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[Zonk]

Im back!I had some problems with school..especially
Latin and Italian...but im gonna be able to write something now..
and maybe i will get my pc fixed so all will be better!
For the manual...when...when i will have even more
time i will improve it...At the moment it's almost completely
useless..

Also I saw the new things on the future page...I like them.
Plus I like the new plan...VERY MUCH!
And,as usual...here is one of my rants...or "quasi novel"as
someone said..

Historic:In the "Overhead and Technical Matters"future page,
you said that the historical genre is possible only
for "human"worlds.But what about playing something not
historic....just VERY realistic,without magic or silly things...
but with elves,dwarves,dragons and giants?It could be cool...

Combat:In the combat release...will we have a stock style editor?
I altready have many ideas for stock styles...Judo,Boxing,
Wrestling,Fencing,Brawling,Sumo...Do you think "Berserker"can be
considered a valid style?

Projectiles,Acceleration and Gravity:Since you
are doing all this...what will the gravitational
acceleration(hope i wrote it right)be in the game
world?If in the real one it's 9,81 meters/second,in the
game it will be at random,user-defined or (more realisticaly)
based on the mass of the planet the player is on?

Various Silly Things:

-Missed bite attack/big stumble when speaking ---> You bite your
tongue!(Hei,i did it a lot of times!)

Also,for the frozen projectile in turn-based gamething...just because
you can see them does NOT mean you are fast enough to dodge them!
It all depends on the player vs projectile speed!

Travelling between universes files:With magic..it could be
possible,but it would be a big hack i think...

About universes...now we could really begin making
some stock ones,right?What about Darksun?It's just some
races...Thri-ken,Human,Half-giant,Giant,Elf,Half-Elf,Dwarf,
Half-Dwarf(Mul)...

[spelguru]

I like the idea about a realistic world yet with fantasy creatures. The dragon flamebreath could be explained the same way as they explained it in Reign of Fire (tm), that the dragon has 2 glands in the jaw that spits out two different chemicals. When those two chemicals mix, they burst into flames. Also there could be retard dragons (not black ones though, they are way to cool to be retards) that get two glands of the same chemical... Or less spiting power so they end up flaming their own jaws.

And about stock universes, the Might and Magic universe is a must. They got all the normal fantasy and realistic creatures. And they got lots of more different extra fantasy creatures. And the devils and angels also live in the world (no extra plane such as heaven nor hell) and can interact directly with the world. The only being that doesnt live in the world is the god(s).

[spelguru]

About projectiles, I dont think that people get the chance of dodging them if fired from (cross)(long)bows. The projectiles just move to fast. The best that you could achieve is to get the projectile to hit a less important part (like the shoulder instead of the heart).

[Toady One]

Hmmm...  I don't even remember what I put on the future page.  I think I put a lot of suggestions from the forum into the unsorted part.  There's so much to do right now I hardly think about it.

You can turn off magic or whatever you want...  if you want a world where there are lots of monsters running around, but nothing supernatural, that's fine.  I imagine there will be a flag or a scale in the universe definition for magic that you can just set to zero.

I had actually written down putting a martial arts editor into this version.  I'm not sure if that's going to happen, but there will certainly be a martial arts editor by the time we get to the combat release.  What do you mean by "Berserker"?  Crazy people that run around with no clothes and attack stuff?  I'm not sure if that's more cultural (like random entity characteristics, that might have a style associated with them).  If clunky armor makes all of the wearer's attacks less effective, not wearing armor would get rid of that disadvantage in the game, but I don't know if it would be written into a style.  Only if the actually techniques depended on not having armor in particular...

Right now, gravity is just set based on what I think looks good...  but every world has a constant that can be fiddled with.  It's written into the world definition.  As the editors get more fleshed out, you'll be able to tweak the number.  The game could set the number based on how big the map is if you want to simulate real gravity.

Biting own tongue...  how would that work?  Any aperture with adjunct body parts in it can cause damage to them when it is used poorly or under large jarring motions?

Going between universe files would require that the new universe understand everything new that's coming in...  so the stock files and so on would have to be added in.  It would be a hassle, like the way the game builds the universe encyclopedia of files now.  More generally, universes could be merged...  you could just add the worlds from one universe into the list of worlds for another universe, and create whatever portals between the worlds are needed...  this would require that the two universe encyclopedias be joined, and ALL references in the second universe would need to be updated.  It is straight-forward, but it would be a long and dreary task.

