Crossfire Mailing List Archive
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

on-line docs (was Re: CF: proposed docs (longish))



On Fri, 28 Jun 1996, Klaus Elsbernd <elsbernd@dfki.uni-kl.de> wrote:
> Ken Woodruff <kpwoodruff@msn.com> wrote:
> >I also favor more "self-documentation", in which the game itself contains
> >descriptive information.  For example, why not let the user discover
> >for themselves that there are two kinds of magic?  We could create 
> >a variety of beginner's maps which impart this kind of information.
> I would support that kind of information within crossfire.  [...]
> For example there should be a librian, which one coud ask a question
> by saying hello to him, paying something and getting the information
> (possible in a book).  Like
> "glowing crystal
> results in a book, where such dokumentation is been written in.
> I think the altar Mechanism could be used for that.

Hmmm...  It would probably be easier to have a library defined as a
shop, with lots of unpaid books that have a more or less obvious title.
That way, the player could enter the library, have a look at the titles
of the books, and see if there is anything interesting for him.  Of
course, he would have to pay the book in order to be allowed to read it,
but at least it would be possible for the player to see if a book is
potentially interesting before buying it.  As in real life, you can
enter a library and have a quick look at the books before deciding if
you buy one or not.

A librarian such as the one that you describe would have to handle
many different requests and provide reasonable default replies if the
item is unknown to him (the current NPC interaction mechanism would
allow that, but it's not very pretty).  Also, it would be frustrating
for the player to have to pay in order to be allowed to talk to him,
and then get no interesting information.

The library as I describe it could be one of the buildings in the
default map (so that new players find it easily) and it would contain
the same kind of books as in the shops, except that the topic of these
books would be clearly identified, i.e. "Book of Glowing Crystal" or
"Introduction to spells and prayers".  Also, contrary to the random
books that you find in the shops, these ones would always be
available.  If there are enough books in this library, it could be
interesting to name different alleys in the library, such as
"Introduction" for basic CrossFire skills, "Spells and prayers",
"Artifacts" with books describing briefly some artifacts (before the
player gets them, so he would start looking for them), and so on.

By the way, I don't like the current system with the books that you
find in the shops: a player (especially a beginner) has no idea of
what is in the book before he buys it.  The random author names and
the various "supports" (book/letter/script/encyclopedia/...) add to
the confusion.  IMHO, the fact that you don't know what you are going
to buy adds to the frustration rather than to the excitement.  When
you get a spellbook (or a tome/treatise/...), you know at least what
you can expect to learn from it.  I think that the principle of
finding the documentation about the game in books and letters is a
very good idea, but I don't like the way it is implemented for the
moment.

It would be much better if you could tell (in an obvious way, so that
beginners are not confused) if the book that you are going to buy
contains:
- a description of the properties of some creatures (bestiary)
- some informations about a God and its powers or ennemies
- the starting point for a quest ("In the mountains up North, I found...")
- a list of spells or prayers that belong to a Path
- a description of an artifact
- ...

It should be possible to know what kind of information you will get by
looking at the title of the book.  For example, an encyclopedia could
always be a bestiary and a letter or a script could always contain
some hints about a quest.  And the author names should not be random,
so that you do not buy the same book twice if you have already read it
(that happened to me several times and it is rather annoying - this
doesn't happen with the spell books).

Or maybe the support (book or letter or ...) could be more or less
random, such as for the spellbooks, but the author name would tell
what is in the book.  In this latter solution, the names have to be
very obvious, such as "An encyclopedia of Gurk the zoologist" or "A
letter of Gnarg the priest".  That would not prevent duplicates, but
it would at least be better than the current system.

Last comment: the current text window limits the usefullness of long
text descriptions.  The "true" client/server system should hopefully
make this easier to customize, and I hope that the current
pseudo-client system will be definitely discarded in one of the future
distributions.

Did anybody read this far?  Wow!

-Raphael