NPC's for Dimonds Cove

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Merlin
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NPC's for Dimonds Cove

Post by Merlin »

I'm going to start scripting NPC's for the Dimonds Cove.
Some are simple yet some others I have in mind would effect the game more dramatically.

The waitress (or waiter!) (Sells food items. Including the Chicken leg?)

Questionable food Items are:

Name ID# effect Buy Cost
Orange cupcake [534] +100 HP 90 GP
Roasted maggot [533] +150 HP 110 GP
Milk [527] +150 HP 300 GP
Bottle of water [541] +250 HP 200 GP
Chicken Leg [562] +500 HP 200 GP

(Prices and Stats from the wiki)
What should and should not be sold. Is the Chicken Leg under priced?

Idea number 2:

A Leather Craftsman. He takes used and dropped Leather Shirts and for a price turns them into items. I purpose the following:

10 Leather Shirts + 2500GP = Leather Gloves
10 Leather Shirts + 5000GP = Leather Pants

The leather gloves would require no added work. The item exists in the reference and is not shown on the character.

The leather pants are a recolor of the jeans that I believe I saw posted before. It would take this item to be included in the game. I think the character sheets for this has already been done. I realize having this item would effect the market on jean shorts. They should have a higher defense rating then the jean shorts thou. (Being as leather is tougher then denim)

Idea number 3:

A kid who collects snake lamps. In the same manner as Vincent the exchange would be 30=2000 GP
This one has very little effect and would provide a use for the snake lamps collected while trying to get jean shorts.

I would like feedback on the purposed stats and exchange rates.

Thank You,

MerlinX420
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Crush
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Re: NPC's for Dimonds Cove

Post by Crush »

MerlinX420 wrote:The waitress (or waiter!) (Sells food items. Including the Chicken leg?)

Questionable food Items are:

Name ID# effect Buy Cost
Orange cupcake [534] +100 HP 90 GP
Roasted maggot [533] +150 HP 110 GP
Milk [527] +150 HP 300 GP
Bottle of water [541] +250 HP 200 GP
Chicken Leg [562] +500 HP 200 GP

(Prices and Stats from the wiki)
What should and should not be sold. Is the Chicken Leg under priced?
Yes, when the chicken leg heals more than the milk it should be more expensive. The same applies to the bottle of water and the milk/roasted maggot that heal the same but don't cost the same. Also note that the bottle of water used to be a rare novelty item. Selling it in an NPC shop would declassify it.

I think you should rebalance the effect and price of all healing items ingame. Do you think that you have enough experience to come up with reasonable values?
The leather pants are a recolor of the jeans that I believe I saw posted before. It would take this item to be included in the game. I think the character sheets for this has already been done.
We can recolor sprites automatically since 0.0.24. So we don't really need any manual recolors of existing items. Unfortunately this technology can't be used for equipment yet AFAIK (at least I wasn't able to do so, but I am not that familiar with the coloring system) but it should be no problem to change this for 0.0.25.
I realize having this item would effect the market on jean shorts. They should have a higher defense rating then the jean shorts thou. (Being as leather is tougher then denim)
No, they shouldn't be stronger because they are much easier to get. The defence rating of items should represent how hard they are to get.
A kid who collects snake lamps. In the same manner as Vincent the exchange would be 30=2000 GP
This one has very little effect and would provide a use for the snake lamps collected while trying to get jean shorts.
The NPC price for snake lamps is 40 gp. This NPC would increase their worth to 66gp. That's more than 50% more. I don't think that the NPC should pay THAT much more for them. 40 for 2000 GP would be more reasonable, IMO.
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Re: NPC's for Dimonds Cove

Post by Merlin »

Crush wrote: Yes, when the chicken leg heals more than the milk it should be more expensive. The same applies to the bottle of water and the milk/roasted maggot that heal the same but don't cost the same. Also note that the bottle of water used to be a rare novelty item. Selling it in an NPC shop would declassify it.
Since the bottle of water is a rare item and doesn't fit into the scheme it should excluded from sale. You are correct this would declassify it and that is something I prefer to avoid.
Crush wrote: I think you should rebalance the effect and price of all healing items ingame. Do you think that you have enough experience to come up with reasonable values?
I've noticed that there is no continuousness to the value of healing to the buy cost. What would you consider a good balance? I was thinking of 80HP/100GP. Yes I could work up the new figures,but I'm worried this might drive the value of apples up to far.

Crush wrote: We can recolor sprites automatically since 0.0.24. So we don't really need any manual recolors of existing items. Unfortunately this technology can't be used for equipment yet AFAIK (at least I wasn't able to do so, but I am not that familiar with the coloring system) but it should be no problem to change this for 0.0.25.
I thought this was already done here:
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?t=3426

Crush wrote: No, they shouldn't be stronger because they are much easier to get. The defence rating of items should represent how hard they are to get.
Considering the limit of drop then jean shorts can't have anything above it.
It's maxed if you can't make anything above that rarity. So how could new shorts/pants be introduced if the top limit has already been set. I've noticed the market value on jean shorts is STEADILY dropping. What could be done to re balance and provide room for additional pants?

