Changes for January 2001
1-30-1
Merchants should no longer buy MiBs (at least new ones. The old ones they'll still buy, so if you
have some, be careful not to put them in a bag you're planning on doing a 'sell bag' on.)
Druid spell treeform has increased duration and a new HP regeneration effect.
Necro animate dead spell has been improved (the better the corpse you cast the spell on, the better
the zombie that you revive will be.)
1-29-1
Nightsight wands should be working again.
The problem with certain spells in which you couldn't cast another spell for a long while should
be resolved now.
Increased poison effectiveness on higher end mobs a bit.
Tinkers can make keys, lanterns, and strongboxes.
1-28-1
Player merchants will now keep a log of items that they buy from other players. To view the log,
say "log" to your merchant. The maximum length of the log is 20 items - after that, the oldest message
will be replaced with the newest. The log will also be erased after you view it. I'm afraid that its
not possible to log the items that players buy from you. Instead, they'll just tell you who bought how
much gold worth of stuff.
It should no longer be possible to cast a spell while meditating (or using most other skills.)
Changed they way that resist works for the field spells (Actually, it was checking the resistance
twice before, which wasn't right, so they'll probably do more damage than before.)
Potion kegs will now work like they do over on OSI - drop the potion or empty bottle on the keg to
empty or fill as appropriate. They still work the way they did before, too (double click and target.)
Yeah, kind of a waste of time, I know. I just wanted to play around some with some of the new POL features
and see how they work.
Agility and strength potions now last quite a bit longer, but have the same maximum effect as the
similar statmod spell.
Carpenters can now make kegs (not potion kegs - basically small barrels.)
Tinkers can make spyglasses, silverware, and spittoons.
Added a Help Page FAQ section (located over at the left.) Its just a bunch of questions that seem
to come up quite a bit, so I thought I'd try and organize them and answer some of them before they
even get asked. :)
Updated the Coming Soon section (just removed some items that I've already done.)
1-27-1
Sorry, but I've been a bit busy lately. Haven't really gotten a whole lot done the past couple
of days.
For people who have had trouble downloading the WoD scripts and aren't a member of WoD, I've uploaded
the current version of the WoD scripts to the files section (in the "complete worlds" subfolder) of the
POL scriptforum over at eGroups. Er, Yahoo groups. Whatever it is.
Wands of life should be working again. I had to take out the Yes/No res dialog box in resurrection.
It was the thing causing the problem, and I have no idea why...
1-24-1
Think I've just about finished with the rewritting magery stuff. Yeah, I know not a lot has changed
out in front, but behind-the-scenes, I pretty much rewrote the whole thing. Now just comes weeks of
finding bugs. Might have been rather a waste of time, actually. :P
Debuff spells (clumsy, feeblemind, etc) now have much more effect on NPCs than before.
Rewrote books to take advantage of new features in the lastest version of POL. They're much more
user-friendly now. Old books will remain the same as they always have been, though.
Wands should now be working again. I think. :)
Increased the speed of lumberjacking a bit.
Fixed tinkering thing such as clocks and sextants. To make these sorts of items, once you've made the
simple parts (axles, gears, springs, and the like), you don't need a toolkit to assemble the parts. Instead
use the parts themselves.
1-23-1
Fixed stablemasters so they they will return items they are given more promptly, and also handle
the claiming of packaged NPCs better.
Characters who are primarily mages (meaning that they have a secondary magery skill (invocation,
animallore, or necromancy) as a primary) now get a second chance with buffs. Basically, it rolls twice
and gives you the better of the two.
1-22-1
Adjusted the magic resist formula. Again. :)
Merchants will once again buy uncharged magic wands from you.
Fixed the renaming of items out of charges so that it'll work for .own'ed items too.
One handed weapons will do slightly more damage. Also fixed the maxHP of a few items that were off
Finally gave up patching the old spawner that respawned merchants and healers, and wrote a new one.
This probably means a lot of missing NPCs for a while while I adjust it so that it actually works. :P
Also, I have to replace all the healers in the world, so they'll probably wind up getting moved around.
Also, after this, they should tend to stay in one place a bit more, instead of wandering off to the other
side of the planet.
1-21-1
For weapons and armor that have spells (items of lightning or poison protection, for example) the
spell name will be removed when the item runs out of charges. This only works on items that spawn from
this point out, however. Items that have spawned before won't rename themselves.