If I get to it, this next version will have the beginnings of a universe editor.  Aside from setting magic parameters and so on like I mentioned above, you should eventually be able to draw maps and place civilizations and all that.  Then doing up your favorite DND worlds etc. would not be so bad, once you get the stock races made.  You mentioned half-races...  I wonder how that will work.  I've kinda thought out how random production of mythological creatures like centaurs might work (aside from the wait-for-Denim-Sk8r-to-do-it method , because having the computer make a centaur is essentially a cut-and-paste operation.  Making a human and a dwarf into a half-dwarf might be trickier, since the blending is more subtle.  If there are body part differences, the game would need to resolve them, and if body parts are supposed to be the same (like the human left hand and the dwarf left hand) the game needs a way to know that.  If it doesn't, it might try to match the human head with the dwarf lower body, and half-dwarves would be more disgusting than they should be.  I should probably add some universal identifiers, like "humanoid lower body"...  well, I guess I already have them in a way, at least for random creatures made from forms.  But if you make a creature like a human from scratch, you'd need to go back and tell the game which body part belongs to which body component of the motif and form.  That way, the game will be able to blend things more appropriately.  Or something like that.  Still probably tricky.  Once the game has all of the tissues/growths/body parts identified between species, it could blend the properties randomly to produce a hybrid.  For any body part without a matching part in the other species, it could just decide whether to add it or not.  In this way, a half-human/half-lizard would have skin with growths somewhere between hair and scales, and may or may not have a tail.

That's a long way off though...  it also runs into things like growth and development, which include not only humans getting taller and hairier, but tadpoles -> toads, caterpillar -> caccoon -> butterfly...  all that.

Back to spell editors...  I've falling behind quite a bit.  There's just a ton of things to do for this release.

[Renaxer]

Well, Id like to be the first to say...
Welcome back Zonk

now I only have two comments...

About the Berserker thing... well most definations Ive heard about a berserker include them attacking and fight naked...
This game has too much nudity in it already... no more...  8(
but since its for the future?
No harm in some... unlike the release before the last on... group of nekkid people all huddling....  

and...
the biting your tounge thingy sounds scary...  and it might bring back harsh memories and stuff.... for some people..

[spelguru]

No toungue biting please... I hate biting my own toungue... hurts like #&Ī&!!!

And when will you all realalise that there is only one method of fighting nessecary, and that is handling crossbows and other various ranged weapons.

When the items patched is finished, I dont plan to get any closer to my enemies than the maximum range of throwing knives/axes/poisondarts.

btw, how will various elementals work? In every rpg I play when you hit an elemental, they take damage and after more hitting, they die. How will you be able to kill elemetnals in armok? Earth elementals should be the easiest, just crush em to dust. But fire and water and air? They cannot really be damaged since the weapon you use against them just passes through them. And they have no organs so you canīt bash their brains out with a sledgehammer either. How are normal warriors suppoused to battle elementals?

And earth elementals might be tricky to make. If they are made from mud, then there should be no problem with movement, but if they are made of stone, things will become very difficult. Stone cannot be bent so they will have some serious (as serious as an heartattack) problems moving since all the joints will not work at all.

One thing more: Will the magic editors be as complicated as the other editors?

[spelguru]

btw, how can I increase the size of my posts? Since no mather how much I write I never seem to get a post the size of your posts. And I dont think yall would like me just making such large posts just of spam.

[Harlander]

Why use crossbows or other crude projectiles when you can focus your will on the very tapestry of creation and bend space around your foes to rend them asunder with a single thought?

Oh, yeah, because crossbows are a lot easier.

As for elementals, fire elementals could probably be killed by relatively mundane means (assuming their fire didn't simply flow out of some otherworldly dimension of eternal flame) - dousing them in water would decrease the temperature of their flame until it was eventually extinguished. I have an inkling that attempting to starve them of air would be unsuccesful, though. Water elementals could be boiled away, frozen or soaked up in things... (A water-elemental-soaked sponge would be interesting) and air elementals? Well, they're tricky so-and-so's. Creating a sphere of rock around them would probably kill them off, as well as freezing the air around them solid...

Perhaps some kind of special transformation for material types could be allowed on elementals - if the material is rigid, it is altered so it can bend.. or maybe the creatures have joints similar to linkages in an engine to allow movement of the limbs (in the case of earth and metal elementals)

I had a suggestion for lil' Spel increasing his post length, too, but for once, I managed to realize how stupid something was before I said it.

[Harlander]

Another thing: Would the way creature bodies are stored allow for interpolation between two different forms?

[Captain_Action]

Well, if remove enough "substance" from anything it should/will die.

