Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Paladin Pummel Parry

I haven't really made any surface changes to the Paladin class, they were pretty beefy before hand, but at the same time they were also fairly 1 dimensional.  Double target, double target, double target.  The shield spells made them great, but I can't remember if they had anything above level three.  In any case, they won't now.  I plan to keep it so that all shield/protect/blur spells 4 and above are only self cast, so that means that Paladin spells are only as good as anyone else could cast on them.  The advantage being that they don't have to find someone to cast the shields for them.  As before, their damage/defense (prior to shields) are not as good as skeletons and lizardmen.  One of the biggest downsides to Paladins was that they could only reasonably train one weapon type, maybe two, whereas those in evil and chaos could use all.  As it stands, I've made it so that every realm has a "weapons" skill instead of "crush" "slashing" etc.  A simlar change has been made to armors, but I'll get into those two changes in deeper detail in another post.  To give Paladins a little diversity I also retooled parry and pummel so that they actually make viable choices as an attack compared to double.

As best I can recall, parry was mildly useful, if the user had enough percentage in it they could use it to run through tough areas without getting hit, or laugh at people while they try and get through his defenses for minutes.  I have tooled the parry percentage to work in the same manner as backstab but instead of removing % from defense and placing it in offense, the % is moved from offense to defense.  It will still be possible to hit while parrying, and to be hit during parry.  However, it won't be indefinite, there will be a timer to disengage berserk/parry style attacks.

Anyone who has ever played a zombie for any length of time can tell you how useless pummel was.  I think I only ever played one to mid-teens or so, probably not any higher.  However, Masterpuppet provided me with a great deal of input on zombies, which includes the Pummel attack.  As it was, for zombies and maybe priests, the situation was more of a "Well I might as well Pummel instead of regular attack" instead of it being a definite primary attack.  While I did do more with zombies (more in a future post on that), there isn't much I can do for pummel mechanically.  If I made it do more damage, it would need some sort of drawback, but from a RP perspective, I can't really think of one.  Keeping it HP/Fatigue damage calculated the same way as regular attacks is good, but since everyone has the same max hp and fatigue, and many heals are both HP and fatigue, its kind of pointless since by the time you pummel away someones fatigue, they'd likely be dead or at least 0'ed too.  Now, this is by no means definite, but the only thing I could think of was to also have pummel do power damage.  It gives someone a slight more reason to use pummel, power can't be healed and takes forever to regenerate, from an RP perspective it is much less effective on a fighter than a caster, which would make sense as the casters are traditionally physically weaker.  While HP and Fatigue damage were originally the same, and will remain that way, the power damage is still up in the air, but will probably be less.  The starting testing point will be power points equal to the number of HP/Fatigue, divided in half.  I'll see how it goes from there.

From a spell perspective, Paladins will have roughly the same they used to.  Shield/Protect/Blur/Holy Warrior and a basic bless, storm pets, and some energy intensive low yield healing spells.

Edit:  I want to emphasize that Pummel is one of the more subject to change skills on my list

Apologies DFCers

I had planned to release something new about the work on DFC everyday but I'm in the middle of an intense class right now and I spent about 12 hours today programming and I'm still not done.  The good news is, in a little over a week the class is done and I'll be back to working on the Darkness Falls: The Crusade remake.

As a bonus, here is a clip of quite possibly the best scene from any zombie movie/show:

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Monks

Okay starting today I'm going to keep up regular postings about races, guilds, weapons, armor and other skills and how I've worked out balances.  It should be noted, before reading, that I have already written a program to test the algorithms behind these skills, weapons, armor and how everything comes together for a fight in game.  All skills were designed to do similar damage/defense of comparable classes at comparable  percents while also taking into account the opponents level.  So Before anyone goes crying about something being overpowered, be aware that I've done my best to balance these things out.  Additionally, there will obviously be some testing in game, as that is basically what "beta" tests are for.