Fixed the rotation of the so-called 'ugly table' (though I really don't see what's so bad about it...)
Anyway, it was turning into a counter when you rotated it.
1-20-1
Finally made the next release version of the POL scripts available. You'll find them over in the
files section. They're pretty much completely up-to-date, with the exception of some changes to magic
spells that I'm working on now.
House deeds will no longer show up on the merchant's sell window, since that was never the correct
price anyway (Can't handle amounts of gold greater than 60000.) You instead need to use "sell all" and
target the deed to sell a house deed.
When you sell a static house or a deed placed house, a 10% sellers fee will be deducted from the amount
of gold you recieve, up to a maximum fee of 10,000 gold.
Some further random tweaks to the damage spells.
Fixed some NPC AIs so they won't change opponent quite so much.
Fixed a major bug with boats that would cause them to stop responding. I uploaded a fixed multis.cfg
over in the files section to fix the problem, for those of you who use the WoD scripts.
Town guards are no longer the uber killing machines that they used to be. They're now more of a
'realistic' skill level, compared to the players.
Guards will now sometimes forgive past sins if you have a positive virtue title (but if they see you
while you're flagged as a criminal, its bashy-bashy time no matter what your virtue is.)
1-19-1
I'm kind of working on magic spells now - adjusting and tweaking some things. Don't panic - I'm not
really planning on any huge, major changes like I did with equipment or anything. Well, not too many, at
least. :P
I'm fiddling some with the way that magic resistance works. I'm going to make it more of a direct
comparison to the caster's Invocation skill that it was before. This'll kind of make both magic resistance
and invocation a more important skill, I think. Anyway, you'll probably want to be a bit careful for a
while, while I tweak and fiddle and such. For the time being, I only have the direct damage spells
finished.
If you try to cast a spell but then don't pick a valid target (No LOS, for example), you'll now
get 1/2 of the spell's casting cost back. The other half of the mana and the reagents used were
expended in the part of the spell you cast, or something. Again, this only applies to the damage spells
(lightning and flamestrike, for example.) I'm still working on rewriting the other spells.
1-17-1
I think that all the weapons and armor in the world have now been changed over to the new system, so
I guess its time to take out the repair on equip thing. If you find any leftover magic items that got
lost in a nook or cranny somewhere, please let me know. So, now we just have to see how the item repair thing
works out (See the description below in January 15th for a description of the item repair thing.) Oh, and
just as an interesting statistic, players own a total of about 35,000 weapons and pieces of armor. Sick, huh?
Eating food will temporarily increase your stamina regeneration rate. The higher the quality of the
food, the larger the effect will be.
Fixed yesterday's "statgain up to 30" thing so that it won't take you above your statcap, if
you've chosen a skillset that limits you to 30 or below in a stat.
Totem horses shouldn't poop anymore.
Updated the coming soon section (mostly just removed old stuff that I've done.)
1-16-1
Adjusted the weight of a bunch of different items.
NPC merchants will tend to run out of jobs after a while.
Stats under 30 will increase quickly, to help get new characters started. Stat gain over
30 remains the same.
Cloak of protection now lasts somewhat longer.
Fixed up totem horses so that they can become packhorses (llamas also work). You can make an totem
horse into a pack animal by using a bridle on it (Same as normal horses. Tailors can make bridles.)
If you release the totem pack animal, everything that it was carrying will be dumped on the ground.
The totem will have changed graphics to that of a pack animal, and when you turn it back into its
animal form, it will still be a pack animal. If the totem creature dies, it'll revert back to being a
normal totem (non-pack) horse.
1-15-1
Updated tailoring, carpentry, and tinkering with the same sort of changes that I made to
blacksmithy the other day. Let me know how it works out.
Even though its not really quite in yet, I have almost finished the scripting for the new way that
item repairs will work, so I may as well talk about them now. Guess I should start by defining a couple
of terms so you know what the heck I'm talking about. First off is item quality. Item quality helps to
determine how much damage an item does or how much protection it gives. Base item quality is 1.0, and at
that level a weapon will do 100% damage. A weapon with 0.8 quality does 80% damage, and an item with
1.2 quality does 120% damage. Normal weapons and armor now have a quality of 1.0, and magical and exceptional
items have a quality of 1.2. Another thing that weapons and armor have is Hit Points. Each item starts
out at its maximum HP, and each time the item gets hit (in the case of armor) or hits the opponent (in the
case of weapons), the item's HP decreases some. Items perform in proportion to their HP. An item at 80%
of its maximum HP will do 80% of its possible damage, or in the case of armor, give 80% of the protection
it could be giving. You can find out the general idea of how an item's HP are doing with Armslore (the
"in good condition" part.)
