New/Old Shrines and what they do (updates!)

[Eisenfaust86]

Yes the majority of what you mentioned will (and partially has) already been implemented spell wise

(Lesser Restoration, False Dawn, Mirror Image mentioned in threds/screenshotted are also spells from Baldur's Gate series)

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The negative plane stuff is the damage type visible as "Resistant/Weak/Immune to Darkness" (in purple) on some screenshots under monster names [EDIT: or maybe not, dont remember if I posted a ss like this before]. This damage type is what most black magic spells that deal damage are dishing out (as a rule of thumb, they consume life when cast and deal damage on the negative plane).

Will the negative plane spells heal undead just like in D&D? That could be quite useful for a character who uses undead creatures to do his bidding (especially with that no-longer-broken AI the revived creatures are likely going to use, given the information you've posted in the dev log...)

EDIT: If you haven't done this already, you might also want to make the healing spells harm the undead instead of healing them to balance this (just like what negative plane spells are probably gonna do to (most) living creatures exposed to them ).

[Nefarius]

Yes, things like healing spells dealing damage vs. certain creatures are intended, but I won't reveal more about this here (as that would spoil too much )

[Nimbostratus]

Er, did I misunderstand something, or is there no point to the "Murphy's" shrine? It either breaks one of your items or kills you; what incentive is there to click on it? o_O

[Nefarius]

There is none, and there neither was any reason to click the so named shrine in hellfire either (where it punished the player for clicking it, just not as hard as this one does). The shrines we are adding don't have to be good in their effect, just true to the spirit of what we try to implement (or replicate), some may give you useful effects like filling all empty inv cells with gems, others may be a general disaster, and yet others generally weird and neither good or bad in their effect.

When D2 was released many people that played D1 where disappointed by the way the shrines in D2 ended being, in D2 most shrines are just temporary buffs. In D1 the shrines were all like D2s magic shrines (ie gem shrines, portal shrines), just with more interesting effects overall.

D2 had one shrine worth to mentioned (it too had no point to click whatsoever), but they borked the code so it never got into the final. (Enirhs Shrine - that reversed the character name, the code works insofar that it doesn't update the client(s) with the new name, so it only has an effect after you save and re-enter IIRC).

In D1/hellfire however Cauldrons and Goat Shrines randomly applied any of the shrines effects (with the exception of some shrines, like the Thaumaturgic shrine ). In hell you had no shrines, only cauldrons.

Theres more info about the D1 shrines in Jarulf's guide.

All in all, the key D1 and hellfire shrines are implemented, leaving out these, which will follow later (with adaptations):

Code: Select all

/*
	ENCHANTED				+1 to all spells, -1 to one spell (-2 for maxed spell)
	FASCINATING				+2 to firebolt, -10% to max mana
	GLOOMY					+2 to armor class of all armors, -1 to max damage of all weapons
	ORNATE					+2 to holybolt, -10% to max mana
	SACRED					+2 to chargedbolt, -10% to max mana
	SPOOKY					refills mana and life for all other players
	TAINTED					+1 to one stat and -1 to another for all other players
	WEIRD					+1 to max damage of all weapons
	SHIMMERING				vanilla mana shrine, not needed
	SOLAR					gives stats based on time of day + has more then 1 message
	SPARKLING				adds 1000 * [acronym="Dungeon Level (Levels.txt)"]dlvl[/acronym] exp, casts offensive flash
	TOWN					vanilla portal shrine, not needed
*/

[Eisenfaust86]

Hello Nefarius:

One thing you might want to note (purely informational) is that in D1, the Sparkling Shrine actually suffered a bug where it would grant negative experience to the player after reaching a certain level, due to the seemingly careless design of the horrendously-complex formula that dictated the experience total gained (seems that bluzzard somehow forgot to check the formula at very high values of clvl).

[Nefarius]

Yep, from what I remember reading, the initial part of the formula was off by 1 sometimes, so to fix it they added that huge string of nonsense to the end, while it probably fixed that bug, it caused something worse (the exp loss you described). I wonder why they didn't just use ceil() or some custom code with modf() to get rid of the "off by 1" issue. Probably would've worked, without the bug

...

Here is some other info about how the Thaumaturgic drops work that I decided to release.

For each closed chest in the level, there is a 33% chance it will trigger the thaumaturgic drop (once it triggers, all chests are back to normal), no two players can trigger it at the same time (as the other player would open it later even if it doesn't appear that way in-game, both events are processed in sequence). If this is the last closed chest on the level it will always trigger the drop (not yet implemented, as I didn't add the counter for it yet).

The itemLevel of what drops is equal to the dungeonLevel (albeit that means it's more dependant on the highest player in the current game as the dungeon level itself is based on this to some extent)

It drops 10-15 gold piles from the chest, these piles have 2-5 times the normal amount of gold you would get from the area.

Next the chest drops 5-10 items, their quality varies from magic to unique, however you can only get one unique or one set item from the chest (afterwards unique becomes rare and set becomes magic).

Chance for unique: 0.2%
Chance for set: 0.7%
Chance for rare: 15%

No jewelry drops from these chests, only armor and weapons.

[Nameless]

Would it be possible to have shrines give the player a temporary skill (e.g. Shrine of Fireball would let you cast Fireballs) to use or an Aura that the player radiates? Spell level/damage... based on the area level.

[Nefarius]

Yep, this is very feasible and doable, in essence I only have to write a oskill to a temporary statlist

[Monty Burns]

How about a shrine that reveals some of the map for you.

[cla$$ics]

Yes, one of the D1 shrines does that (Revealing maybe? i forget which)

[Nefarius]

Look at the initial post under secluded