Bay 12 Games Forum

Name: Sponge Bop Bonk

Race: Sponge

Skills: Talented Striker (105)

Background:
From parts unknown.

Edit: Can this be considered an addendum of my first application, which was declined?

Edit Edit: If I'm too late, thats fine.

Edit Edit Edit: "Yeah, well, I'm gonna go start my own tournament! With blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the tournament! ... Ah screw the whole thing."

Quote from: dikbutdagrate on June 28, 2023, 12:14:53 am

Name: "Boogie Wonderland"

Race: Bogeyman (Size 50; points 220+?)

While bogeyman are not explicitly banned, their combination of transforming powers, no stun, no pain, and no exertion makes them an unfair competitor in the arena. In this case, we are going to exercise our right to decline races as we see fit, so your gladiator is not able to be approved.

Their body transformation removes no stun, no pain, and no exertion, by virtue of being a body transformation.

In spirit of good fun, I'm going to have to attempt to appeal this 'being inclined toward disallowing a creature.'

Bogeymen are eligible to transform into most of the non-vermin, and non-under_swim creatures, and as such, the RNG is weighted far more toward sticking me with something awful or underwhelming, like a rhesus masque or a penguin, then it is toward landing me with a giant elephant during a round.

To top things off, I have zero equipment! Canxio's character, posted above this post, is using a steel battle axe. What is a penguin going to do against THAT?!

The reality is, I will most likely lose in round 1. I might not, but would I really be so lucky as to make it to round 2 or even 3? And if this doesn't meet the requirements for embracing the spirit of the tournament, then I got nothin'.

Plump helmet men are [arena_restricted] in base vanilla, yeah?
So I'm unable to elect one as my champion, correct?

Also that bit about silver is a bit of a misnomer. The differences are negligible. And actually, in most circumstances, which pertain to the mass and skill of the creature swinging the object, you're ever so slightly better off using copper for blunt weapons.

Questions:
- Are the listed animal people the only animal people that we can choose from?
- Why does silver have a x3 material cost, which is greater than iron?
- Is divine metal not allowed?
- Are bone and shell not allowed? This seems very odd.

Balance concern:
- Dwarves are size 60 and have access to 220 points.
Whereas Gorlaks are size 50 and have access to only 215 points, with the added disadvantage of being unable to equip chest armor.
Whats up with that?

1. As I recall from the myth demos, deities and primordial forces are given spheres by looking at what objects with obvious spheres (like the sky, elemental planes, certain creatures, divine law, etc.) they created during mythgen. So if a deity created the ocean, they might become associated with OCEAN or maybe WATER. However, some spheres would seem required for a more cohesive myth narrative. Like the TRICKERY of a trickster god, or a deity of LAW not running around wrecking things. Especially if mythgen doesn't cease completely at the point where historygen starts (or the player is able to enter the world), but continues to run in parallel to history (albeit slow). At what point would these sphere-connections be put into place? At the end of (normal?) mythgen where historygen starts? When something with an obvious sphere connection is created?

2. Many cultures have considered mundane animals to have magical properties, such as scarabs or black cats. Can we expect any of this with mythgen, or will it rather be the separate fantastic beasts, like the unicorn, who are granted powers?

3. Any thoughs on sacred animals/plants and mythgen?

Ha, well somebody is gettin' antsy about the Myth & Magic release.

I'm sure Tarn will answer your questions to the best of his ability, but I seem to recall from interviews that Tarn is still pretty decidedly undecided, even now, with how the variation of gods, spheres, and biomes are still all going to tie into one another come the Myth & Magic release. 

I imagine he'll attempt to kick that can down the road for as long as possible, at least until enough time frees up so he can meditate on it, you know, like under a waterfall for 4 months, until he settles on something.

_{edit: Brevity}

of course, dragon leather has a fixed temp

Hmm... I'm not sure what dragons you're playing with, as dragons in vanilla don't produce leather. Instead, they use scale.

Heres the dragon vanilla raws up to the relevant lines.

Mostly, I just wanted to model lightning, to see how far the rabbit hole could go.  And but also, to allow for HFS inorganic creatures to show up that are made out of the substance, which could be butchered, in order to produce items made out of an 'X' creature's lightning, which could be really fun, because the script could trigger the lightning bolt script, whenever those particular items happen to be thrown or launched into the air.

But yeah, ultimately, the simplest solution is to actually just spawn a tree mid air, just off the ground or whatever. It'll collapse into a multi z tile cave in dust explosion. And if the tree's material is set to be made of 'lightning'.  Then well... that happens!

In arena mode theres a function to actually spawn trees, however, this feature isn't accessible via the raw interaction tokens. Interesting to note though, the create-tree.lua script available in DFhack actually borrows the arena mode function, in order to spawn in trees. Which makes a lot of sense.

Since no one answered, I'll make a suggestion but I don't know if it will work.

According to the wiki, v 0.47.01 added some new functionalities to custom interactions.

1) [I_TARGET:A:LOCATION], [IT_LOCATION:RANDOM_NEARBY_LOCATION:A:X]

These tokens can be used to specify a location (A) in the local map and then force an interaction to target a random tile within a given radius (X) from the specified location (A). That could be used to emulate random lighting strikes in the map, but I don't think it can be used to find the hightest point/"shortest path" for the electric discharge.

2) [I_EFFECT:SUMMON_UNIT], [CREATURE:<creature token>:<caste token>]

Right, so this is where DFhack I guess has to come in. When the interaction happens, it triggers an automated lua script, which picks a random above ground tile on the surface, and then calculates the highest targetable z point above that area, and then changes to the target's z coordinate to that spot.

It's interesting that you suggested a creature, because if we use a short lived one, one that lives for 4 ticks, it could use an interaction and vanish. This would allow us to get away with some stuff that we might not otherwise be able to get away with in vanilla. However, if we're already involving DFhack to target tiles on the z axis, then this doesn't seem particularly necessary.

Alright, so let's say we have managed to randomly target a tile on the map, and then raised that target to the highest possible z elevation above it through an automated script, and further, we now have access to lua for whatever comes next.

My idea, is for the lighting to Etch-a-Sketch its way down to the surface by shifting 1x and/or 1y coordinate during each z-level transition, and producing an instantly evaporating boulder of flashing "lightning" for each z level, (because thats the best I got), which has a fixed temp of 5x magma. Every z level transition, the script checks for whether its targeting a ground tile, if it is, it creates a cave in explosion of lightning dust, and then terminates. (It could also play a sound effect?)

I'm not sure if the lightning's path should be purely cosmetic, or if it should attempt to model natural lightning in some manner. Like, have it determine if moving over x number of spaces as it climbs down, will allow it to travel faster through a tree within range that it can strike, rather than continuing to travel through air.