The new thing that I'm adding here is an item's long term health. Items start out brand new, and each time
you repair them, their long term heath decreases. Eventually an item's long term heath runs out and the item
will break. No matter what the item's long term health is, it will still give you the same performance.
It doesn't really matter as much anymore
when you repair an item. If the item is in good condition, it won't hurt the long-term health as much
as if you repair it when its badly damaged. There's really no exact number of times that you're limited
to repair an item. If you repair it often, it'll last a good number of repairs. If you don't repair it
very often, it won't last as many repairs. Either way, though, it'll last about the same amount of time.
Whether you succeed in repairing the item is a skill based check (meaning at 80 skill, you have an
80% chance of success.) Failing to repair the item does minor damage to it (but nothing real big, really.)
High skill in whatever skill you're using to repair the item will reduce somewhat the amount of damage
to the long term health of the item. Also, player made items will tend to last more repairs than other
items (After all, if you made it, you probably know how to repair it, whereas magic items are wierd and
mysterious.) Items with HP modifiers also tend to last longer (That's the "durable" kind of thing in
the weapon's description.)
Instead of saying what the item's quality is (The "It looks like an exceptional item" thing), Armslore
will now give you the general idea of how the item's longterm damage is going. It goes through "brand new",
"virtually new", "relatively new", "somewhat worn", "rather worn", and finally "rather badly worn". An item
in any condition will give the same performance. The only difference is in how many more repairs the item
is likely to survive.
1-14-1
The lastest version of POL allows me to adjust the stamina cost of running and walking, so...
That's what I'm doing. After the next restart, running while carrying a lot of stuff will drain your
stamina significantly. You can still walk with a billion tons of stuff pretty easily, though.
Meditation doesn't suck as much anymore at 80 skill (though rather obviously, its still a lot
better at 100 skill.)
For the other GMs out there, .create can now be used to create stacks of items greater than 20.
For non-stackable items, its still limited to making 20 at a time. The .createstack dot command
will still work because its used by HoD, and I don't want to break it. I just got sick of typing
those 5 extra letters all the time.
When you make blacksmithy items, you can now tell it how many items you want to make and whether
you want to autoupgrade them. Try it out and see if you find any major bugs or problems or whatever.
I'll be fixing tailoring and carpentry with similar autoloop things.
To tinker items out of clay, you must now be near an oven.
Fixed a bug with changing the graphic of housesigns that sometimes made the graphic appear facing
the wrong direction. If your housesign is like this, changing it again should fix it.
Fixed books so that you won't get multiple copies of the same book open at the same time.
1-12-1 to 1-13-1
Reformatted my harddrive and reinstalled Windows. Rather obviously, I didn't get a whole
lot else done.
The previously mentioned bankbox thing went in finally. If you try to put more than 500
items in your bankbox, it'll just pop right back out into your backpack. Also, all the
Christmas trees, Christmas tree deeds and such have now gone poof. Happy, um, January.
You can now use itemID on .owned items that have previously been identified. Basically,
you'll be able to check how many charges an item has without having to un-ID it.
".own bag" will prompt you to target a bag. Everything in the bag will be marked or
unmarked, if its an item that can be marked (not owned by someone else, not stackable, and
already identified.)
The stealing skill will now autostack gems with other gems in your inventory, if you
have autostack turn on. Otherwise, the items that you steal will go into your grab bag
(and if you don't have one, into your backpack.)
1-11-1
After the next restart, the 500 item limit on bankboxes will be enforced. If you try to
put more than 500 items in your bankbox, the item that you put in will pop back out into your
backpack.
I'm going to rename .inventory to .sort. Its nice and short and easy to type, kind of
describes what the function does a bit better, I think, and I can add a couple of options
that'll make more sense with .sort than with .inventory. .inventory will still work for a
bit, but it'll tell you to start using .sort.
