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[Toady One]

The stance bug is fixed now.  I found some other problems in the code, but fixing them meant that titans could no longer support their own weight (which is realistic I think).  In order to compensate, titans now have strengths around 1000, which means that their muscles work 10 times as effectively as those of a human their size.  I don't see a problem with that -- titans aren't real, after all, but if they were, they'd need to have hyper-effective muscles.  I didn't need to change dragons, so dinosaur-type quadrapeds would be fine (they spread the weight out over four points).  Tyrannosaurus-type creatures would be harder to figure out -- I think we may have brought up before that one study (probably contested) suggested that dinosaurs would need to have 80% of their body mass taken up by muscle to run like they do in the movies.  In this game I can either make the muscles work more effectively, increase the muscle mass, or whatever else, or they'll probably fall over just trying to stand.

I also fixed the missssspelling of "envelope" above in the spell text!

[Denim Sk8r]

Um...yeah, little late posting some suggestions, but whatever.

Can we have a way to constrain the size of a spell's cone, sphere, or line to certain limits, so that we can make spells that must operate withing set ranges, that possibly increase with skill.

Also, I thought of some visual effects that may or may not be easy to code. Basically, I figure that you could make this "dull white glow" but having an Aura visual effect that finds the model(s) for the target and draws them again at some level of transparency and color, but say, 25% larger.
Besides that, how about outputing one or more of the Symbols at or around the target location of the spell or on the ground beneath the caster or target or something.

With these, we should be able to come up with some nice visual effects, like: Your hands glow with red energy and an eye appears on the ground beneath you, some of those blue dots jumps around the target, and then it explodes with a number of skulls appearing randomly around the air where the creature was.

Something else I wanted, but believe is way too difficult to be done well before Item relase is fire. Yeah, I know we have fire, but only as a side product in chemical reactions. I want to start fires, and have fire spread to other things, but I'm pretty sure that this is an item release concern, you know with torches and such light something on fire and have it run into a tree and catch it on fire. Still, maybe it'd be possible for a simple spell that has the visual effect of fire and burns something for now.

There was probalby other stuff I was thinking, but I forget easily....

Oh yeah, I want the game to NOT crash when I load a saved file....that'd be sweet.

[Toady One]

I fixed a save bug.  Maybe it's the right one.

I also fixed a bug involving rabbits weighing 250Kg because each strand of rabbit hair was more like a piece of spaghetti, and they have tens of thousands of them.  You can pick up their corpses now, even if there are still bugs associated with that.

I'll see what I have time to as far as your suggestions...  I'm already down to less than a week, and I have lots to do in terms of administrative school stuff.  Today and tomorrow will probably be my last days programming for a while.  Maybe I can finish the wound interface today, and some of your things tomorrow...  aside from the fire, it all sounds feasible.  You're right in that fire would be hard to do.  I might have time to do a straight damage effect (with a fire gloss), but even that has some issues (which is why I've avoided it so far)...  well, I guess straight damage is do-able, as long as it doesn't involve materials-on-materials or force, like a creature attack.  That will be harder.  Oh, and the way things stand it might be hard to make specific caster body parts illuminated until those body parts are used in rituals -- then the spell will be able to use the ritual code to find them.  I can illuminate entire creatures, or targeted creature parts, now.  After I do that, if you wanted to make the caster's hands light up, you could go through the very awkward process of adding them as a spell target, which you then select.  Rather than doing that, it's probably best to wait for rituals on that one...  then the spell can just grab the hand from the "hand-waving" ritual.  Although, if there's no hand-waving ritual, I'd probably need to do it anyway...  like, making the caster's nose glow whenever he or she blows things up.  Hmmmm...  anyway, I'll think it through when I do rituals.

As a sidenote, I changed the coloration of spell effects to use color files.  That lets you use transparency.  The balls of splat look much better that way.  But symbols will be fun -- I'm definitely all for using them for something, finally.

[Toady One]

The wound screen is done.  Since I worked on it all day but finished it in a day, I'm crowning myself both a Marathon Man and a Quickie King.  You know it.  Anyway, you can also use the look button to get a view of anybody's wounds.  Right now you can also see their pain and nerve damage, but whenever I do a damage viewing spell (you can't see internal organs in the wound screen now, as suggested), I'll also place a flag on it so that only certain versions will be able to sense a creature's pain and numbness.  There's a nice model with five different modes, and a list of body parts for those modes with different descriptions (generic model view, wounds, bleeding, pain, nerve damage).  Lots of nice color-coding and so on...  I guess there are still some gripes with it (lists not ordered by severity) but since the list is now color-coded by severity, it shouldn't be all that hard to use.  There are a few more things I could add to make it a little better, but compared to the last piece of whatever that was there, this is good.

