Nerds and Politics and Nerds

A new DFC remake underway

2016-04-04T16:38:00.001-05:00

Despite posting that I had given up, I still get messages occasionally asking on my progress or for more information. A couple days ago some people tracked me down on reddit asking for any material I gathered for a new attempt and I obliged. So any newbies coming along looking for a fix for their nostalgia, here is the best place to get involved with the community focusing around the latest remake.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/9979950914/

Corgon The Scaredy-Corgi

2016-01-21T13:23:00.001-06:00

The GOP Reality Problem

2015-10-30T20:53:00.001-05:00

The GOP has a reality problem. I'm not saying this as an attack on conservative ideals and policies, but rather the echo chamber the GOP and conservative allies have created around themselves that is only getting worse. It was revealed today that following the CNBC debate a few nights ago, the candidates and/or their representatives will be getting together, minus the RNC to discuss what they can do about the debates to make them more favorable. Now, I watched the debate, while some of the questions may have been a little weird, they were hardly "gotcha questions" (Thanks Sarah Palin for that phrase). In Ben Carson's case, the moderator had come with figures in hand for his tax plan and when he suggested the number would be "much closer to 15%" she then pointed out those numbers that still did not come even close to adding up properly. Donald Trump was fact checked on live television with something from his very own website to prove him wrong. The list goes on and on. This is hardly a new issue either. I remember 4 years ago when fact checking sites across the board couldn't keep up with all the lies, truth stretching and blatant ignorance on the GOP side. Yes there were some on the (D) side, but they paled in comparison. It makes you wonder, why is it such an epidemic in the republican party? Well, its because of the giant echo chamber that has been constantly under construction since the late 80s and early 90s. Through the 90s conservative "entertainers" blossomed across the airwaves, many of which are still on the air today. They exerted pressure on the GOP and the GOP acquiesced because it helped bring them into power. Then came Fox News. I'm not entirely sure when it became so detached from reality itself, but I do remember my little rural cable company finally made it available on basic cable around 2000 or so, which probably means thats when it started getting really popular since we always get things like that later than others. So now there were radio hosts AND TV hosts tied together, fairly uniform, harping on the same things, pressuring the GOP, the GOP, again, acquiescing because it made them stronger (at the time). Coinciding with the rise of Fox News (well known for being less than factual and having the worst informed viewers) was the networking capabilities of the internet. Throw in the Presidency which routinely coordinated with the aforementioned media outlets (talking point memos to them issued each morning by the POTUS office) and you begin to see a sphere of influence internal to itself that distrusts everything outside of it. It's no secret the conservative movement has always seen the media has being liberally biased, which, true or not in each individual case, still meant they would only trust their buddies. I distinctly remember circular rings of information 10s of points of connection deep in which one publication cited another publication, which cited another, and so on until you were back to the original publication being cited indirectly for its own assertions.

Okay, so all of those things and many others, lets move along. In 2012 there was a rash of distrust of polls for the Presidential election. Every day the radio voices would talk about it (I listened regularly) and there was even a website created by....I think a guy in New Hampshire.... that took all the major polls released and "adjusted" them to correct some sort of sampling bias he perceived. The man clearly had a knowledge of statistics, at least to an extent and I watched his poll releases daily. While all the regular polls had Obama up in swing states and nationally, or tied, his polls were always shifted 5 or even 10% towards Romney. The end result was (D) going into election day feeling good about the polls and (R) going into election day feeling good about the polls. This wasn't limited to just average listeners/readers/etc either. On election night there was a famous incident where Karl Rove was on air for Fox News going over his own numbers that were skewed in a similar way to the previously mentioned website and the look of shock on his face when his numbers didn't match reality was, needless to say, very enjoyable for a dirty pinko commie liberal like myself. But then, it went even FURTHER up the ladder. Mitt Romney HIMSELF went into election day thinking it would be a landslide. He didn't even have a concession speech prepared. The silence behind the scenes with his campaign staff was defeaning. Nobody could believe it. They were all devastated because their numbers didn't match reality.

