City-elves and stuff.

[Saellyn]

I'm just saying there's plenty of creatures that will take off running at the first sign of them starting to die during a fight.

[Eyeball]

I'm just saying there's plenty of creatures that will take off running at the first sign of them starting to die during a fight.

Ok, let's list them for the southlands.

1. Jozhals.

Um... uh... that seems to be it.

Suicidal beasts:

1. Mekillots.
2. Salt worms.
3. Silt flyers.
4. Silt horrors.
5. Scrab.
6. Drov beetles.
7. Tarantula.
8. Jakhals.
9. Snakes.
10. Raptors.
11. Dujats.
12. Hawks.

And a couple of things that will not attack but will fight to the death when provoked (rats and buzzards).

Does my point seem a little clearer now?

To me, the best creature of them all is the gurth. Kudos to whoever implemented that one, it actually has some character.

[Saellyn]

I'm just saying there's plenty of creatures that will take off running at the first sign of them starting to die during a fight.

Ok, let's list them for the southlands.

1. Jozhals.

Um... uh... that seems to be it.

Suicidal beasts:

1. Mekillots.
2. Salt worms.
3. Silt flyers.
4. Silt horrors.
5. Scrab.
6. Drov beetles.
7. Tarantula.
8. Jakhals.
9. Snakes.
10. Raptors.
11. Dujats.
12. Hawks.

And a couple of things that will not attack but will fight to the death when provoked (rats and buzzards).

Does my point seem a little clearer now?

To me, the best creature of them all is the gurth. Kudos to whoever implemented that one, it actually has some character.

I'll just say you're wrong.

[RogueGunslinger]

And as interesting as I think it would be to have those creatures run off after taking a reeling hit, or a bunch of damage, I don't really feel like that's adding much to the game other than some mild annoyance. Technically ALL creatures should "nope" out of a bad situation after taking too much damage. This is how it works in nature(although many fight far too long and take a crippling injury that usually kills them later). But is that really how it should work in-game?

I'd be pretty annoyed if every time I went to hunt scrabs I had to chase them around the known to secure the kill.

I'll just say you're wrong.

Huh?

[Saellyn]

Just what I said. That list is wrong. At least one of the animals in that list will flee if they take too much damage.

[HavokBlue]

the ratio of suicidal to non suicidal animals is still significantly skewed.

[RogueGunslinger]

Is it snakes? I think you have to have the damage of a Poor Strength elf to figure that out.


I think I saw a spider flee once, but I figured that was an animation because it was so rare.

[HavokBlue]

I think snakes arbitrarily go to sleep in the middle of a fight if they fall below a certain threshold

[RogueGunslinger]

Your blow bounces off its tough skin.
A sandy snake reels from the blow!

[Rahnevyn]

Technically ALL creatures should "nope" out of a bad situation after taking too much damage. This is how it works in nature(although many fight far too long and take a crippling injury that usually kills them later). But is that really how it should work in-game?

I'd be pretty annoyed if every time I went to hunt scrabs I had to chase them around the known to secure the kill.

I wish it did work this way honestly. Generally hunting something involves sneaking up on it, outsmarting it, and surprising it with a deadly attack before it can escape.

On the other hand, due mainly to limitations in our codebase, "hunting" in Armageddon just involves charging straight at aggressive vicious animals and dueling them with melee weapons while they fight on without any sort of self-preservation instinct until they die. The game could be a bit more realistic in that regard, alas.

[Saellyn]

Your blow bounces off its tough skin.
A sandy snake reels from the blow!

A sandy snake attempts to flee from a city-elf!

[Delirium]

Technically ALL creatures should "nope" out of a bad situation after taking too much damage. This is how it works in nature(although many fight far too long and take a crippling injury that usually kills them later). But is that really how it should work in-game?

I'd be pretty annoyed if every time I went to hunt scrabs I had to chase them around the known to secure the kill.

I wish it did work this way honestly. Generally hunting something involves sneaking up on it, outsmarting it, and surprising it with a deadly attack before it can escape.

On the other hand, due mainly to limitations in our codebase, "hunting" in Armageddon just involves charging straight at aggressive vicious animals and dueling them with melee weapons while they fight on without any sort of self-preservation instinct until they die. The game could be a bit more realistic in that regard, alas.

Yeah, I don't see the problem in having to actually utilize the ranger skillset to take down beasties in the wilds.

[RogueGunslinger]

The only problem I have with that is the completely unrealistic nature of wounds in armageddon. If you could reliably determine that chopping a few legs off a scrab would make it only flee for 10 rooms before falling dead, that'd be pretty sweet.

I don't like how you can almost kill someone (as in, roleplay-wise they should be bleeding badly or have severely broken bones) and then suddenly they can run away like they were perfectly healthy.

[Delirium]

I imagine any scripting could take into account the health level of the NPC. If not, then yeah, that'd be an issue.

[Armaddict]

Technically ALL creatures should "nope" out of a bad situation after taking too much damage. This is how it works in nature(although many fight far too long and take a crippling injury that usually kills them later). But is that really how it should work in-game?