Today's entry: Monks

I probably know more about monks than any other class.  Back in the day I used to quiz staff about the inner workings of the game, points in offense/defense as well as the bonus to defense when using martial arts, simple things.  That combined with observing how percentages worked and were affected by stats, I reverse engineered a rough approximation of how it was originally designed.  As I was comparing the mechanics of various classes, namely berserkers and monks, I realized that Trolls/Werewolves/Monks were really more similar than just being each realms "extra, no standard warrior" class.  While the berserk skill produced massive damage increases at the expense of defense, martial arts/adrenaline/counter would alter the state of the monk for different purposes.  It was never really determined how monks received the defense bonus when using martial arts, but I believe I found a way to approximate it, or at least have developed a balanced approach at it.

 When the monk is not holding anything, he receives a 10% of his martial arts skill as an extra chance of evading the attack.  Say the monk has 250% Martial Arts.  That would mean there is a 25% chance the attack will miss.  If the attack gets through this calcuation, then a normal calculation is done in the manner of the other classes.

Secondly, the monk also receives a 10% of his martial arts skill bonus to his armor skill percentage.  I will get into how armor is calculated into everything in a different post but the algorithm, assuming proper training of the armor and martial arts skills, would be roughly equivalent to a plate wearer at 50.

I never really cared for counter's original design but I suspect that is because one of the big toning moments monks received was when I was around the mid-20s on my monk, so I never got to see the real benefit of a good counter skill, prior to the toning.  The idea was that you went into a hyper-alert state, attacking anything that hit you, but you did no independent actions.  You couldn't attack anything besides the automatic attacks from when something hit you, if there were a significant amount of enemies in the room you could run out of fatigue rather quickly and you had to "undo" counter, stuck with a timer, before you could do anything else, which meant if you bit off more than you could chew you had to wait an extra few seconds to try and escape.  Obviously it had its benefits, you could clear a room pretty fast, or in a huge PVP battle do some decent damage, but its usefulness was generally only for moments when you felt lazy.  Despite popular belief, going afk while countering was generally a really bad idea if you were in any area that could do damage.  I believe for the most part it won't operate any differently here, it might do less damage, but its hard to tell since it was such a comparatively underused skill.

Adrenal move was very situational too.  Unless you wanted to carry around a ton of melons, you didn't use it while hunting.  In PVP it was much more useful but you had to pick your moments.  The idea was you received a boost in your damage in exchange for losing a massively larger amount of fatigue for each hit.  I want to say that you would be out in 10ish+ chops, but I can't remember clearly.  Anyway, the bonus received from adrenaline is functionally the same as the berserk skill but instead of the drawback being a loss of defense, its instead exhausting yourself which can be rather damaging in its own way.

Spells are where things get different with monks.  Everything else is basically the same, minus a few tweaks, but spells will be slightly different.  I don't remember why I always teased staff about giving monks a dragon form, I know someone else thought of it, probably Grip, but the idea seemed intriguing.  This is one of the places where I've attempted to balance out the three realms.  In general, with cases where only one realm had something the others didn't, I took that and translated it into the other two in an attempt to level things out.  However, I made sure that the original primary class holder of that skill, spell type or ability retained a better version.  Essentially Werewolves are primary shapeshifters while monks and gnolls would be secondary shapeshifters.  While Monks and Gnolls each received new forms at level increments of 10 (10,20,30,40,50) and would have roughly identical damage and defense capabilities, Werewolves receive at rough increments of 5 levels ( 2,7,11,16,20,25,30,35,40,45,50).  For Monks and Gnolls, it will most likely always be beneficial to be in their highest level form, but for Wolves, the damage types and effects vary based on tiers.  All forms in a tier would do the same base damage, but other elements or status affects would prove useful for different situations which brings me to my final point about Shapeshifting.  It will all be done by spells.  Doing this eliminated the need for training shapeshift and sitting around trying to shape for 5 minutes until it works.  It also lets the shaper choose which form they want to use.

Also, I totally forgot until I had written all of this, and I don't feel like going back to edit it in, but Blood Coven Vampires do also still have bat forms.  They are similarly tiered to wolves except at larger intervals mostly (2,7,14,20,25,32,38,45,50).

Feel free to post comments and thoughts about this.  I will take it under advisement but there is no guarantee I will change it as I calculated the interaction between skills months ago.