The disconnect wasn't limited to individuals either. There were constantly "scandals" being thrown about in an attempt to tarnish President Obama. The Fast and Furious scandal, which began under the previous administration, was going to be the thing that brought Obama down. It turns out, it was overblown. There was also an IRS scandal. People were subpoenaed to testify, turns out the FBI exonerated the IRS of any wrong doing. There was also Benghazi which has had 9 separate investigations which found no wrong doing, but provided recommendations for improvements to be made. Millions of dollars later its still going on and nothing is coming from it except bringing pain to the families of those lost. Even the email server is not that big of a deal. Secretary Clinton has been exonerated of any wrong doing and the FBI investigation isn't of her, its of the State Department and thousands of released emails later, nothing has come of it except that we know what TV shows she likes. On top of all that, she was not the first Secretary of State to do this. Colin Powell and at least one other had done it and nothing came of that. Heck, even Bush/Cheney used a server kept in GOP HQ so that they could keep things away from subpoenas. They ended up erasing around 20,000 emails before they could be seized as well. My favorite, the Planned Parenthood videos which was over 12 hours of footage edited to look as terrible as possible and even inserting unrelated footage like a stillborn child while the audio was still playing. The echo chamber was so strong that Carly Fiorina insisted REPEATEDLY for DAYS and probably still does, that an image came up in that video that has never existed. Now theres an investigation to see if PP are the monsters they were being portrayed to be, selling organs for profit, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

Which brings us back around to the debates. The candidates stand up there on stage spouting the facts as they see them, and the second someone points out holes or errors, they cry bias and want to have softball questions lobbed their way(side note: the last two GOP debates had conservative radio hosts being called liberal media because of hard questions). One of the last remaining avenues for bringing people back down to reality is being pushed away. The GOP candidates will get their softballs, live in their own little world, and then get to the general election and get torn asunder or pull another Romney and live in a virtual reality until election night. The average conservative voter will also continue to observe this disconnect and manifest even more dislike of the GOP establishment, which will further tear the party apart, like we are seeing now. Reality has left the GOP. The conservative movement created an insulated world around itself and what gave it strength in the past is now tearing apart from the roots up.

/rambling rant

DFC Future, where I've been, where I'm going.

2015-07-12T02:39:00.002-05:00

So I've been periodically getting messages from people asking about the progress of DFC and I feel pretty bad that the project crapped out. What basically happened was the hard drive I had all the work on crapped out on me and by the time I could recover it things had shifted around in my life and i lost momentum with the project. I got sucked into Guild Wars 2 with my good old Magestorm guild (www.strikeforceguild.com) where we rose to become one of the best world vs world forces on NA servers. Very few guilds that were in existence at launch are still alive and healthy and I'm proud to say that Strike Force one of them. The reason I get into this is because I spent a good chunk of that time, once the previous GM had to retire for IRL stuff acting as the AGM supporting our new GM. For anyone not familiar with me, I've always been fine acting in the leadership level of a council member or officer but have avoided direct leadership at all costs, mostly because I don't like being in the spotlight. SO, getting put in that spot left me with more and more responsibility towards the guild I've been a part of for 15 or so years and since [SF] was one of two NA time zone guilds on our server facing two other servers who could field sometimes up to 8 if not more guilds at once during NA time, needless to say I really had no time to spare to ever starting the project back up again, as much as I wanted to. I did finally step down about 6 months ago or so. I got to enjoy Guild Wars 2 for being Guild Wars 2 again and eventually managed to get myself down to really only playing half an hour a day for dailies and to keep me sharp.

Which leads me to my next thing. I've spent much of my life, probably more than one person should, consuming fiction, be it star wars novels, anime, comics, manga, D&D and various other typically nerdy stories. The result of this was that I began to get the itch to create again (similiar to the DFC itch). Over a period of 2-3 months I informally arranged a world and story in my head that I wanted to tell. I tried to flesh it out in simple written form but it just wasn't working how I liked. Being an avid reader of webcomics each night I knew that the webcomic format was a much better fit for the story, but this left me with a few problems. First, what I thought would be the biggest issue, my color blindness, has turned out to not really be too much of a problem thanks to RGB values, knowing what colors are called even if I cant see them property and spreadsheets. Second, I am 31 and have not spent more than 5 minutes drawing TOTAL in the last 15 - 20 years but with diligence this can be remedied. However, third, my personal health issues leave me with mild hand tremors. You can imagine how that could seriously screw up drawing. I've made due this far by doing the entire process in Manga Studio with heavy usage of the line/curve tools as well as taking a sort of "sculpting" approach instead of traditional methods of drawing. I do have a reason for pointing all this out and that is that as the comic approaches its 3rd month of actual steady publications, it helps illustrate my dedication to telling the story. On a larger perspective, this webcomic takes up most of my free time if I want any sort of regular/quick release schedule. That means the time for picking up the DFC revival project is just not there.