Added ".sort regs" and ".sort gems". When you do either of these actions, you'll get a
targetting cursor that you can use to select a backpack, bag or whatever (must be in your
backpack.) Then it'll sort all of that type of item you have into that container. So
".sort regs" will search through all of your backpack, find any reagents you have, and stack
them in the container you selected. Some of you people REALLY need to do this. Plus, we also
have this little feature called "sell bag", and let me assure you that you don't need to keep
EVERY set of Praetorian armor you come across...
1-10-1
Random bugfixes and such. Nothing exciting.
1-9-1
Fixed a bug with the drinking script that, when you were drunk and fell off your horse,
sometimes caused black horse/obsidian steeds to turn into nightmares
Critical hits based on anatomy skill have now been implemented. The chances of scoring a
critical hit are equal to 1/10th your anatomy skill, so that will 60 skill, you will score a
critical hit 6% of the time, and with 100 skill, 10% of the time. Once you have scored a critcal
hit, the amount of bonus damage done is also dependant on your anatomy skill. With 60 skill,
critical hits will do 1.5 times as much damage. With 100 skill, critical hits will do double
damage.
Removed a lot of the useless spam from autoheal.
Added arrows, bolts, enchanted bones, and reaper and ent heartwoods to the list of
items autostacked by .grab.
Fixed the thing that was causing reapers and other immobile NPCs to walk around sometimes.
1-8-1
.grab now has an autostack feature. You can toggle it's enabled status with ".grab autostack".
When autostack is enabled, items that you grab, such as reagents, gems, potions, hides, and so on
will automatically stack with any others that you have in your backpack, no matter what
sub-container they are in. Other items will loot normally into your lootbag.
Bankboxes are now based on accounts instead of individual characters. Everyone now has one
bankbox that is shared among all characters. This bankbox is the one that is accessed no matter
which character you are logged in as. There will be a limit of 500 items on this bankbox, but its
not currently being enforced so that everyone has a chance to sort through their stuff and clean
it up some.
Its no longer possible to remove your mount while using .inventory.
Fixed (I think) a bug with the magic item spawner that was causing it to occasionally produce
items with skillbonuses but no HP modifiers (Meaning it had a skillbonus of 0.) If you have one of
these items, drop it in my in-game mailbox and I'll fix it for you.
If you use the detect hidden skill inside of your house or a house that you are friended to,
you'll automatically search the entire house for any hidden mobiles. Any hidden mobiles that are
in your house will be revealed, with the exception of warriors and humocules (since they probably
belong to another one of your characters anyway.)
You can no longer recall into or open a gate into a house that you do not own or are a
friend to.
If you log in while in a house that you do not own or are friended to, you'll be moved to
the location of the housesign (Since this is generally outside of the house. There's a few
static houses where the housesign is inside of the house. If you have one of these houses and
want this extra security, page a GM and we'll try to figure out a different place for your house
sign.) Also, this won't work if you have any items at the location of your housesign that block
walking (since otherwise, players might get stuck there.)
1-7-1
Upgraded the server to POL version 0.92
One of the features of this upgrade is that you can now how more than one custom
gump open at the same time. So you can keep your necro book open while the options
menu is open and still open up the skill window. Seems to get a bit slow if you have
more than 3 open at a time, though. Not my work - thank the POL people. :)
When you place a boat, the boat should appear facing the same direction as you.
If you have any problems placing a boat or house, let me know. The way they work
changed rather significantly in this new version of POL.
Fixed vampire spellcasters so they don't instantly kill you.
Fixed player merchants so that they can hear you again.
Flower seeds can now be planted in flower pots (Boy, is this dumb sounding or
what? :P)
1-6-1
Mostly worked on preparing some scripts so that we can upgrade the server to
the new version of POL.
The word "yield" in yesterday's updates is now spelled correctly.
1-5-1
Zombies will now yield fertile dirt when killed.
When you use a flowerseed (available from farmer NPCs), you now get a targetting
cursor. If you target yourself, you'll plant the flowers where you're standing. If
you target a pot or vase, you'll plant the flowers in that Sometimes looks pretty bad,
sometimes looks pretty good. You'll just have to experiment.) If you target anything
else, you'll cancel the planting.
Update:You now have to lock down the vase where you want it. When you
target the vase, the flowers will appear on top. If you target yourself, the flowers
will appear where you are standing.
If you say "status" to a banker, they will now tell you how much gold you have
in your bankbox.
You can now say "withdraw (amount)" to a banker, and they will try to transfer that
much gold from your bankbox to your backpack.