Darkness Falls: Bone Update

Yesterday I posted about the new approach to Evil's archer class using skeletons and their "bone" command.  As Rangers and Gnolls both get significantly more than simply volley.  In the future, I'm going to be making a series of posts regarding specific classes and races as well as mechanics changes I've made in favor of making the playing field a little more equal, things like a version of bless for all three realms.  Anyway, I digress.  The as of yet to be named new archer skeleton guild is still in the brainstorming stage but I think I've got a good idea of where I want to take it in terms of their side benefits.    After consulting my two assistants, the ideas we've come up with are plays on the "bone" command, that is, the skeletons ability to break off a piece of itself and use it as a tool.  Obviously since they would have to fire arrows at a rather fast pace, they would need some sort of regeneration to replace the components lost.  With that in mind Masterpuppet suggested we give them a minor regeneration.  This will be better than the best "Quick Heal" abilities than other classes have but less than Zombie's quick heal.  Additionally they will have access to limited transport type spells.  Something akin to "Masterpuppet removes his skull and launches to the east as his body crumbles to dust!" While in the target room people would see "A skull comes flying into the room from the west and lands on the ground as a skeleton begins to regenerate at it's base! Masterpuppet rises!"  At the moment this is all I have for them, and I am hesitant to add more, but it is always possible.  It is also most likely they will be studded leather wearers.

Bone Bone Bone Bone Bone

Earlier tonight Niteninja and I were discussing random stuff with no real impact on the world, like we always do, and he jokingly suggested that we give Skeletons a "bone" attack so that skeletons could "bone insertplayernamehere" or "bone vixen."  Loving infantile jokes such as this as much as I do, I ran with it.  One of the biggest problems I had as I was reverse engineering the mechanics and balancing all the realms of Darkness Falls: The Crusade was what race/guild would be the best fit for an archer.  I did not think giving it to vampires was very fair as both guilds will have plenty of toys to play with, while wolves do track, ranged attacks are pretty much the exact opposite of how a werewolf would normally fight.  As it was, giving it to the CoX demons meant it would conflict with their melee attacks.  Bael-elves are pure casters, so they were out of the question.  Zombies, while fairly screwed in DFC, are already set to have some really bitching fun (bite attack akin to lizardman breath attacks), so I was basically left with Imps.  Imps, while physically weak (Niteninja's primary disagreement with me on it), were also not really a combatant you'd find in your face, making ranged shots and sniper shots a bit more logical.  So it sat like this for almost a good 4-5 months now, until tonight when Niteninja made the joke.  As of tonight, I have made the decision that the evil realm volleyer/ranged race/guild will be a second skeleton guild and it will no longer be a second imp guild.  The skeletons will have an attack command known as "Bone" that is functionally identical to the ranged style commands like "fire."  Here are examples of how the text would look:

--------------------------------

fire anubus

Jagorn releases a flaming arrow that pierces Anubus's side, setting him ablaze.
Anubus is now burning!

------------------------------

bone anubus

Masterpuppet rips off a femur, loads it into his bow and fires it at Anubus!
Masterpuppet's flaming bone flies through the air and plunges into Anubus!
Anubus is now burning!

-----------------------------

Everything will be functionally the same, stats/special effects determined by the bow used to bone the target.  It is a relatively easy thing to alter in the code, in case it ever gets old I could swap it out in no time.  I'll also have to figure out what else to give this second skeleton guild.  Gnolls and Rangers both have more than just their bows and volley so in the name of balance, skeletons would need something more as well.

Kumare: The True Story of a False Prophet

Kumare is a documentary about a man who, as he falls from the faith he was born into, Hinduism, and the increasing number of "Gurus" who don't really seem to have any holy traits about them.  He takes it upon himself to see if he could do it as well.  The documentary follows him and two others as they transform themselves, gather followers and discover how much they are in over their heads when it comes to the level of control they can exert over someones life.

The documentaries website is here: http://www.kumaremovie.com/

I wish it was playing somewhere near me.  It is a perfect showcase for just how much religion is a fantasy created by the human mind to fill in the holes in our knowledge.  People need to have confidence in themselves instead of some invisible dictator in the sky.