[Toady One]

The spell editor should be fairly straight-forward.  The magic art editor will probably be a little harder...  I guess that means the spell editor will be medium-hard and the magic art editor will be very hard.

One way to increase the size of your posts would be to include more newlines or carriage returns or whatever.  Your lines seem to go horizontally across the page longer than Zonk's.  Perhaps this was Harlander's idea.  And you know what he said about saying his idea...

Anyway, yeah.  Those are lots of good suggestions on ways to kill elementals.  It also depends on how they are affected by separation.  Like if you drop a wall/rock/whatever that cuts an elemental in two, does it die?  Or split permanently?  Or split until it can rejoin?  Depends.  If you breath in an air elemental, does it die when you absorb the oxygen into your blood and pump it full of CO^2 (like being digested, kinda)?  Or would it just crash out through your rib cage?  Or does it just chill out until you have to breath out?  What if you close your mouth after you breath some of it in?  Another separation question...  it all depends on how they survive magically in the first place I guess.

Changing between different forms was kinda in my mind during that rant up there in my previous message...  I'd need some kind of universal flag on each form body part, so that it knows what it is doing...  like the body and front legs of a quadruped form correspond to the body and arms of a humanoid form, respectively.  A problem comes in with motifs...  if one motif breaks the body into "upper body" and "lower body" (as the mammal motif does), while another motif (maybe a tree or something) realized a body as a single trunk, or a branching thing, then the game would be hard pressed to make a precise transformation.  In this case it would probably just set up the correspondences randomly, as best it can with the available information.  In the worst case scenario, where you have something changing from say, a jellyfish to a bird, the game would probably give up any kind of correspondence between body parts and just make completely random assignments in a transformation from one to the other.  If it wanted to make a half-bird/half-jellyfish, it might choose one of the forms randomly (say bird-form), but give it lots of jellyfish motif characteristics...  or it might select a third form (quadruped, say)...  or it might discard the notion of form and just use all of the parts, or some of the parts...  like make a big feathery ball with slimy tentacles and wings, just by selecting parts randomly.  It would have to be careful in this last method to make the creature viable...  I can probably come up with some tricks to do that.  Like, if it isn't viable, just make up some new organs and throw them in or whatever.  When splicing two completely different creatures, I doubt people would really care if it had some subtle extra features to make it live.  Well, I mean, people might care if it is like disgusting and evil and alive.

[Denim Sk8r]

what I'm wondering is how the bird and jellyfish were able to mate in the first place....

*shudder*.......never mind

my thoughts on on how elementals work:

elementals are pretty much agreed to be magical in nature right, so their source of life tend to come from magical ends. So in order for most to retain "life" they need some source of magical energy input. So...

1) The elemental is given an energy supply as part of its creation and slowly exhausted that.

2) The elemental draws energy from some external source.

type 1 would be in a sense a sort of Summon Elemental as it only lasts so long before collapsing on itself. so this type of elemental could be destroyed by exhausting it's energy source prematurely, or delaying it somehow and letting it die out

type 2 could draw their energy in any number of ways.

A) draws energy from a device
B) draws energy from an area
C) draws energy from other sources

yeah, the last is vague, gimme a sec to explain

type A would be linked to a device either specificall made for the purpose of sustaining the elemental or any other devious converted or enchanted to that effect, so disable the devious to disable the elemental.

type B would be slightly different in a sense where the elemental gets its energy by "refeuling" somewhere corresponding with its type. (Water elemental w/body of water, etc...) This type could be set up such that it gradually loses it's form and becomes smaller as its source of energy, so it would need to go back to some place to restock on its form. Its ability to do so could be determined either by an innate power of the elemental(meaning any body of water would suffice) or with the area(this particular bosy of water has some magical effect on the elemental). so to kill this kind of elemental, cut it off from its source until it dies out.

the last kind, C, would be more "human" by comparision in that they would derive their energy by "feeding" off of something. It could be very similar to other races in that it actually "eats" food of some kind(people, cats, multi-vitamins, organic matter of some kind that it transfers directly into energy through magic or some sort of elemental organ system) or draws energy through action of some kind (fire elementals become stronger by...setting certain things on fire?)

As you can see it's pretty easy to cross some of these types over. there's a very simple and exact explanation to how this works:

I'm insane and this is the best I could do in expressing my thoughts. I hope this generates some ideas on how people want to do elementals.

