lot of the game at this point.

[Toady One]

Melting itself consists of 17 small tasks I need to do.  Then general material reactions will be a few more tasks, though probably much more difficult.

After that, it's all garbage and bugs and loose ends...  hundreds of them.  I'm not sure how many I'll feel like doing before the magic release.

[Toady One]

I can't believe this...  I was going to start melting stuff today, but my materials don't have heat capacity!  I have crap like fissility, but no heat capacity.  What an oversight...  It's easily fixed, fortunately.

Things are complicated, as usual.  Creatures have ambient body temperature, a range of temperature regulation, the temperature range where each function starts to break down...  in addition, every material will have heat capacity, and aside from full state change (solid->liquid, etc.), different materials will blister/crack/char/etc. in the presence of high temperature.  So on a hot day, your character could get blisters or sun burns, even if you don't turn to liquid.

To end on a good note, I just tested the temperature field (after all of my revisions), and it is still giving me sensible numbers.  My first character started in a desert at 33.4 C.  There's also a "goal" field, so that temperatures can vary smoothly throughout the day.  It keeps everything up to a tenth of a degree C.  Based on the exact time, the game will linearly interpolate between the "current" field and the "goal" field, which are updated themselves every hour.  This allows smooth, random temperature variations from day to day.  Temperatures are kept down to the "area" level, which is about 19x19 miles.  Spells, etc. create "flows", which are local variations in the temperature field, so that you can have more precise changes on a smaller scale.  For things like determining plant types and so on, I think 19x19 miles is fine.  Later on, it will be easy to add in other variations like shade under a tree.  This release will have day/night differences and latitude differences (I think).  I'm hoping to be able to code those based on the suns themselves, so that if you make your world have two suns, things will work out.  Light and sunsets and all that will also be determined by the position of celestial bodies, although maybe not for this release.  This will be good -- then moonlight etc. will be a factor.  Eclipses should be really easy...  on the other hand, phases of the moon might be hard to do accurately, at least in a multi-sun setting, where you can get some weird "double-crescent" shapes.  I'll probably just default to having the moon lit at all times in that setup, with its color determined by how much light from each sun is getting to it.  Assuming the world is round and the suns aren't like chariots and stuff.

Anyway, back to melting...

[ April 30, 2003: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Captain_Action]

All this talk of melting has gotten me to thinkung...

What about reactions of water and wicked witches.

[Demon]

Temp.(plantet)=Temp(star surface)*((radius of star)/(2*distance from planet to star))^(1/2)*(1-albedo)^(1/4)

Thats the temperature of a planet based on the star, but the greenhouse effect is not accounted for.  Still it makes a close approximation to Earth.

[Toady One]

I guess you'd have to account for geothermal energy too...  but yeah, that equation looks right for the sun's direct contribution.  I'll copy it!  He he he...

As soon as water gets put in, you should be able to melt witches.  For a slightly more simple case, you'd make a creature with materials that react with water...  the reaction would either change the skin into something with a room temperature melting point (goo!), or the skin would dissolve in water.  That's if witches are a species.  Otherwise, there would have to be an option in magic arts that cause people who have chosen to be witches to have the reaction happen...  that sort of thing isn't coded yet, although I was hoping to have all kinds of side effects for magical arts.  Then if you are psychic you could turn into a big blob like in the end of Akira.  Anyway, I'm trying to code melting with these general sorts of things in mind.  I have to figure out dissolving/solutions/suspensions anyway, or else cooking will actually be harder to do (there would be a ton of set reactions, instead of just mixing stuff).  That should be fun...  you'd be able to make a slurry of all of your favorite creatures and plants, and then drink it.  Might make a blender spell more popular.

[spelguru]

One question though, how many of the magical art reactions will be customisible? Say if you want a universe where the witches doesnt melt if hit by water, or an universe where gargolyes can be out in the sun. And that meta thingy with getting petrified, there is an easy answer. As long as the brain is intact at the point of stone-flesh spell, then you are alive. If it is not intact, you are dead. if only your head are left, then you are alive, but live for 0.01 seconds then die. And the soul you ask? It goes to where ever it should go when you die... So if a medusa is particulary nasty, it will petrify its victim, then crush its head...

[Toady One]

I'm not hard-coding much.  Not even colors anymore.  Well, certain physical concepts like mass are hard-coded.  And the basic interpretations of "flavors" like cheerful vs. gloomy or light vs. dark, although you can use fields to make new flavors, more or less.  Personality traits will be hard-coded in the sense that angry people will have more adverse reactions etc., although given how things have worked out there will probably be custom personality traits as well.  Insanity types, etc. ...

Everything else can be accessed and changed with the editors.  Hmmm...  I guess it might as well be hard-coded.

Anyway, so if I made a witch creature, I'd have to put its materials in a material class, and then make a reaction whereby (for instance) things in that material class turn into goo around water.  To make witches not melt, you'd just get rid of the reaction, or the material class, or take the witch materials out of the material class.  Same for gargoyles.

[spelguru]

But now that you think about it, are witches really a specific creature race? I always thought they were evil old women (human) that used magic to kidnap little children or generally evil stuff like that. And the general term witch is old woman that use magic. What if you start out as a normal woman, no magic. Then grow old and learn magic. You are still a human then and not a witch creature. Or is there some specific change in the very race of the human/witch? And how does the game decide wether a female human spellcaster is a witch and just not a minor spellcaster... like a village healer or something like that? And what happens if say an orc or kobold female (are there female kobolds? and if so, do they grow beards?) grows old and use magic. Do they become witches or are they too "unhuman" to do so... Just some random thoughts... Oh yeah, will the magic patch include "rabid cowmonkey rabbits from beyond the seventh star on the right of the black hole nebula"?

[Denim Sk8r]

the process to become a witch involves a ritual that shows dedication to the dark arts. The practices is the last step which completely converts the witch and strengthens her magic powers, but at the same time, she aquires her weaknesses.

So, evil ritual creates witch.

[Toady One]

Yeah, either way.  It depends on where you're coming from.  If you got witches melting in water from The Wizard of Oz, witches might be a different species, like Munchkins.  If you wanted to be more traditional, you'd have a magic art do it (like I said a few posts ago, this isn't done yet)...  but then witches probably wouldn't melt in water, or they would have done that instead of burning them on crosses.