But if anyone is interested you can follow my learning process on Kikonrar

or the publishing of the comics my father has been drawing since the 60s at ccf.kikonrar.com/ccf

Sorry to the DFC fans, I hate having become another failed attempt, but it is what it is.

Persona 4: The Animation

2012-12-22T03:16:00.001-06:00

Persona 4: The Animation

Yokoso, waga Velvet Room.

Oh Holy Crap I loved this series SO much. I'd never played the games, but I have a good friend who is obsessed with them so she turned me onto this. After my bad experience with .hack//roots and the feeling of wanting to play the game, but not having the means to play the game that I usually get when I watch an anime made about a video game, I just try to stay away from them, but this is the only adaptation of a game I've ever watched that could stand alone perfectly as the anime(.hack//sign isn't far off though). It's also got a unique feel to it that mixes the two types of anime I gravitate towards, typical action-shounen stuff and comedic slice of life stuff. When I say this I don't just mean action with funny moments, but theres a few episodes that are strictly character development and interaction in their day to day lives. It also had me on the edge of my seat a few times with a mix of detective/suspense/horror moments, and it is really rare for me to enjoy that kind of thing.

So to sum it up. Persona 4: The Animation is a Shounen Slice of Life Detective Suspense story that follows a group of friends as they try to solve a series of murders in their town intertwined with this alternate-reality world they discover and in which they have "Persona" monsters that fight for them.

I really got a kick out of the main character too, which is REALLY rare. At first he just seems like a blank slate character that can take on the attributes of the watcher but in the more slice of life moments you see a really awesome mischievous sense of humor.

10/10 all the way.

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

For those curious about DFC, winter breaks started, and I've started again ;)

Winter Break

2012-11-14T00:17:00.003-06:00

Pretty good news all around everyone. I've been settled for awhile now, but my schedule was kind of wonky until after the first weekend of the month. I'm a staff member at an Anime Convention here in Omaha (Anime Nebraskon), most of which is tech team stuff, making sure our tech setups are going to the right panels and everything. It's pretty hectic considering we ran about 200 panels this year for around 3000 attendees. On top of that I also run the Karaoke event Friday and Saturday nights and that keeps me REALLY busy the two weeks or so preceding the con, updating the encyclopedia of songs, remaking the list of songs available since the file was lost. I do kind of want to brag about one thing though. Our big name guest this year was Steve Blum (Spike from Cowboy Bebop, amongst other names), and I was able to get a couple of his prints signed by him and my collector's edition S-cry-ed and a picture too.

I also came away with a bit of a cold, all this crammed into school work as well, so I've been busy. The point? Well, aside from showing off the swag from Steve Blum, with the con out of the way theres a finish line just at the edge of the horizon, that is the end of the semester. I have no commitments planned, no vacations, no events, nothing, between early December and early-mid January. That means I'm wiping off the dust and whipping out the C++ to see how much I can shoot out in that time. I'm not sure how things will go once the semester starts again, but things look rosey.

Problems

2012-09-21T01:36:00.005-05:00

As evidenced by the lack of posts, things have happened. Awhile back my roommate said she was going to buy a house, which meant breaking our lease and it was all going to happen in the middle of the semester. That meant we had to get everything revved up to move, clean and repair the house we rented, do the move itself, unpack, all with minimal help because my parents are elderly and I hate tasking friends with such tasks. The move took place last friday. Since I'm in my last year of school I decided to just take over a room at my parents house instead of adding to everything with having to search for a new place to live. Well, a myriad of problems has cropped up since then. The internet is a bit sketchy at best, cutting out depending what I'm doing and probably the biggest thing to happen, my hard drive crashed sometime between Tuesday when I went to bed and Wednesday when I woke up. More specifically, the hard drive for the computer I do my dev work on. I have the PC up and running again with a new hard drive, but I haven't been able to recover whats on the crashed one. Typically, I have a pretty good backup system with my file server, but in preparing to move I had left it at my parents house the last time I had visited, which was almost a month earlier. The good news? I didn't really lose much because I didn't have the time to get anything done in that month anyway because of everything else. I still haven't got everything unpacked, and only briefly had my server up when restoring my tower since I don't really have a good place for it at the moment. I'm going to have to find my copy of visual studio again too.