I'd be pretty annoyed if every time I went to hunt scrabs I had to chase them around the known to secure the kill.

I wish it did work this way honestly. Generally hunting something involves sneaking up on it, outsmarting it, and surprising it with a deadly attack before it can escape.

On the other hand, due mainly to limitations in our codebase, "hunting" in Armageddon just involves charging straight at aggressive vicious animals and dueling them with melee weapons while they fight on without any sort of self-preservation instinct until they die. The game could be a bit more realistic in that regard, alas.

Yeah, I don't see the problem in having to actually utilize the ranger skillset to take down beasties in the wilds.

They'd have to fix projectile economy or re-implement traps in such a way that they were actual hunting tools instead of PvP surprise buttsecks.

[Eyeball]

Hrm, snakes may or may not flee. Well, that just must mean there's no room or use for improving Arm's fauna then. Glad we got that straight.

C'mon.

[RogueGunslinger]

Did you not read all the ideas that were just suggested? We're wildly off topic anyways.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I wish it did work this way honestly. Generally hunting something involves sneaking up on it, outsmarting it, and surprising it with a deadly attack before it can escape.

On the other hand, due mainly to limitations in our codebase, "hunting" in Armageddon just involves charging straight at aggressive vicious animals and dueling them with melee weapons while they fight on without any sort of self-preservation instinct until they die. The game could be a bit more realistic in that regard, alas.

Is that something that can't be handled by clever scripting, though? I don't know if we have mprogs, like ROM does, or Circle, or the like, but mprogs in both those code bases enable a very wide array of responses, if you are clever in writing it. I built a Circle once, and in it, my gate guards didn't check your clan, they checked your insignia, and if they saw what they needed to see, they let you in.

I built a script for a wolf that had the wolf flee, run away three rooms in a random pattern, emote howling, and come back to the spot he fled from with D-something other wolves with him. If there was no PC to attack, he dismissed the extra wolves and went back to prowling. If the code had had hunting, he would have hunted with that pack for a few rooms.

Both of those bases also had wimpy settings for NPCs, which was a percentage of health they would try to flee at. By creating tokens for various scenarios, I was able to make them do a lot of cool stuff. I think it was Oasis OLC in ... one of them, and another sort of OLC in the other.

Somebody who liked scripting could really do a ton of stuff with NPCs, from daily living to surviving. There's some versions of OLC that extend to Objects and Rooms too, which could add a ton to the network of scripts which comprise an ecosystem or cultural environment. I think there are some OLC systems on the MUD repository sight that you can download and write into your existing code, though they are probably made for Circle or Rom or Envy ... being that those were written in C, though, I'm not sure how hard it would be to adapt them to Armageddon's code.

Besides, we had DSPL (Dan's Shitty Programming Language) for scripting back in the day, and I know we've done some java integration into the code, iirc, so if our scripting capabilities are lacking, I think that's a serious place to consider allotting some coder time to, to enable the builders to add real life to all of their creations.

[Eyeball]

Did you not read all the ideas that were just suggested? We're wildly off topic anyways.

I did, and I gave 7DV a thumbs up for them.

So much cool stuff could be done. Like imagine a raptor spotting a grebber. Ok, too similar to the above. Imagine drove beetles which only emerge at night. Come dawn, they burrow back underground.

And so on. So much potential.

[Reiloth]

I dunno what y'all are talking about. The desert seems more deadly than ever, recently.

[Eyeball]

Not looking for added deadliness so much as to add give each sort of creature its own semi-intelligent behavior and to add to the sort of wilderness knowledge that can be accumulated.

[Reiloth]

If a tree falls in the woods...

I just don't know if scripting for stuff beyond the current SimDesert or whatever is worth the time. I'd rather coders code things that affect PC's, after all.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

How in the world would scripting not affect PCs? You could play a real mugger if Merchant Shopkeepers sometimes wandered through a dark part of town on the way home. You could run into a real ambush that wasn't gank gank gank if gith were scripted with semi-ai. You could really experience hunting if you had to track a whole pack of carru in order to kill the lone straggler at the back end, and then figure out how to get time to skin it since a Tembo has been stalking you for the last ten rooms. You could run into real trouble if you smacked the jozhal and two more showed up, their yips heard from a couple of rooms away. You could bribe NPCs to do stuff if the scripting was intelligent enough, without staff assistance. THe silt horror could subdue and shake you to death if you couldn't flee, instead of just whipping you down. The Drov Beetle could hiss at you as it struck, towering over you [if_race dwarf] as it lashed out with it's mandibles. You could hire that elven whore for five IC minutes to follow you and take commands, or hire that Mercenary NP from the gates of the Byn to escort you out to salt at 5 am server time, when there are only three people online.

Yes, man ... it would certainly affect your PC.

[Reiloth]

I dunno.

I'd rather like, play with PCs.

[racurtne]

PCs could also experience these NPC scripts together, making the world feel more alive.