Bows and wear location

[Cerelum]

Been a long time since I've messed with bows.

I could have sworn back in the day I would wear bows on my shoulder, but now they all go across your back, is that why nobody is wearing regular large backpacks and rocking satchels now?

Because bows can't be shoulder slung?

[Cabooze]

Bows can be:
Sheathed on a belt
Sheathed on your back
Worn on your back
Put into a quiver


Why their only proper wear location is relegated to the back and strictly the back, I will never know. Might be a good idea to suggest in the QoL thread, for bows to be able to be shoulder-slung.

[Cerelum]

Bows can be:
Sheathed on a belt
Sheathed on your back
Worn on your back
Put into a quiver


Why their only proper wear location is relegated to the back and strictly the back, I will never know. Might be a good idea to suggest in the QoL thread, for bows to be able to be shoulder-slung.

Thank you for that.

I forgot sheath bow back was a thing.

[Brokkr]

Bows don't conflict with backpacks.

<slung across back>      an ebon wood, recurve longbow
<across back>            a large, carru-leather backpack

They conflict with sheathing a weapon on your back.

[Cerelum]

Bows don't conflict with backpacks.

<slung across back>      an ebon wood, recurve longbow
<across back>            a large, carru-leather backpack

They conflict with sheathing a weapon on your back.

Yup, I figured that out, I just forgot sheath bow back was a thing.

[Alesan]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

[Delirium]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

[th3kaiser]

A number of bows are actually able to be slung over the shoulder already. They tend to be newer items, which isn't really a surprise. Typo the ones that aren't, maybe someone goes through and adjusts them.

[mansa]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

<worn on left shoulder>     its a bow yo
<worn on right shoulder>    It's another bow, yo
<slung across back>         guess what, it's another bow.  yo.

[Delirium]

No worse than 3 packs, i.e. one in both shoulder locations and one across the back.

also somewhat less silly.

[Alesan]

Why would you need more than one bow? At most, I guess, a bow and a crossbow. I would probably be OOCly side-eyeing anyone wearing three bows.

If you wanna carry three packs, that's your business. Maybe you just need room to carry all those bows you can't wear at once.

[Riev]

Why would you need more than one bow? At most, I guess, a bow and a crossbow. I would probably be OOCly side-eyeing anyone wearing three bows.

If you wanna carry three packs, that's your business. Maybe you just need room to carry all those bows you can't wear at once.

I could allow, in my mind, the following:

Longbow: for hunting
Shortbow: for when the animal comes closer
Crossbow: close-range defense

But like... really you just need a longbow and two scimitars, Drizzy.

[nessalin]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

"just" is a four letter word when volunteering other people's time.

[Delirium]

I didn't mean it like that, but I'm sorry it came across that way.

It was my understanding that scripts have been used in the past to wholesale change specific types of objects with relative success.

I have no idea how involved that is, so yeah, I probably shouldn't have used the word 'just'.

I still think the idea makes sense from a QoL standpoint. If you're an outdoorsy combat character, all those EQ slots can get used up quick.

[Brytta Léofa]

"just" is a four letter word when volunteering other people's time.

but perl

_{(I know, everything's hard.)}

[Alesan]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

"just" is a four letter word when volunteering other people's time.

To be honest, any of the suggestions in this forum comes close to "volunteering other people's time". Why not just say running a script is easier said than done, if that's what you mean?

[Namino]

I've never worked in DIKU but going by what I've heard, this isn't the sort of engine where it's easy to run batch commands. The fact that a major undertaking is updating the databse makes me fairly certain that 30 years ago, the database structure wasn't set up with the foresight to consider the possibility of needing to add a tag to all bows.

I doubt this is as simple as:

Code Select Expand

import os
def bow():
     with open('AllTheBows', 'r') as bows:
           for x in bows:
                bow = x.rsplit()
                os.system("add " + bow + " wearloc shoulder")
bow()

But if it is, make sure to cite me in the credits thx ness.

[Cabooze]

I've never worked in DIKU but going by what I've heard, this isn't the sort of engine where it's easy to run batch commands. The fact that a major undertaking is updating the databse makes me fairly certain that 30 years ago, the database structure wasn't set up with the foresight to consider the possibility of needing to add a tag to all bows.

I doubt this is as simple as:

Code Select Expand

import os
def bow():
     with open('AllTheBows', 'r') as bows:
           for x in bows:
                bow = x.rsplit()
                os.system("add " + bow + " wearloc shoulder")
bow()

But if it is, make sure to cite me in the credits thx ness.