John Kieffer

Today I read an interesting case about a man who is essentially on trial for being an atheist, in Florida of all places.  Accounts state that a group of citizens had gathered for a regularly scheduled school board meeting, but the meeting had yet to be called to order.  A priest began to lead most of the room in prayer.  While not strictly unconstitutional, its clearly a means to subvert the separation of church and state, but there isn't really anything that can be done about it.  In protect, Mr. Kieffer and a woman who was in attendance with him continued about their business during the prayer.  At this point a board member began to verbally attack Mr. Kieffer for not joining in.  Kieffer and his friend's only response was to question if the meeting had been called to order or not.  As it hadn't, they had every right to go about their business.  This wasn't good enough for the school board member who then summoned the police and had Mr. Kieffer arrested on resisting arrest peacefully, disturbing a school, religious, or lawful assembly and disordely conduct.  Two of the charges have since been dropped by the state attorney but one still remains, the remaining charge leaves him facing up to a year in jail.  It is worth noting that Mr. Kieffer did not resist arrest and I'm not really sure how someone "resists arrest peacefully."  Anyway, the following link is kept up to date with the proceedings.

http://free2think.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=1414

Freedom of religion works for everyone.

Programming Marathons

It has been awhile since I went on such a programming binge.  I've been hard at it for two days straight, looking at another day tomorrow.  The assignment is to create a basic shell, using C.  I HATE C, or rather the limitations the teacher has put on us.  Anyway, one program down, two to go, then DFC binging :D

Batman doesn't use Guns

Today was a sad day.  For whatever reason, a man took up arms against a packed theatre of helpless individuals, killing some, wounding more.   It was some sort of sick joke, during the latest Batman movie "The Dark Knight Rises" and the shooter claimed he was the Joker.  Very quickly the news and comments around the web devoted to two fields, demands for more gun control and claims that if there was less gun control it would have never happened.  More gun control wouldn't have stopped this.  The man had no criminal record, no recorded mental health problems. The best that could have been done was keeping the assault rifle out of his hands.  It would have made it much more difficult for him to fire so many rounds and injure as many.  Similarly, if conceiled carry permitted people to carry in the theatre, it wouldn't have stopped him either.  At best he would have fired less shots as someone pegged him.  At worst the people trying to stop him would have missed and harmed others, or have been mistaken for being a second shooter.  The theatre was packed full.  Guns don't like crowded rooms.

I also ran up against someone claiming that if an audience member had an assault rifle themselves, it would have been stopped much earlier.  Frankly, that would be much more likely to hit innocent bystanders, not to mention the inability to hide such a weapon would have made him the first target for the gunman.

Finally, good old Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) pulled another one from his book of classics and used it as an opportunity to promote the death penalty.  Here is the tweet in question:

"Aurora, CO mass murder is a terrible event near Littleton. Another very evil individual whose heinous crime calls out for the death penalty."

I'm sure all the victims and their families loved it being turned into a gun control/freedom debate so it must have been all the better that a congressman wants to add another body to the count.


Edit:  A good friend of mine from Chicago told me about a family that lives down the road from her and her husband.  Their son was in the theatre and they had not yet heard anything as to his condition.   All the area television networks were camped out on their street trying to get an interview or waiting for news.  Despicable.

You know you're a nerd when....

Today was a great day in my nerdocity.  Not only did my 17 button razer wired/wireless mouse arrive, but I pulled a rabbit out of a hat when fixing my parents computer.  Last week I had remoted into my parents computer to fix a problem they were having with their printer.  It is much simpler to do it this way rather than to have me drive the 45 minutes to their place and 45 minutes back. Somewhere in the process their system wonked out would no longer run programs or properly connect to a remote session.  So today I made the journey down there, Windows 7 disc in hand and my laptop in case I needed to grab any drivers.  The OS installed just fine, but many of the motherboard related components weren't working properly, including the Ethernet port.  I looked up the specs on the motherboard from where purchased it, went looking for the necessary drivers on my laptop, nothing out of the ordinary, but my parents only had 3 blank CDs for transferring, one of which I had already used for a separate task.  As it turned out the manufacturers drivers did not work and I was left with no method to transfer any other installers I found to the new computer.  Then I earned my nerd cred. 