Fixed tamed AI so that is doesn't do bad things during server startup for packaged
NPCs.
1-4-1
I've discovered something ironic about trying to keep a recent changes page, which
is that the amount of work I've actually accomplished is inversely proportional to the
amount of work that it looks like I've accomplished. During my lazy days, I make 3 or 4
changes and post about them as nice, neat little bullet points here, and it looks like
I've done something. For the days that I really get some real work done on WoD, I make
500 minor changes in 118 different scripts, and it all blurs together and I wind up not
posting anything at all, or something really vague. Like this little bullet point here,
in which I'm claiming that I've accompished a lot in the past few days, but can't really
present any real evidence to prove that I haven't spent the last week drunk off my ass or
something. :P
Anyway, this is kind of a condensed version of some of the stuff I've been doing
over the past few days that I haven't gotten around to posting about.
When you kill a mounted doppelganger, the mount should correctly turn into another
doppelganger.
When you resurrect a henchperson, he or she should be the correct gender.
Equipping an item will change it over to the new system of weapon or armor that I
posted about the other day.
Found a bunch of old junk in some storage areas. Nuked a few thousand leftover items
from old NPCs. The size of the save of the storage areas went from 7.2M to 6.1M. Please
pretend you care. Thank you.
Adjusted some different AIs to be a bit more memory efficient.
Adjusted farm plants to be much more memory efficient.
Gave some of the AIs a few new tricks, and adjusted them to use some of their old
tricks a bit better.
When a hostile NPC loots your body, there's now a 25% chance for each item they loot that that
item will be destroyed. If the item looted was a container that has items inside of it, they
will then destroy 25% of the items in that container (and if one of those items is a container,
same thing again.) I know this will be kind of annoying, but it'll be good for the game's
economy in the long term.
The previous bullet point was a joke. I'm just kind of wondering how many people actually
read all this junk.
Fixed up the regionspawner some. Had a lot of old code sort of stuff that was kind of obsolete
because of new features in POL, so I fiddled around with the code a bit.
Fixed furniture dye tubs so that you don't need line of sight to the item that you're
dying, which makes them work a lot better.
Fixed a bug that was causing Praetorian mounts to sometimes not appear when their rider died.
Fixed a bug with the lockpicking script that wasn't causing problems for WoD, but
was causing a problem for new shards using our scripts.
Changed the name of carpentry to woodworking. It may take a restart before everything
switches over to the new name, and your skill title (for you carpenters out there) won't change
until you've been logged in for a while. If, after tomorrow or so and you've played for an hour+,
you see anything that's not right, let me know.
Carpenters can now make counters.
Fixed up some scripts that weren't compiling correctly.
First release of the WoD scripts for the new millenium. Not really a lot different from the
last release, but all the the scripts actually compile right now, which is generally the main factor
in deciding when to put out a new version. Still have a lot of unfinished stuff for the weapons and
armor changes, though, just so you know. I'll probably release another version when that's done
(assuming everything compiles, of course. :) )
1-1-1
Happy New Year! Kewl date, huh? Haven't updated here in a few days now, but I have been working
on stuff. Mostly just the boring, behind-the-sceens type of stuff. Got a lot of work
done on AI. AI is pretty cool once you figure it out, I do have to say. I used to hate
AI, but its pretty fun to play with now. Only took 6 months to figure out how it works,
too. :P
I'm afraid that the time has come for some nerfs... Actually, depending on how you
look at it, its really not all that much of a nerf. Well, OK, it is. Basically, I'm
finally getting around to changing around the attributes of weapons and armor. The big
change is that skill gain items will only give +2 skill per HP bonus level instead of the
current +5. That means that a fine item with a skill bonus will give +2 skill, and an
indestructable item will give +10 (and the others vary between them). I'm sorry, but
any skill bonus of more than +10 (especially in the non-combat skills) is just too
horribly unbalancing.
In regards to weapons and armor, the difference between player made items and
magical equipment will be getting smaller. Exceptional items will have a quality of
1.2, and the damage or armor modifier of magic items will be getting a bit smaller.
Weapons overall will get a little bit more powerful, but armor should stay about the
same (because I'm going to decrease the AR given by non-magical or exceptional armor
so that exceptional gives the same AR as quality does now. If that makes any sense.)
Back to Recent Changes |