Crush wrote: The NPC price for snake lamps is 40 gp. This NPC would increase their worth to 66gp. That's more than 50% more. I don't think that the NPC should pay THAT much more for them. 40 for 2000 GP would be more reasonable, IMO.
I was worried about making it to high to obtain. However considering how long it takes to get 30 bug Legs...Yes 40 sounds more reasonable. I'm in the middle of the script right now. That is the figures I will go with then.
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Re: NPC's for Dimonds Cove

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MerlinX420 wrote:I've noticed that there is no continuousness to the value of healing to the buy cost. What would you consider a good balance? I was thinking of 80HP/100GP. Yes I could work up the new figures,but I'm worried this might drive the value of apples up to far.
Stronger healing items should cost more gp per hp because they take less weight and allow you to heal faster.
I thought this was already done here:
http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopic.php?t=3426
As I wrote: it is a manual recolor with a graphic program - something we don't really need anymore. Also note that the female version is missing.
Considering the limit of drop then jean shorts can't have anything above it.
It's maxed if you can't make anything above that rarity. So how could new shorts/pants be introduced if the top limit has already been set. I've noticed the market value on jean shorts is STEADILY dropping. What could be done to re balance and provide room for additional pants?
Cave snakes are not that strong. Better leg equipment could be dropped by stronger monsters.
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Re: NPC's for Dimonds Cove

Post by Merlin »

Crush wrote:Stronger healing items should cost more gp per hp because they take less weight and allow you to heal faster.
It seems that no matter how I try to re balance the figures I get much greater values for apples. Perhaps I should leave them out of the table.
I'm worried that any change in the prices could adversary effect the already fragile economy of TMW.
Crush wrote: As I wrote: it is a manual recolor with a graphic program - something we don't really need anymore. Also note that the female version is missing.
Then I guess the only why to get something new is to make it myself.
I believe I can create male and female versions of some new leg armor/pants. What about new weapons? I imagine I could create sprite sheets for the existing yet unused weapons.
Crush wrote: Cave snakes are not that strong. Better leg equipment could be dropped by stronger monsters.
There would have to be a monster that doesn't exist yet. A stronger Monster would have to be made. Since the apparent aversion to re-colorings. A completely new monster would have to be created from scratch. I see this being attempted but never finished or implemented.

Perhaps the Poison and Fire Skulls could be given a permanent home and the drop changed from the Eye-patch to the new leg armor? Would that work? Or is they still yet to weak to be worthy of yielding such a worthy item? If so could they be made stronger. Considering the drop must be as rare as the jean shorts it would make it time consuming to obtain.
However if I create cave maps linking the cellar to the cave snake cave it would make both drops to close to one another. Perhaps a rare new type of key that multiple has to be obtained in order to get a new weapon? I can't imagine a method of creating a quest that would yield this that fits into the game. Perhaps a Hermit that needs X amount of items to get the new item? Would that work? I can't figure what drop would be needed. I think that even then a new item would have to be created just for the quest. How about dead skulls? or Poison Sacks from the Poison Skulls?
I believe that just a straight out drop of the new item would reduce the value of said item and make it so everyone has one. I would prefer if it was only obtainable once. I have watched the value of jean shorts drop 100k since I've started playing and that is a very rare drop, yet it is possible to get more then one of. This effect is something I wish to avoid.

As far as the possibility of a recolored monster it should be some plausible, yet not already done. I think there should be 3 varieties of a particular monster instead of just one of some and many of others.
The scorpion structure is an example of how it should be done.
A different version of a bat or maybe a cave pinkie (Colored purple and with a snake lamp on it's head!) would be a different yet easily implemented re-color. I'm sure any addition to make a harder monster would be greatly appreciated from the players. I hear people complain all the time about the lack of content and wish there was something that could be done about it. Feel free to make any suggestions as what sounds feasible and I can then attempt at creating the necessary stuff to implement this.

Does anybody have any ideas regarding this?

Thank You,
MerlinX420
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Post by Falcata »

Perhaps someone should design an algorithm that can automatically deduce the price of an item, based on a variety of different factors. It would take a lot of effort to balance it, I'm sure.
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Post by Crush »

The reason for our strict "no recoloring" policy in the past was that automatic recoloring was planed and thus it would have been a waste of time to recolor monsters manually.

But now automatic recoloring is implemented and thus there is no reason for not putting new monsters into the game that are recolors of the old ones. The only thing you have to do is to convert the monster spriteset into greyscale (or better only those parts you want to be recolored), find out a colorisation palette that makes it look closely to how it lookey before and put this palette into the monsters.xml as coloring instruction (in case this hasn't been done before). Then you can add new monster with the same animation file but different colorisation instructions to the monsters.xml.

Note that you can even have multiple recolored color channels. You could for example take a colored graphic instead of a greyscale one and convert all pure blue to an olive-green color ramp and all pure red to a dark-brown-to-bright-yellow color ramp. For details about the coloring system refer to: http://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Image_dyeing
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Monster recoloring

Post by Merlin »

I had no idea it was so simple. Since I'm no pixel artist I am much more comfortable editing a XML file then I am manually re-coloring sprite sheets.
I will experiment with this and hopefully come up with some decent recolors that are usable.
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NPC Script files

Post by Merlin »

Can all the NPC's for one map be located in one text file?
I think they can and wish to know if there's any instances where it might not be a good idea to have all the NPC for one map in one file.
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Post by Crush »

It makes sense to put NPCs in separate files when you want to give the server admin the ability to activate and deactivate them separately. otherwise you should put all NPCs that are on the same map into the same file.
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NPC's

Post by Merlin »

That makes sense...

Thank you crush...


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