I whipped out my phone, looked at my Dad dramatically and said, "I need your charger, NOW!"  He quickly rushed to the kitchen in a desperate search and returned with both his and my Mom's power cord only to discover that they were simple chargers and not the 2 in 1 charger/data cable I needed!  In a panic we desperately began to theorize as to where his data cable had gone, for you see, we both have identical models of phones, and I knew for certain that he had one!  We donned our platemail, readied our blades and ventured forth into the rest of the house in a last ditch effort to find the cable and save the quarter tank of gas it would take for me to make another trip and at last we discovered it in a seldom used cabinet in my parent's bedroom, hidden by ferocious cassette tapes!  The day was saved!  We rushed back to my laptop, plugged the phone in, turning on USB storage, transfered the driver with much fervor and made haste towards my parents computer only to be thwarted by USB ports on the front of the tower being in negative hit points!  In a last ditch effort, I reached around the tower, scrambling for an open USB port and SUCCESS! I plugged the cable in, turned on USB storage again, transferred the file and the day was won!  I had conquered the shortcomings of Windows 7 with the lowly Droid operating system!  FEAR ME! FOR I AM NERD!

Lore Updates

Niteninja and I have been doing a lot of tossing ideas back and forth for both of our sections of the Darkness Falls: The Crusade remake, possible story directions for him and how to proceed with what components of the project in what order and what we want implemented when.  As an example, something like choosing what font to use and developing graphical representation of idols is of much lower priority than character interaction, but fonts are even further down the line than the idol representation.  I'd give a more detailed answer but then it gets into more programming mumbo jumbo.

On Niteninja's section of the project, he's decided to set a preliminary release schedule of one "chapter" or release of story/background content per week.  This isn't fixed, but its what we're shooting for.  He currently has an opening chapter to begin to explain how the world changed from DFC to this new version we're working on and is just polishing it up before I post it as sort of a teaser.  Hopefully it gives people a little something to keep them interested until we can get the beta out.

Finally, to the joy of a lot of people, a few who have IMed/emailed me and a few who are in magestorm, I have met all the goals I set forth in magestorm that was keeping me there.  For those not familiar with the plan I had, I had a few months of downtime between semesters that coincided well with the revival of magestorm.  I put this project on hold so that I could make all the different builds I had always wanted to try.  I reached that with a week before this current semester began.  This semester ends in 3 weeks.  Between the class I have now and the classes this fall, work seems promising.

Some Darkness Falls Progress

I've split up the work on the remake of Darkness Falls: The Crusade into three sections.  The programming, database work and all similar things are strictly in my hands (Draken) with some consultation from Niteninja on networking and security.  There was also a component of algorithm design and interaction that was developed by me with feedback from both Niteninja and Masterpuppet. The second section is more of a lore theme and is primarily in the hands of Niteninja.  Obviously I will consult with him a bit on this but I trust him to do a superb job.  The final section is a slightly related to lore and consists of the creation of lands, monsters and items.  This will mostly be in the hands of Masterpuppet and Niteninja, and maybe later on a few people who have commented on a previous post, expressing interest. (Note: I do have your info cataloged guys)

Now that that is sufficiently laid out, the news.  Awhile ago we decided that instead of a clean remake that we would make this a sort of "DF3" or a continuation in the story.  Unlike the change from DF1 to DFC, however, there won't really be a huge difference in mechanics.  Without going into too much detail, as Niteninja is still having fun with the lore, here is a rough breakdown in the timeline:

• World wide event to explain the "shutdown" of DFC
• Period of time in which the realms congregate in a single city
• This will be a beta-like situation to accommodate smaller player base with a similar format to DF1
• World wide event that shifts the 3 realms from a single city to 3 new realms, a return to DFC style setup
• This is to account for the fact that we do not have logs to cover all areas in all realms, while some of it can be reconstructed by memory, much cannot.
• Some old areas will make reappearances though possibly altered slightly

Our goal is to make this as much like DFC as possible, while fixing a few balance issues.