Sooo, Hurray! Shit happens all at once. Back to the grindstone I go.

Necros Skellies and Anonymous

2012-08-25T16:43:00.000-05:00

First off, apologies for the long delay between posts, the next semester has started and I'm retooling my weekly activities around it as well as preparing for an upcoming move as one of my roommates recently bought a house and I can't afford this place by myself.

Bael-elves

Necro healers were always kind of boned in general, though they could hold their own in PK with Pain.V and sneakyness combined with a fair bit of talent. As I see it theres two options going forward. One, keeping them at cloth like their brother guild, but granting them level 5 sheilds instead of level 4. The other, lowering them down to level 4 shields and granting them the leather armor that orcs and priests have. It will also be much easier for them to hunt with a weapon, ie training weapons, than before, allowing them to hunt much like priests used to. That will be similar across all three healer classes.

Pure Necromancers, similar to wizards, will take over part of the "warding" burden/privilege, retain their role as primary tappers, shields, teleportation, cold/pain lists and of course the good old namesake ability of their undead pets which were never really all that exclusive to them in the first place. I always thought that was a bit silly. Necromancers who can only summon one at a time and whose summoning ability isn't unique to them at all. Maybe I'll do something about it if there is an imbalance.

Skeletons

I've made a previous post where I described the joke ability "bone" and how Skeletons will have a second guild option akin to rangers/gnolls to take over evil's archer race. Of course the typical melee double fighter class will remain and will have Parry as well, though I cannot remember if they had it originally or not.

Anonymous

The big news of this post is a big thank you to the anonymous poster who has given me a link to documentation on the tempest engine, that is, really really really freaking detailed information on how the game works. It's uncovered a lot of tiny things missing from my database design. It would have all been picked up as the game was developed, but having it pointed out now saves significant time later on. So, Cheers to whoever sent that. It is immensely helpful.

I also have another message of appreciation to another person and those who came before him, who have offered material support of some kind. Thank you.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Demons

2012-08-13T17:28:00.001-05:00

For pretty much everything CoX demon you can refer to the craftie characteristics of goblins and craftsmen. They have the physical creation/reparation skills of craftsmen types,. When it comes to fighting, however, they have slightly less defense (studded leather vs chain) in favor of more offense (melee) while also retaining the parry skill that the other two have.

Burning Hnad Demons will have level 4 shields, leather armor, the ability to tap, though not to the extent of primary tapping classes. There won't be any mechanics tricks to it, BH demons simply have less points in the mental area than the others akin to the way CoX demons are better at fighting than a goblin would be, but not as good as a skeleton would be. They will have their pets, though the CoX might have them as well. I am uncertain on that specific point. They will cover the craftsman duties not covered by CoX demons, that is weapons/armor infusions/enchantments. They will also be the alarm wards casters as well as absorbing some of the other wards for evil realm (healing/refreshing) and if I ever manage to implement a fair approach to light/dark issues, they would also have a darkness glyph.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Werewolves

2012-08-12T20:38:00.003-05:00

Wolves were always one of my favorite classes. I'm a fan of the idea behind the berserker type of fighter and the shapeshifting ability is just the cherry on top for me. My largest non-good realm character was a level 35 wolf named "Ultimatemooo" and I can't really remember why I stopped playing him. Anyway, as I have elaborated in the troll post, I have made a strong attempt to re-implement berserk and make it useful at higher levels and not really a death sentence. The theoretical method for calculating berserk is to take half of the berserk skill and add it to the weapons skill, while taking the same % off of defense. Having run a few simulations, PVPwise, using berserk does provide a significant damage increase and the defense decrease isn't so damaging that the wolf is killed by a random level 1 town npc, which I remember happening more than once in DFC.

As for shapeshifting, I initially wanted to keep it as a skill, and have the damage related to the shapeshifting skill % but that doesn't seem feasible for various reasons. Instead it seemed easier to implement it as a spell casting ability. If I recall correctly, blood coven vampires had spells to shapeshift themselves into bats and I remember more than once staff using spells to shapeshift themselves and targets. I mentioned in previous posts that monks and gnolls forms were less diverse and fewer in number. Monks and Gnolls operate in their forms with only one real choice, their highest level form. To use any other form would be stupid. Wolves, being the natural shapeshifters they are are given a much more diverse setup.