[Zonk]

Im testing this version.And beging writing the new manual.By the way,in the PRE release i did not manage to get troll's skin to burn in sunlight using material classes...

EDIT after 5 minutes of testing:There is still the problem with races like "grass"and "tree"in the character creation screen.Also,if the image of my character shows,for example,a dark skinned blue-eyed human,when i start playing it should be so...it's a sort of preview...Maybe I could send you a screenshot

anyway...Most spells effects look cool...

But summoned creatures should be nearer..I mean..a summon spell is "initated"...but then i get no msg the creature appeared

[ July 20, 2003: Message edited by: Zonk ]

[Toady One]

Did you make the grass and trees yourself, or do they appear in the character creation list the first time you play it?  I do not have them in my list, and I don't have grass and tree creature stock files.

The preview is deceptive right now.  If you are playing a human male, it just shows you an example human male, but it won't be the one you're playing.  At some point the picture will be accurate, and moreover, you'll be able to adjust your deformations, variations and frills (so you can make your face and skin look how you want, etc.).

I'll check the material classes and reactions and see if I can get them working.

Somewhere up there in all those posts I mentioned that summoning is fixed.  In fact, lots of things have changed.  The final version will be up in a few days.

[Denim Sk8r]

I've had troubles with the material classes and reactions as well. I tried defining a class of materials in the material classes, then made a reaction of that class to turn to stone(I think bismuth) in light, and then made gargoyle skin a memebr of that class, and imported the stuff into the creature file and universe, but it didn't seem to do anything. I don't know.

Along the same lines, I tried redefining hair as being made of Shadow on a human and then went to see if it would burn, but it didn't, maybe something wrong with growths accessing material reactions or hair is too small for it to work or something with frills, I don't know. Stuff to look into, maybe.

[Toady One]

Lessee...  there was a bug with mat class and creatures.  That is fixed now.  I tested it by making face horror eye tissue catch on fire in sunlight.  There's a new class called "Sunlight Susceptible" (shadow now belongs to this).

However, there are manymanymany rough edges.  Apparently, growths aren't affected yet, as you noticed.  Also, now that creature mat classes are implemented, looking at the code I think that having skin turn to stone would cause the creature to crumple into a pile of rocks, rather than turning into a still-living statue.  The game doesn't make the distinction -- for instance, why wouldn't a shadow demon turn into a still-living creature of fire, rather than just burning up?  There needs to be a flag for it, I guess.  I can think of three things off the top of my head:

1) Reactant turns into product, loses shape (as with shadow burning)
2) Reactant turns into product, keeps shape, but killing tissue (as with a Tolkien-troll-stoning)
3) Reactant turns into product, in stasis (as with a gargoyle)

Constant oversights...  and when I fix them, trolls die...

Since these next changes (including the spell/effect changes) are all your suggestions anyway, let me know what you want me to focus on as soon as possible if you care.  I'll be having a Denim Sk8r party today.

[Toady One]

Spell target constraints (geometric shapes + creature distance to caster) are in, along with skill modifications.

[Toady One]

I put in some new effect appearances (floating symbols, ground symbols, flames, glowing auras).  They aren't quite up to snuff or fully implemented, but it's okay.  For instance, you can't fire a skull beam yet, although the Morbid Skull Beam makes skulls dance around its targets.

[Toady One]

There are now straight damage effects and wound viewing effects.

[Zonk]

I did not create these races...Anyway,i tested another bit...If you use WEIRD resolutions,you get OPEN GL errors...but it's not a problem, for me.It's a COOL version,anyway :-) SO i can write the new manual...

[Toady One]

Well, since Windows or Visual C or whatever (something by Microsoft) just nuked the editors code (45000 lines, last backup one week ago), I'm not sure there will be a new version before I leave.

I was working on this:

   

and flaying spells, as a lead-in to getting gargoyle-style reactions working.

Now I have to reconstruct a week's work of changes on that giant file.  I'll probably miss stuff, and there will be lots of bugs to work through.

[ July 21, 2003: Message edited by: Toady One ]