Thursday, November 3, 2011

Pimping thieves for JADE 0.2.0

JADE 0.2.0 offers a couple of new professions. Besides the fighters you by now are accustomed to JADE 0.2.0 will have tinkers, commoners and thieves as additional classes. A somewhat strange selection considering the fact that JADE 0.2.0 is supposed to be the first release of the "melee combat release cycle" (JADE 0.2.x). But it's befitting...

Because I'm still tinkering with concepts and building more and more infrastructure to be able to churn out content at ever growing speed in the future.

While fighters basically needed no tweaking (and commoners are for masochists who like to die "very hard") tinkers give you access to a nice bunch of tools and hint at the creativity that JADE will allow for in the coming releases.

But thieves?

They got a little bit shorts-changed so far if you don't mind the pun.

Traps are not yet included in JADE 0.2.0 (if I'm very fast with the implementation progress I might add a couple though). Locked doors don't work so far. But at least thieves picks are in. Although useless for now.

So basically it's clear that I need to push thieves a bit more before releasing JADE 0.2.0.

Thus tonight I added searching and secret doors. The cool thing about the search infrastructure being that it's once more highly generic: It works all the same already - no matter whether you might be able to discover a secret door, a trap, some hidden item or maybe even some detail on a statue. Which is kind of cool and will help to breath even more life into future JADE features.

As for the current implementation JADE differentiates between two search modes: casual searching (e.g. you are doing something else) and detailed searching (e.g. you spend one or more turns actually searching). Casual searching is harder and uses a much lower chance of success but happens automatically. Detailed searching is activated by an explicit command (as in ADOM).

And what does this have to do with thieves? Thieves are a lot more effective at searching than any other professions. Both when doing casual searches and when actually searching actively. So being a thief will be very nice in JADE as many hard to find things will come much easier to your PC.

Next are locks (you need to be able to pick them in JADE 0.2.0) and maybe a trap or three. Hopefully. I want to get the release out by sunday latest so I need to hurry a bit :-)

See ya!

6 comments:

  1. Just don't forget another way to get through doors too. It would stink if (k)ick weren't implemented and no one but a thief could open a door.

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  2. It would be good if there was some logic applied to the locking of doors and application of traps even within randomly generated locations.

    It always bugged me in ADOM when you found a hidden, booby trapped door, leading to a trapped tunnel, leading to another locked, trapped door, leading to an empty 2x2 room.

    With caves generated in any size and shape, finding hidden doorways is going to be a nightmare in JADE at the best of times.

    So if searching is to be more of a rarefied skill it would be good if that which is hidden, trapped or locked was done with purpose (be it to protect whatever's inside, or to protect outsiders from the contents).

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  3. While I am looking forward to testing the next release, if you want to spend an extra week preparing locks/traps, that's fine by me - you lost a week due to illness, I don't have any issues with you pushing your timetable back!

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  4. Will there be different types of door?

    I know there were some suggestions about various materials... doors of stone, metal, glass... doors with barred windows. Especially the secret doors -- discovering that a square of wall is actually a wooden secret door? How does that work?

    Some ideas:

    Door opening directions: it's easier to kick in door that opens outwards than one that opens towards you. Some doors (like secret wall panels) could slide into the wall.

    Multiple locks: the very important doors could have several locks.

    Bolts: Bolts would work like locks, but from one side they can be easily latched and unlatched, while they are inaccessible from the other side. Opening them from the other side would require either special tools or some sort of power, like telekinesis.

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  5. Playing a tinker, I find that I can tunnel through the stone walls of houses but not use my pickaxe to go through the door. That seems odd!

    I look forward to the tinker being able to do, well, much of anything!

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  6. I'm sure that locking your doors will add some security. Thanks.
    locksmith in Wichita

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