First tier of forms:
2) Physical damage, single attack
7) Earth damage, single attack
11) Cold damage, single attack

Second tier of forms:

16) Physical Damage, chance of attack being a double attack
20) Cold Damage, 10% stun chance
25) Earth Damage, 10% fatigue damage chance
30) Fire Damage, 10% chance for a second attack

Third tier forms:

35) Physical damage, 100% double chance
40) Cold damage, 25% stun chance
45) Earth damage, 25% fatigue damage chance for a second attack
50) Fire damage, 25% fire damage chance for a second attack

Each tier's forms have the same basis for damage and defense values meaning a level 50 wolf in any of the third tier forms will get the same usefulness from them.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Gnolls

2012-08-10T22:14:00.001-05:00

Gnolls run a lot of the typical archer stuff they used to have, mildly akin to Rangers in good. The main difference comes in the spell setup. Gnolls still retain a few of the wilderness skill spells that rangers have, like improve.track and such, but they also pick up the slack when it comes to Chaos's shapeshifting class. Their intervals are every 10 levels, like monks and are all animal forms (Large Cats/Hawk/Bear etc). Nothing else really all that special.

Tomorrow I'll start in on posts about evil and possibly dive back into programming again, it depends as I am having a few friends over.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Ogres

2012-08-09T16:21:00.000-05:00

I hinted at some changes to the overall game that affected Ogres, but didn't get into a lot of detail. As of right now Ogres have the fire and earth lists that wizards have and when you consider that wizards have more elements available, well that is not terribly fair to Ogres. I've discussed a few changes with the others to be made to all the tappers that will even things out, so I won't get into that and I'll ask people reading this to put that point aside at the moment They will still have wards, that is, all of the types of wards available, unlike other realms who's wards are split between classes/guilds. They will also likely have better versions. The ability bonuses are not the same as would be elves and bael-elves and account a bit more for Ogres size, that is, they have the same basic mental characteristics but the other four stats vary from the other two races, like higher strength and constitution, but lower agility and dexterity.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Lizardmen and Orcs

2012-08-09T01:40:00.001-05:00

Lizardmen haven't really changed, but like a few of the other unique skills it took time to come up with a good algorithm to mete out proper damage throughout the levels for Lizardbreath. It did prove very fruitful when dealing with something new and fun Masterpuppet and I came up with for another class, though. It will remain on a 7-ish second timer and the damage is increased over typical weapon attacks, to make up for the increased timer. Of course they will keep double and whether they had it or not before, they will have parry.

Orcs presented a problem, and still kind of do. I have designed some spell lists that initially cover most of the healer class basics. I have absolutely no frame of reference for orcs buffs and very little with offensive spells. Their skills and makeup are similar to priests, and if I'm not mistaken that does improve their hunting ability compared to what it was before.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Goblins and Trolls

2012-08-07T14:55:00.000-05:00

Goblins:

Not much to tell here. Chainmail is the "favored" armor, they still have their bombs that they get every 10 levels or so. I might slip in parry at somepoint since it makes sense they'd be a somewhat defensive fighter, but at the moment they don't have it. Currently they do have sneak since they are so small. SURPRISE! BOMBS! being the idea behind that.

Trolls:

Trolls aren't a terribly complicated class. Berserk, Pummel, 2 handed weapons in 1 hand and off the charts strength. I'm not sure how to exactly describe the method I did for stat layouts and how much bonus each race gets from how many points in what stat, and how that progresses from low to high, but initially it involved 7 levels. Very Bad, Bad, Weak, Average, Better than Average, Good, Better than Good. I had based a lot of these off of various stats I saw in logs I found across the internet with a little guestimation. Each rating had values (-4,-3,-2,-1,1,2,3) and each class had ratings assigned to each of their stats based on what they were good in. Take for example, a tamian:

Strength: Good (2)
Constitution: Bad (-3)
Agility: Good (2)
Dexterity: Good (2)
Intelligence: Better than Average (1)
Wisdom: Better than Average (1)

Total: 5

Tamians were designed to be versatile and able to do just about anything, but not be overly excellent in any one thing.

