Crafting & knowing what you can make

[Reiloth]

I think the annoying thing now is...

You have a buckle.

Craft buckle and nondescript length of linen

You can't make anything out of that.

Hmm..How about a buckle and some buttons?

Nope.

How about a buckle and some sand cloth?

Nope.

What would be nice is:

Analyze Buckle

You can make some pants with that buckle, but you need this specific type of cloth.

or

You could make pants with the buckle, but you are missing material:
list of material you can use with the buckle

I think if you are of a certain skill -- It's an apprentice recipe, and you are a journeyman for instance, you can figure out how to make it.

[Barsook]

I dig that ^^^.

[perfecto]

Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but its' been eating at me.

"Crafting, and having to get it resized to fit me."

Why on Tek's red earth would any crafter, of any kind, of any race, make something that doesn't fit them?

Doesn't that strike you as the basic guideline for what you're about to make? 

I find this especially annoying for any indies trying to live off the land. 

It's none too helpful having to run into town to get the new stuff you've just made from scratch re-fitted so that you can wear it.

[Reiloth]

diku code, not by design.

[Saellyn]

It's just difficult to change because of intrinsic code that prevents it. It would require an admin to find every craft recipe in the game, every craftable, then custom code each object that can craft things to show you a message. That would take fucking FOREVER.

[CodeMaster]

It's just difficult to change because of intrinsic code that prevents it. It would require an admin to find every craft recipe in the game, every craftable, then custom code each object that can craft things to show you a message. That would take fucking FOREVER.

what's this a response to?

[Saellyn]

Perfecto.

[CodeMaster]

I see!  Ok, off the cuff - stock Diku doesn't have item sizes as far as I'm aware.

I can't speak on it because I don't have the context, but I imagine Perfecto's idea could be accomplished by checking whether the item you're crafting has a size attribute, and then setting that attribute to the crafter's size if s/he succeeds in crafting it -- i.e. without going through every object in the game.

OTOH, you raise a good point in general, that some seemingly trivial changes can require new data structures and/or extensive case-by-case attention, which is often too much to justify them.

[Saellyn]

I see!  Ok, off the cuff - stock Diku doesn't have item sizes as far as I'm aware.

I can't speak on it because I don't have the context, but I imagine Perfecto's idea could be accomplished by checking whether the item you're crafting has a size attribute, and then setting that attribute to the crafter's size if s/he succeeds in crafting it -- i.e. without going through every object in the game.

OTOH, you raise a good point in general, that some seemingly trivial changes can require new data structures and/or extensive case-by-case attention, which is often too much to justify them.

Yeah, but these are all manual things you would have to add into the game code, and it's really hard to do that stuff with only a couple coders, as good as they may be.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

It's just difficult to change because of intrinsic code that prevents it. It would require an admin to find every craft recipe in the game, every craftable, then custom code each object that can craft things to show you a message. That would take fucking FOREVER.

I'm not discounting that theory, but how could such a change require more than a few lines in the crafting command itself that says , resize item - get character's size?

[Riev]

I mean, its really just setting the size attribute on the item to be the crafters size attribute, but it might require a new method to GET the players size, and then change how crafting works...

I don't know DIKU at all, but I get the feeling it is NOT like a real coding language, and doesn't just have easy functions and methods to do everything we want it to.

[lostinspace]

Last I worked in diku a character was just a struct. If the crafting skill is grabbing a stat from the character to get the chance of success, it can grab the size category as well. I think that if you can make something, you should just be able to resize it.

[Ouroboros]

I think this is something many have wished for over the years. At the same time I'm on the fence on it, as I've come to find the mystery of "unlocking" recipes to be a satisfying endeavor. In a clan for example, it provides a good opportunity for senior crafters of the clan to train newer members. And perhaps release recipes to them as trust in the crafter builds. For the indie, it can provide a nice "treasure hunt" plot to track down a sample of a given item they might have seen or heard about in order to dissect it for study. But I understand I might be the minority in this.

In any case, if this was to be implemented as proposed, a solution to the spam would be simple: analyze -v <object>

Normal use of the analyze command would spit back the current message that states what the object was made from (if craftable), and adding the verbose flag would also spit back crafting recipes it's partially included in. Personally if this was added I'd also like to see the analyze skill finally be used as more than a binary state, where what recipes you can see in verbose mode would be dependent on your skill level (and not just your crafting skill level and/or clan flags).

As far as the sizing woes, which might or might not belong in this thread, the crafting code shouldn't be hard to mash up with the tailor NPC code even if it isn't that way out the box. A simple hook at the end of a successful craft that inserts the sizing code from submitting a ticket to a tailor would do the trick and get that object sized for the crafter.

However I think if effort was going to be made into adding this, it should really be added as a modification of the repair command and skill (much like armor repair NPCs function already). That way with a third input variable to the command one could repair <object> <material> to repair and/or tailor it to themselves or repair <object> <material> <target> to do so for someone else. Given the repair command uses up materials, that would effectively offset the cost of not going to an NPC. This has been a requested feature for as long as I can remember.