Michael Salman

There has been a big ruckus created recently about a man in Arizona who was supposedly arrested for holding Bible studies.  This is a gross mischaracterization of the issue.   A simple summary is that Mr. Salman wanted to build a building on his property, according to the permit, it was to be a sort of game room.  More than once he stated that it would not be used for what it was later used for, massive Bible studies.  It was reported that there was seating set up for close to 100 people.  The problem is the building was not build to code to properly support so many people.  In an emergency many could be trapped inside.  The city had no problem with him doing what he wanted to do, he could have built the building to code, he didn't.  More than once he stated it wouldn't be used for the Bible Studies/Church assemblies despite the fact there is a sign on his property indicating it is known as the "Harvest Christian Church" and his vehicles are also covered in advertisements.  Nobodies rights are being violated.  Mr. Salman just wants to the attention.

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2012/07/michael_salman_is_not_in_jail.php

Star Trek: Enterprise

I finished watching all of Star Trek: Enterprise today.  It is a shame it was cancelled so early because it really was a fantastic series.  The story was never about the goal and all about the journey.  You knew the entire time where human history was headed, the forming of the United Federation of Planets and the level of technology ahead.  In many ways I think that is what made it so great.  With all of the other series, the science officers and engineers would just make up some bullshit and save the day.  With Enterprise, their options were limited.  They had no shields, no tractor beam, phasers and transporter technology were brand new concepts.  Don't get me wrong, I love the entire universe, but Enterprise really was fantastic.

Also, I'd totally Sub Command Her T'Pol.

Doctor Manhattanism

"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing. And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle." -Dr. Manhattan

That is one of my favorite quotes, from a fictional story ironically, but it illustrates very well how beautiful our existence in this universe is and that attributing such existence to a creator cheapens it to nothing more than a factory produced steel rod.

High School Civics

Recently a local group I am a quasi-member of put up a billboard at one of the busiest intersections in my city.  The billboard said "Don't believe in god? Join the group!" with a link to the groups website.   Tonight there were two stories on the local news stations covering it, a rather hateful posting on a local radio stations website and tomorrow the local paper will be covering it.  I spent hours pouring over the posts on the facebook page for one of the networks and it was very enlightening.  Most of the posts were respectful, but it was abundantly clear that too many people lacked a proper understanding of rights, including the poster of the article who stated "Should this be taken down?"  Other people posted claiming it infringed on their rights to even see such a thing.  It was really disappointing.  I think more people need to retake high school civics class.

Hitlerball

Anyone who uses facebook with any frequency has probably seen the wave of postings that consist of a picture of some figure, or an info-graphic, with a quote from that figure, usually anecdotal and out of context.   People see these, get a quick laugh out of them, assume they are correct if they fit their religious or political outlook and repost it, repeating the process.  As most of my friends come from varying ideologies, I see a wide range of them.  I look upon most of these with sadness because,whether I agree with them or not, all they do is to further divide people and like I said, their factual basis is usually questionable.  As we currently have a Democrat in the White House, much of what I see are quips about fascism, loss of freedom and liberty and how Barack Obama is driving the country into hell.  I remember 10 years ago, similar things being said about President Bush.  I was younger then, 18, and I remember participating in the hyperbole myself and I'm not particularly proud of it.  Another cool-headed friend of mine posted another one today.  An info-graphic making fun of info-graphics, my favorite kind.   It said basically what I am saying here, it was a picture of Adolf Hitler with a caption pointing out how everyone accuses everyone else of being Hitler-esque.  The minute someone kills 6 million innocent people because they have "inferior genes," is the only time Hitlerball should break out.

Ariel and Jordan Reunited

I had previous written a blog post about Jordan Clipstonand his efforts to be reunited with his daughter.  Jordan is an atheist and his mother comes from a very religiously conservative family and has done everything they could to keep his daughter from even knowing he exists.  The post can be found here:

http://nerdsandpoliticsandnerds.blogspot.com/2012/05/jordan-clipston.html

Good news though, Jordan and Ariel have been reunited and have had several visits that went great for Ariel.  The future does look bright for the two and the mother and her family do seem willing to at least meet minimum requirements.  To follow the story you can find his new page on facebook here:

https://www.facebook.com/ArielJordanReunited

There is a very detailed post of the experience the two had together.  Please join me in supporting them.