Subject: What S2 feature excites you most?

Well, now that CMJ has revealed the majority of S2's new changes, it's our turn to salivate over them.
So, what new feature/change excites you the most?

While I'm loving everything, especially the Scrapbots idea, the thing that has me most excited is the Improbable Labs and the Games within Games. We have an amazing amount of creative people here and I can't wait to see what we can do with this freedom. CMJ knows we have an amazing community here and he's going to use that to the fullest, and for that I salute him.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Same here. Minigames and customization options are awesome and provide nice distractions when you feel like doing something different.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Want an admin POV? Honestly for me it's gotta be IItems.

No more
set_module_pref("key",1,"hauntedhouse");
anymore - just a quick
iitems_give_item(hauntedhousekey);
and it'll show up in the Inventory for the player, complete with description, weight, usable points and all that other good stuff.

No more rewriting three damned modules, adding prefs and bollocking around for hours at a time just to add a new usable item. No more worrying about adding dangerously-overpowered items to the game, when I can just make them so heavy that the player can't carry anything but them without a severe Stamina penalty - and with newly-variable chance of finding any given item, we can finally get on to the creating, buying and selling of ultra-rare items.

Having said that, maybe the Stamina system is more exciting for me. It certainly took the longest to make, with balancing and all - with Stamina, I can add new things to do without worrying nearly as much about affecting game balance. Races now have more going for them than Turns, Travel, Attack and Defence. Everything's a bit more varied.

Although, Improbable Labs is also gonna be a hell of a lot of fun...

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

I'm excited by most of the new features, but I'm a little apprehensive about the new Stamina system. And the removal of the Travel Agents got me a little concerned.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

The Travel Agents aren't, strictly speaking, going away - but they will be replaced with a more interesting way to travel instantly to a given Outpost.

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Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

There's lots of stuff going in S2 post-launch, enabled by the new Stamina and IItems systems, that I didn't even remember to mention in the post.

You'll be able to buy a One-Shot Teleporter from any Outpost, which pretty well eliminates the need for a Travel Agents. The price, and stock available, will vary per Outpost and per day, globally. With the current Trading system, prices vary locally (IE for the player - every player's set of prices will be different) rather than globally (the prices are the same for everyone). Global variations will hopefully inspire some clan-coordinated economic buying and selling. Of course, sometimes the OST's will sell out, which makes things more interesting - but there'll be other reasons to get out and explore the World Map too, like wandering wormholes, strange fruit, and all sorts of cool stuff.

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Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

An example of the versatility of IItems (and this will probably only make sense to LotGD veterans, PHP coders or ultra-nerds like me):

Player gets a bottle of juice (iitems_give_item(bottleofjuice)).
Player can drink the juice for an admin-settable Stamina point restoration (iitems_use_item(bottleofjuice) -> hook into stamina-food -> look for "edibleitem" flag -> if set, look for Nutrition, Fat, Fullness -> return to use_item function -> hook into staminasystem -> look for "staminarestore" flag -> increment Stamina).
iitems_destroy_item(bottleofjuice);
iitems_give_item(emptybottle);
Player now has "Use Bottle" nav appear during forest fights in fightnav-specialties hook - the player can throw the empty bottle at the monster.
Further checks via "iitems_has_item(emptybottle);" in modules will allow the player to refill the bottle, sell it, smack someone over the head with it in the pub, melt it down and turn it into something else - none of this functionality is coded at present, of course, but the system is designed from the ground up to do anything I want with it in the future, without having to rewrite the core IItems program.

...if this all seems rather underwhelming (wow, man, you can drink from a bottle and then chuck it at a monster, big fekkin' deal), try coding it sometime. Likewise, try making it so that a player with a hammer, two nails and a stick can construct a club.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Underwhelming? Not at all. I love the idea of versatile items. Hitting someone with a beer bottle amuses me greatly.

Incidentally, can I use a bar stool as a weapon? Because I have some (unintentional) experience with that

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

MOAR:

For most of Improbable Island's first year, development has been an absolute pain in the arse. Most of the time I've spent with the core code has been made up of wondering why the hell it wasn't designed to do XYZ - or being afraid to do A because it impacts on B and C.

For the past eight months - yes, you read that right - I've been developing and testing systems that will cope with any idea I might have in the future, and let me build that new idea very quickly. In short, we're going to see a period of vastly accelerated development - adding new content is so easy for me now, and I know the new systems will take whatever I can throw at them without having to be rebuilt (I know this because I've deliberately built useless testing modules to interact with IItems in horrendously convoluted ways that I would never dream of using in a live game, and they've all worked flawlessly). Combine this with Improbable Labs, you've got a game that has new content every week.

I'm really, really, really looking forward to releasing this.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

...if this all seems rather underwhelming (wow, man, you can drink from a bottle and then chuck it at a monster, big fekkin' deal), try coding it sometime. Likewise, try making it so that a player with a hammer, two nails and a stick can construct a club. [/p]

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Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

If you hit them hard enough, they will.

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

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Re: What S2 feature excites you most?

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