This is why Staff is going through the arduous task of converting all flat files into mariaDB/MySQL

[Riev]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

"just" is a four letter word when volunteering other people's time.

To be honest, any of the suggestions in this forum comes close to "volunteering other people's time". Why not just say running a script is easier said than done, if that's what you mean?

Code discussion forum. Someone suggests the ability to maybe 'just' run a script, implying that 'all bow objects should have this without discretion'. Staff provide terse response.

Neat.

[Namino]

Two days ago I was trying to process a list of records iteratively using a program to pull trinucleotide motifs from a reference using a list of positions. I was trying to store the results in a new text file, which I intended to use downstream.

Rather than "command " + record + " >> DownstreamFile" writing to the file for my 14,580 records, my stdout was being scrolled by 14,580 motifs and the file was empty. It took me several hours of hateful irritation before I realised I was r.splitting the records instead of r.stripping them so I was keeping newline characters that were breaking the command into two commands after the record variable.

Several hours. I'm not a coder by trade so Ness is probably better than me, but I also wasn't working on legacy code where 50 systems are sharing the same variables.

My point being is that sometimes jobs seem very easy until you try to do them in practice. Adding wearlocs to all bows sounds easy until you consider there might not be a data table containing all the bows to awk out their unique ids to iterate a script over, or any thousand of other complications.

There's nothing more irritating than someone telling you a task is easy when your insight into the process informs you it will actually be hard.

Yes the response was terse. It's not how I would have responded but I do sympathize as I have had the experience.

[Delirium]

I phrased things poorly and I understand the response I got. Let's not turn this into a Thing ok?

[Namino]

I phrased things poorly and I understand the response I got. Let's not turn this into a Thing ok?

Of course. These are not pitchfork wielding statements from me and I apologize if that's not clear in the way I'm presenting them. And this is by no means directed solely at you, Delirium, or even primarily at you. It's more of a... meta comment over the Code Discussion board overall.

So often suggestions are made and consequently dismissed by staff in a way that appears offhanded. An example from a different thread would be when someone suggested making a post-death state would be easy because you simply have to make the person go ethereal for a bit before they truly die.

On the surface it looks like an easy change, but in reality this code is old and after decades of use they're likely inextricably entangled. An entity dying probably has ties into spawning its corpse. Maybe the dump to menu is mandatory in order to spawn a corpse at all. And maybe the corpse spawning mechanism for players and NPCs are the same, so now NPC corpses won't spawn because the NPCs are going ethereal instead of going through the splash dump protocol, so we have to change how corpses spawn. And now corpses are changed we have to change the elements that skinning scripts are pointing to. Five minutes later and we're rewriting the entire game. This is a hypothetical -- I don't know if this is how it would actually work. But it does explain why certain suggestions seem easy and then the suggesters are left frustrated when they're met with pushback from the staff.

So I think a lot of this derives from the fact the playerbase isn't cognizant of how rough some suggested changes really would be to implement. I think the other half of the coin is that staff are loathe to give the real reason for a lot of their pushback which makes the arguments actually presented sound contrived. If adding mercy to bow-shots on unconscious targets breaks the combat system due to the combat code being a bunch of recursively calling spaghetti, then just say that. No one is going to fault you for inheriting decades old spaghetti code. Maybe being told, "it's too tangled to fix without enormous effort" is unsatisfying but I'd prefer that to half-baked reasons under the guise of balance that don't hold up to scrutiny.

Anyway, this is a massive derail and I apologize for that. To tie it back to bows: yes, wearing all bows on shoulders would be nice. But to make that work may require vastly more man-hours than it might appear, and those hours might be better spent elsewhere.

[Delirium]

I knew I should have used the quote button... I was responding to Riev 

Good post though!

[John]

Bows wearable over a shoulder would be nice though.

I've suggested this before, it feels like it would make a lot of sense.

I'm thinking just run a script to find all bow objects and add the shoulder_wear location.

"just" is a four letter word when volunteering other people's time.

To be honest, any of the suggestions in this forum comes close to "volunteering other people's time". Why not just say running a script is easier said than done, if that's what you mean?

Code discussion forum. Someone suggests the ability to maybe 'just' run a script, implying that 'all bow objects should have this without discretion'. Staff provide terse response.

Neat.

Snarky response from Riev. Follow up snark from John.

The circle of life is complete.

Seriously, there are only two certainties on the GDB forum these days. Most responses from Nessalin and Riev will be cranky and snarky. Almost makes you wonder if they're secretly the same person.

[EDIT]: Actually that's not fair. Nessalin has cut way back on the snark. Like, by a whole heap.