Herd from The Laboratory:
Thorn has been at it again with the battle system. For those of you with coding priviledges, the system now does more with weapons. This is bad news for the poor orc being used in the laboratory as a crash test dummy.
As we've reported, the attack command (examine 47604) allows you to go into melee with certain foes (their material is "living").
Now, the battle system it spawns (examine 47609) looks at your weapon's health to determine how much damage to deliver. The fist is a default weapon with health 1 (therefore 1 point damage per hit). Now if you have been playing with weapons created with the default health of 10, then you may want to nerf them...
Thorn's thoughts on weapon health: once in a while, a weapon might get damaged (dulled, rusted, etc), and therefore its health could be lowered a bit. A repair shop could then repair it back to its maxhealth. Thorn is pondering the same thing on armour.
Now, making things even more exciting are special attacks (if you reviewed the attack command today you know what I mean). Thorn has created a few already: try examine 47916 or examine 47902 or examine 47912, then review the code to see how special attacks are initially being done.
Here is how things work:
During each round, the attacker and defender have a chance to hit.
During a hit, there is a chance for a special attack.
During a special attack, a random object from inside the weapon is moved into the room of the battle and switched on.
For now, the spawned battle daemon is visible in the room during combat so Thorn can tweak more easily. Later, it will be hidden.
Also for now, there is no variety in the battle spam message. Thorn will deal with that once the basic functionality is there.
Of course, there is still armour to deal with, then Thorn can finish up the spawn command (to populate the realm using battle-ready creature templates) and variants for forging armour and weapons.
Feel free to send Thorn a note with your thoughts.