I know that this doesn't really solve any of the problems involved in killing them really. They could be done like other demons in that they don't exaclty die(like those damnable Fleshballs!) but I think it would make more sense to have a core of some sort that functions like the brain, parts disconected from it are, immediately or after some time, converted into their normal form(turns into a puddle of water or glob of mud) whether or not it could later regain this back is up to whoever makes it. So, you could cut part of elementals off to slowly dwindle it(dropping a rock onto a water elemental would scatter it everywhere so it would be "dead")

What are other people's ideas about elementals having their own magical spells or abilites. Should some of them be able to control other forms of thier element around them(earth elemental can affect surrounding ground) and if so to what extent? Could an elemental who can affect its element be able to do so to such a degree that he forms minor elements? they wouldn't normally have any further powers as they are like disconected segments of the main elemental. This creates cool situations about like a "Master elemental" upon whose death all subordinates are disencahnted. Maybe under certain circumstances the underlings can become full elementals and then later attain their own underlings.

I think these last ideas go best with the concept of elementals being more like races than just beings. I don't know how I want to or if I want to try to put elementals in at all when it becomes possible.

I haven't relaly been in an Armok-ian mmod lately, I've had some stuff with college and such eating up too much time and thought to concentrate on this stuff, so don't expect anything besides occasional posts from me until I'm more together with everything and can spare time to this.

Meh, that was more typing than i was planning on doing. Spelguru, if you want your posts to be longer tpye more, if you want to type more, have more contributal thoughts to incorporate into your posts. Just go from there until you're done thinking, then stop.

It's not the size of your post that matters, it's what's inside.

That sounded way too dirty for me, ignore any sexual references.

AH! now I'm grossed out again. I'm back where I started!

[spelguru]

Master elementals was part of the D&D system but there they went by the name of Elemental, Greater Elemental, Elder Elemental and Elemental Princes. Basically the better type of elemental it was, the bigger and more powerful it was. I dont really know if they can create new minor elementals. I think for an elemental to be able to create or summon new elementals, it must be able to sustain itself in the world and yet have more power left to supply new elementals with. Fire elementals could perhaps absorb energy that is made by burning stuff. Water elementals might be very powerful while raining. And freezing the water elementals is not a good way to stop them. Havent you ever heard of Ice elementals (hereoes of might n magic) or Ice vortexes (ADOM)? And greater earth elementals, will they be able to move through rock like a ghost? When you inhale an air elemental (if possible) what stops it from going compact and being inhaled completely then bursting out from your chest when it stops being compact.

The point is that all elementals are really powerful. Summoning them should be very difficult, and as it is in D&D, a minor chance of them not being in your control.

Also, there must be other types of elementals than the normal ones. In might and magic there are also light elementals, so that should also be possible to add. Death, darkness or evil elementals?  The death elemental would kinda be something like a super zombie with some necromancy capability. The darkness elemental could do all sorts of nasty stuff like curses that has to do with eyesight and all that and illusions. Evil elementals should be kinda like demons but instead of being "created" by evil forces, these are made of evil itself. Have anyone ever read Wheel of Time? Mashadar in Shadar Logoth is kinda a mix of a darkness and evil elemental. He was weakened during day (as darkness and evil should be) and at night he came out from the dark corners and cracks to hunt.

And auras should be able to create some minor elementals. Say in the middle of a great, ever active volcano. Boiling lava everywhere. That could be a breeding spot or maybe even a portal for fire/magma elementals. In the middle of caves thousands and thousands of feet below the earth or inside the heart of a big great mountain could be a portal or breeding spot for earth/metal elementals. An evil necromancer who controls a region for houndreds of years should be able to imrpint some of his evil and death into the very land. At night evil things could lurk the lands.

And how will the game decide wether an aura is evil or good? Or an characters actions, are they good or evil? If you are hunting and shoot at a deer and accidently shoots another hunter dead, is that a evil act? Or was it just an accident? What will the game say it was? Kill another being in selfdefense, will it be evil or good? Kill a great paladin of goodness itself because he was #&#&ing your wife, good or evil and how much?

And now to my favourite subject: Dragons. There will be different types of dragons, thats for sure. But how will the different types act, and will they even have some kind of mental capabilities? Will dragons be large powerful creatures that live in big caves filled with gold and other treasures? Will they kidnap princessess? Or will they just be stupid creatures that search for food, sleep and mate? Should dragons be able to use magic? Or if they can use magic, should they be able to use shapeshifting magics?

*phew* now I should have made an large post. If it isnt large enough by my standards I will edit it and add some rows of spam.

[spelguru]

One more question that I didnt think of: Life elementals, how would they look like and what would they be able to do?

[Harlander]

Life elementals? o.O

Personally, I'm interested in seeing elementals being formed out of every material type... Uranium elementals, anyone?