Okay, so picture you're out in the woods on a hike because you're tired of Arm and need to stretch your legs.
So you go take a walk in the woods, get about half way to where you want to go, and look down to make sure of your footholds. On the ground are some deer tracks you casually notice while still walking onward.
Okay, so taking that in an Arm perspective...you enter a room, and casually notice the tracks on the ground without having to look for them directly.
I'm just gonna shoot this idea out: How about randomly echoing the hunt command apon room entry if you have the skill (meaning you know what the tracks look like for certain animals)
And also I wanted to say that we should have a few more echos for signs of life in the wilderness...Animals take a crap occationally that you'll discover on the trail (please don't turn this into a: Animals and PCs don't need to crap and the like) as well as small traces of broken limbs on trees and scrap marks etc.
When you use the hunt skill, you can emote looking at chewed branches or holes in the ground or dung or scrap marks or anything else such as that, as long as it's within reason.
Coding something like this, to me, looks like it will take significant work to get enough non-crappy echoes for the kinds of tracks all sorts of animals could leave on different sorts of terrain, and after a year be mostly ignored and just regarded as generic footprints.
EDIT: About auto-hunt, by the way, I'd be more inclined to allow unskilled people to try and hunt in order to get a generic message such as "You see large-sized tracks going east-west", with possibly penalties for smaller tracks.
If something as large as a bahamet or a mekillot recently passed through, any idiot should be able to tell.
I think what you described is a perfect emote around the use of the hunt command. Just because it requires a command was entered doesn't mean you can't play it off as a passive effect of your hunter's knowledge of the wilds or having good eyes.
I'm not a fan of the idea because 75% of the fun of the hunt command is when you happen to use it at the right time and place and find interesting tracks. With blood in them.
I think it would be a appropriate for characters with very high levels of hunt to maybe just see a 'you notice some tracks here' appended to room descriptions when tracks are present. You would still have to take a closer look to see what's up.
I'm against this because it sounds like you're trying to make hunt or track a "passive" skill, or at least a partially "passive" skill. "Passive" meaning that you get benefits from it even if you don't have to enter a command to use it. It's not a horrible idea, but it would be strange having hunt or track be the only passive skill in the game.
You could argue along similiar lines that scan, listen, analyze, or even certain types of foraging should be "passive" skills... and suddenly all these skills are a lot stronger than they once were.
I'm not a fan of this unless it's implimented in a way similar to jstorrie's suggestion. It would make hunt extremely powerful otherwise.
As things are now, just try to escape an experienced and intelligent ranger in the wastes.
Now imagine if the ranger didn't even have to pause in each room to check the trail, how insanely impossible would it be to escape them?
Well, again, the size of the tracks could be possibly made a factor here.
If I was walking around in the desert and some T-Rex or a full-sized argosy complete with a whole team of gigantic lizards was stomping around there, I'd probably be able to tell even if I didn't have a single bit of tracking knowledge.
There are or were some critters that when they passed, they left something in the room to show they'd been there.
No idea if they still do that.
Proxie
Quote from: "proxie"There are or were some critters that when they passed, they left something in the room to show they'd been there.
No idea if they still do that.
Proxie
Ya, bahamets and silt horrors still do that. Just follow the trail of dead bodies.
Quote from: "Larrath"If I was walking around in the desert and some T-Rex or a full-sized argosy complete with a whole team of gigantic lizards was stomping around there, I'd probably be able to tell even if I didn't have a single bit of tracking knowledge.
Considering the size of rooms and the landscape (rolling dunes and the like) I wouldn't consider it a given.
And then it may just add a lot of lag, if 30 people up and decided to go hunting. Just a thought.
Quote from: "Rhyden"Ya, bahamets and silt horrors still do that. Just follow the trail of dead bodies.
Heh heh heh.
"Sarge, do you think maybe we shouldn't be following this trail of dead bodies?"
"Nonsense! I don't see any tracks! What could go wrong!"
Hilarity ensues.