Re: Skills in CF

[Nick Williams <njw@sarc.city.ac.uk>]

Excerpts from games.Crossfire: 5-Mar-95 Re: Skills in CF Brian
Thomas@chaupher.gs (1182)

> 	I did look at the code. All that is needed to use the stealing
> 	skill is the player gaining the skill_stealing arch in their 	
> 	inventory. It would appear that the basis for creating a full
> 	fledged skill code already exists in CF (indeed, some of the skills
> 	I suggested are suggested in comments in the skills.h file!)

Indeed, although you managed to think up more skills than I in your
posting.  Unfortunately, some of the skills are a bit of a pain to
implement (and hence why only the thievery code was fleshed out),
typically the "more interesting" ones (to me) such as auto-identifying
(e.g. librarian skills, allowing identification of all books and
scrolls), which involve some radical rethinking of the manner in which
objects get identified, from what I vaguely remember.

> 	If having skills in CF is so contentous, why is the code there??

HoHum.  I put the code there in one of my inspired "I want skills!"
times.  The code which got left in was fairly primitive and I fleshed
out a much better&generic system after having a small echat with Mark
Wedel, however that code got nuked during a diskcrash (sounds like a
fisherman's tale, doesn't it... :) and I got very discouraged about
working on it further after that.

My idea was that any player/class could be trained in a particular skill
(e.g. by paying loads of money to a thieves guild to get 'stealing'),
but that particular classes might have innate skills, maybe only
apparent at higher levels (c.f. nethack).  In this manner, even
magickery could be a skill which most people would have to start with. 
The advantage of having it as a skill was that the skill would erode
over time if you didn't use it.  You could even go to a guildhall and
pay for extra training lessons and boost your skill rating...  That was
the idea, anyhow.








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