Then I came to Dwarves and realized, when I compared it to my Dwarf Paladin's stats, that "Better than Good" strenght wouldn't cut it. So I made "Super" and having taken another look, I went back and adjusted some of the other races to have the Super trait, like Elves with Intelligence and Halflings with dexterity. Then I got to chaos, and Trolls and realized, the highest possible bonus for a 20 str on super, doesn't even come close to the original DFC bonuses. So I created Super.ii. Which, after calculating it out, STILL didn't come close. So I created Super.iii which finally seems to have hit the mark. I couldn't remember for sure what armor they used before, possibly chainmail, but I upped them to plate. The changes to Berserk should make it a much more useful skill and a little more viable for hunting.

Just a side note, each of these "levels" are at equal increments between each other, so there is a uniformity to it and super.ii and super.iii actually have two of these increments between each of them so I suppose technically they should be super, super.iii, super.v. I'll lay out the mechanics of it after I'm done with all the race/class posts.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Priests

2012-08-05T20:09:00.001-05:00

The final class for the Good realm, Priests have had some slight changes. I had a good friend in high school who played a priest (Dominic) but as it has been so long he no longer has logs of spells and some details. So with that I had to make spell lists based on memory. A single offensive spell casting list, the traditional group shields, level 4 self shields , light/bless/holywarrior etc. If I recall resurrections Healing, resurrection and cures/remove curses were in seperate lists, 2 or 3. This is the same for all the healing classes. In DFC they could wear plate armor and cast through it with divine spells. I am not entirely sure of how viable that is in comparison to the healer necros and orcs. I've lowered their "Favored armor" down to leather. I'll get into more detail about how armor changes will work in another post as it will be quite detailed. From a physical combat standpoint, and there is a likelyhood that these might be removed, they will also have pummel and parry. I included parry because they are essentially a defensive class, and pummel because of the crushing weapons nature of the class. But as this may be too much, either or both may be removed.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Craftsmen

2012-08-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

With craftsmen I didn't do a whole lot of changing anything, the only really unique battle skills/items are parry, which is kind of one dimensional, and their golems. Most of the work done with crafties was consolidating item/weapon/armor creation lists. If I recall, before, there were lists for each type of armor, maybe more than one for weapons too, I cannot remember. The updated version is based on tiers of 10 levels. Each tier (ex level 1-10) deals with one specific type of item (ex boots,gloves,leggings, helm, shirt etc) Within those 10 levels are where the difference in material lies, cloth, leather, studded, chain, plate. There are also a cloth and leather cloak mixed in as well. Weapons follow a similar patter. Crushing, Slashing, Thrusting, Ranged, Shield etc. Right now I have all of the armor enchantments and weapon infusions in their own lists, but at sometime int he future I'll probably split them off to be specific to craftsman/goblins/demons. I suspect it would be too easy to get full set of gear that has resistance to everything on it if all realms had access to all protections. Walls and Catapults/Ammo are currently equal for all realms. The slight differences each realm had in DFC were good in theory but, particularly with walls, I don't think it panned out terribly even. There is nothing saying I can't change that back though, and it isn't out of the realm of possibility. I did level a crafty to around high-30s and had GM for awhile, so I remember how stupidly hard to get some rather inconsequential components for enchantments and such were. With that in mind some of the lower required components will obviously be much more available, while the components for the higher level items will be fittingly rare. In particular, I'm tossing around the idea of having a temporary bonding enchantment. It would last for some amount of releases of the character, and would require a rather large number of rare items. Keep in mind that that is just an idea and may never actually be implemented. Finally, I remember wearing plate as a craftie on DFC, goblins having chain, but chain sucked so they often wore studded leather, and CoX being Studded/BH being leather. I've bumped crafty favored armor down to chain though. It seemed more fitting. If you're constructing things on the battlefield, you're going to want a little more flexibility than plate would offer, plus too many plate wearers can just get silly.

Side note: I've finished my final program for the class I am in 5 days earlier than the due date. All I have left to do is study for the quiz and final exam and I'll be done and begin working on programming this again instead of sitting around and making these posts while I take breaks from programming my assignments for class.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Rogues Kobolds and Imps

2012-08-03T22:40:00.003-05:00

Well...Honestly there isn't really much to say here. I had a heck of a time tailoring the algorithm for backstab and it gets rather complicated, mixing between percept, weapon skill, backstab skill etc. It is drastically different from basic damage calculation to say the least.

Weapon type being used might factor in, but at the moment it doesn't....

Well, that was informative. See everyone tomorrow for Craftsmen!

