05-01-2003, 02:56 AM
Hi,
Actually, I meant that the game should add the probabilities that each key has, and apply the total probability, the same way it does with resistance from items.
What would be the point? Since (IIRC) you can stack 12 keys in a slot, you would always have 100% chance of opening the first three locked chests you run across. Keys are cheap and they also drop often, thus there isn't much need to ever have less than ten. I think that changing keys would require more than just adding a probability to make it a significant part of the game.
But I *would* prefer that bows have a repair cost. . . . But really, bows are more subject to damage from use than many other kinds of weapon - bowstrings fray, crack, and eventually split and must be replaced.
Totally agree. Bows should be low cost, low durability items.
I'd also like to see heavier bows require more Str than they currently do; fantasy fiction books like to talk about bows with 100-pound pulls, but I can say from experience, they're not very realistic.
Actually, the English longbow probably pulled all of that and more at the 36" full draw. While no bow has come down to us from the period of the Hundred Years War (and would not matter if it did, since wood that old would not have the properties it had when it was new) we do have a lot of information from forensics. The left wrist bones of many men of this period have multiple and extensive compression fractures. Those fractures are the result of extending the bow. The people who did the measurements have determined that bows with pulls of 90 to 120 pounds were needed to do that amount of damage. Spanish Yew is the favorite material for the English longbow, and, no, it was not imported. That's just the name of the plant, it grows quite well in England. When bows have been made from this plant in accordance with what details we have of bow construction of that day, they pull quite heavily, in about the same 90 to 120 pound range.
Realize that children started to learn the bow quite young, and continuous practice was required by law. Indeed, at various times, all other pastimes were forbidden so that people would only practice archery. Add to that the fact that these were rural people doing heavy farm work without the benefit of power tools. However, you do have a good point in the "Not many people could fire a bow with that kind of pull for very long without wearing out." In reality, an archer might fire a dozen arrows in a row. After that, the attack was repelled, and he got a chance to rest till the next one came (a matter of a few hours to perhaps days) or he had to defend himself in melee. The continuous machine gun fire of the bows in D1/D2 is not at all realistic. OTOH, the forty or fifty foot range (limited by on screen sighting distance) is equally wrong.
Frankly, bows are not handled worth a damn in any CRPG that I'm familiar with, and they aren't handled much better in pnp games.
As to games not dominated by marketing and fx, there are such games, but not in the genre of video games. =\ At least, not very many.
I'm still old fashioned enough to distinguish between "video" games and "computer" games. Video games are the descendants of Pong. The video, the sound, those are what those games are all about. The home versions were the consoles. Computer games started with neither sound nor graphics. The earliest computer games I know of (and played) were turn based games run in a batch environment. Even the later games in a time share environment were like dungeon and adventure (precursors to Zork) and (with the advent of controllable cursors using ANSI) rogue (granddaddy of Diablo). As the capability of consoles became greater, they drifted in the direction of adding more thought. And as the capabilities of the personal computer became greater, they started to add sound and graphics. The situation now is that the two systems are nearly capable of the same things.
But there are a *lot* of games out there that are not influenced by marketing. There are a lot of games, or add ons, or mods that are being done by gamers for gamers. It's just the commercial games that get hit by the desires of suits.
I wonder which came first: videogamers' insistence on graphics being the first and foremost aspect of a new game, or videogame makers' decision that that should be their selling point? The chicken, or the egg?
The egg, of course. Eggs were around long before chickens, and the first chicken came out of an egg laid by something that wasn't, quite, a chicken. :)
From my own dabbling with game programming, I'd guess it was the game designers that drove the video as much as anything. I've never worked on a game yet that didn't, eventually, push all the limits of the machine and left me saying "If only I could . . . ". It's the nature of the beast. After all, a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet all have some limitations of what is expected of them. The only limitation on a game is how cool and how fun the designers could make it.
--Pete
Actually, I meant that the game should add the probabilities that each key has, and apply the total probability, the same way it does with resistance from items.
What would be the point? Since (IIRC) you can stack 12 keys in a slot, you would always have 100% chance of opening the first three locked chests you run across. Keys are cheap and they also drop often, thus there isn't much need to ever have less than ten. I think that changing keys would require more than just adding a probability to make it a significant part of the game.
But I *would* prefer that bows have a repair cost. . . . But really, bows are more subject to damage from use than many other kinds of weapon - bowstrings fray, crack, and eventually split and must be replaced.
Totally agree. Bows should be low cost, low durability items.
I'd also like to see heavier bows require more Str than they currently do; fantasy fiction books like to talk about bows with 100-pound pulls, but I can say from experience, they're not very realistic.
Actually, the English longbow probably pulled all of that and more at the 36" full draw. While no bow has come down to us from the period of the Hundred Years War (and would not matter if it did, since wood that old would not have the properties it had when it was new) we do have a lot of information from forensics. The left wrist bones of many men of this period have multiple and extensive compression fractures. Those fractures are the result of extending the bow. The people who did the measurements have determined that bows with pulls of 90 to 120 pounds were needed to do that amount of damage. Spanish Yew is the favorite material for the English longbow, and, no, it was not imported. That's just the name of the plant, it grows quite well in England. When bows have been made from this plant in accordance with what details we have of bow construction of that day, they pull quite heavily, in about the same 90 to 120 pound range.
Realize that children started to learn the bow quite young, and continuous practice was required by law. Indeed, at various times, all other pastimes were forbidden so that people would only practice archery. Add to that the fact that these were rural people doing heavy farm work without the benefit of power tools. However, you do have a good point in the "Not many people could fire a bow with that kind of pull for very long without wearing out." In reality, an archer might fire a dozen arrows in a row. After that, the attack was repelled, and he got a chance to rest till the next one came (a matter of a few hours to perhaps days) or he had to defend himself in melee. The continuous machine gun fire of the bows in D1/D2 is not at all realistic. OTOH, the forty or fifty foot range (limited by on screen sighting distance) is equally wrong.
Frankly, bows are not handled worth a damn in any CRPG that I'm familiar with, and they aren't handled much better in pnp games.
As to games not dominated by marketing and fx, there are such games, but not in the genre of video games. =\ At least, not very many.
I'm still old fashioned enough to distinguish between "video" games and "computer" games. Video games are the descendants of Pong. The video, the sound, those are what those games are all about. The home versions were the consoles. Computer games started with neither sound nor graphics. The earliest computer games I know of (and played) were turn based games run in a batch environment. Even the later games in a time share environment were like dungeon and adventure (precursors to Zork) and (with the advent of controllable cursors using ANSI) rogue (granddaddy of Diablo). As the capability of consoles became greater, they drifted in the direction of adding more thought. And as the capabilities of the personal computer became greater, they started to add sound and graphics. The situation now is that the two systems are nearly capable of the same things.
But there are a *lot* of games out there that are not influenced by marketing. There are a lot of games, or add ons, or mods that are being done by gamers for gamers. It's just the commercial games that get hit by the desires of suits.
I wonder which came first: videogamers' insistence on graphics being the first and foremost aspect of a new game, or videogame makers' decision that that should be their selling point? The chicken, or the egg?
The egg, of course. Eggs were around long before chickens, and the first chicken came out of an egg laid by something that wasn't, quite, a chicken. :)
From my own dabbling with game programming, I'd guess it was the game designers that drove the video as much as anything. I've never worked on a game yet that didn't, eventually, push all the limits of the machine and left me saying "If only I could . . . ". It's the nature of the beast. After all, a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet all have some limitations of what is expected of them. The only limitation on a game is how cool and how fun the designers could make it.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?