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Wizards

2012-08-03T14:30:00.000-05:00

Wizards presented a real problem. I knew exactly where their points were, but I never had a great understanding of how tap factored in to damage done so I had to completely rework it myself through testing. In fact, tap, backstab and berserk were probably the three skills i spent the most time working on when figuring out the balance between everything. What I came up with was a multiplier effect. Base 200 damage with 100 tap is 400 damage, base 100 damage with 200 tap is 300 etc with max tap being your tap skill * 2 (200% in tap, 400 max). This may sound like its more costly on power, but I should point out again, every realm will have some form of power ward/rune/glyph to counter it. The other problem was spells. Wizards have a TON of spells and I had a list of none of them. I did have a 45ish wizards in DFC, so I could vaguely recall some, but a lot of it I had to make up. This did give me a chance to balance things out between the tappers though. I remade the spell lists to have similar spells at similar levels across classes. I also worked in the remaining wards for good realm (Lethargy, power, anti scry, magic, combat) all at level two except for power (4).

Edit: Thanks to an anonymous tipster, that is, anonymous because I have no idea who he was in game, I snagged the old help file that had a rudementary list of spells in the game prior to many of the updates. It is definitely going to help iron things out.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Rangers

2012-08-02T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rangers are the first class with spells that I don't have enough experience with to remember their spell lists in good detail so it was interesting trying to recreate them. Pretty much everything else is the same. Ranged, Volley, track, etc, and I think I got the points setup right. As for the spells, I remembered pets, some basic "nature lore" type stuff, which would be personal buffs and self heals and glyphs as alarms. Rangers are also the beneficiaries of the balancing effects. One of the big things that chaos had over everyone was wards, ogres had good reason for the power ward, with their lower overall power capabilities, but frankly, giving them to a single realm was really tipping the balance, at least if Chaos ever rallied in numbers. I didn't want to put all of the wards in one place, and it just seemed natural to put healing and refresh "glyphs" with Ranger's already having the alarm glyphs. Additional note, Ogre wards are still better than the other two realms versions and Ogres/Necros/Wizards all have same power regeneration capabilities.

Tomorrow: Wizards

Cyra vs My Darkness Falls Remake

2012-08-01T01:39:00.000-05:00

I knew this time would come so I figured I'd make the post now while its fresh. Someone who frequents the Cyra forums has found this blog and informed Cyra about it. I'm actually surprised that it has taken this long as I the first chunk of work I did was for about 2 weeks back in January, then put on hiatus until now, with a few bits here and there. Anyway, I have no connection to Cyra or what Vassi and Rashka are doing. Their project has little if anything to do with mine, nor was it really a motivation either. Last fall I did have a bit of a longing to play the game, went looking and noticed Cyra seemed inactive. I tried a few other MUDs but like most former DFCers was disappointed. Eventually it all passed and I went back to other endeavors. In late December and early January I began playing the Magestorm remake, this is what inspired me to start this project. I saw the amazing job Sorien did/was doing and realized that I could do the same with DFC. Not only would it indulge my desire to play again, but it would also be a fantastic project that I could point towards for prospective employers. Originally it was just a secret between myself, Niteninja and Masterpuppet and one or two Strike Force (SF) members in Magestorm. At some point one of the SF guys told someone else about it, I can't remember who, but he didn't know I wanted it as a secret, and the word spread through the people who played Magestorm that loved DFC as well. After that it wasn't really necessary to keep it secret, so I began infrequent posts on this blog which I had normally used for other things. That is the story of things.

I know that some people have emailed me or replied to my posts mentioning Cyra, but anything that happens to Cyra has no bearing on my remake just as it had nothing to do with my motivation to begin. I wish Vassi and Rashka well in their attempt. Even if theirs goes up first and is wildly popular, which would be kinda neat, I'll still keep up with this because its something I want to do, to show that I can do it. I guess the entire point of this post is, I don't want people to lump the two games in as competing, or as if I did this because Cyra had not released yet. I did it because it was something I wanted to do for fun. I'm not really too familiar with how Cyra has progressed or anything about it, but I'm sure the two of them have put a great deal of work and effort into it and look forward to seeing the fruits of their labor.

Darkness Falls: The Crusade: Paladin Pummel Parry

2012-07-31T18:57:00.001-05:00

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

2012-07-30T03:18:00.000-05:00

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

2012-07-28T19:27:00.002-05:00

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

2012-07-28T00:36:00.001-05:00

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

2012-07-27T00:21:00.000-05:00

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.