Gold and encumbrance [RESOLVED]

nposner
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Gold and encumbrance [RESOLVED]

Post by nposner »

Not sure if this is a bug or feature, but it seems no longer possible to pick up a single item if that item would put you over your encumbrance. That's all well and good, but It also makes it impossible to remove large sums of gold from your wagon, since there is no way to split up the gold as far as I know. End result is that there's a big stash of gold in my wagon I can't do anything with. This was not the case as of the previous version.

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Hazelnut
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by Hazelnut »

Probably an unintended consequence of the last bugfix I made. I will take a look when I get a chance but about to go on holiday so I may need a reminder in 2 weeks. Thanks for the report.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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Hazelnut
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by Hazelnut »

So now the weight checks take notice of stack sizes, it's impossible to get gold out of your cart. Either an exception can be made for gold to allow you to go over encumbrance, or I could make it so the bank sees the gold in your cart so you can deposit and get a note.

Any preferences? I'm going to sleep on it.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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Hazelnut
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by Hazelnut »

I decided to allow gold in wagon to be deposited at bank instead of allowing you to take it out and be loads overweight. I think it's more atmospheric that way.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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King of Worms
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by King of Worms »

Makes sense, thanks for fixing this!

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mikeprichard
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by mikeprichard »

I know this goes beyond the scope of the bug report, but has anyone ever considered a game option to make gold weightless? Of course it wouldn't be realistic, but I personally always found gold having weight to be more of a hassle than anything after a while. Maybe that's mod territory, but just curious.

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Jay_H
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by Jay_H »

Well, Daggerfall is known for being a game brutally biased against you. Little mercies seem contrary to its nature :lol:

BansheeXYZ
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by BansheeXYZ »

Mike wrote: Wed Sep 05, 2018 11:40 pm I know this goes beyond the scope of the bug report, but has anyone ever considered a game option to make gold weightless? Of course it wouldn't be realistic, but I personally always found gold having weight to be more of a hassle than anything after a while. Maybe that's mod territory, but just curious.
Having played lots of RPGs over the years, I agree with you. We'll see a mod with this. Realism is never the goal with encumbrance mechanics, it's just some pen and paper carryover that doesn't really translate in modern games. Realistically, your character wouldn't be able to carry 20 armor pieces, bags of gold, etc. And if he could, it would slow him down gradually with each piece.

Games that have hunger meters do similar things. Ever played Ultima 7? Your party members are constantly complaining about needing fed, interrupting the things that are actually fun like dialog, fighting, and exploration.

Another dubious mechanic is "identify". Would you really enjoy the game less if you knew an item's magical properties the moment you picked it up? Of course not. It's always been some stupid D&D thing where you're gambling a hefty sum to know. But when it's super cheap to identify, then you're always going to do it and it just becomes busywork. Like Diablo.

Al-Khwarizmi
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

As another veteran RPG player, I agree this kind of features shouldn't be abused in game design as they often do more harm than good, but there are some games that do hunger and identify right. For example, I recommend ADOM for both features. Hunger management is very fun in the early game, especially because many monster corpses have properties, beneficial or not, and you can do stuff like cook corpses with a fire bolt. The identification feature is also really nice, leading to epic situations like being on the verge of death, and as a last resort drinking a random potion or zapping an unidentified wand at a monster without knowing what it is (maybe it will teleport the enemy away, or kill it with a fire bolt, but it can also make it stronger!). I have had a lot of fun with that. However, in most RPGs (as opposed to roguelikes) identification doesn't work too well, as without permadeath you don't have that kind of epic moments, and you can just try the wand and reload. I think it can still be nice, to keep a sense of wonder about an item and delay the moment you find out what it does, but it's not really such a great feature.

On the other hand, I agree with you about encumbrance, it's mostly a busywork feature that makes the player spend time micromanaging without really making the game more difficult, just more tedious. Especially in games that have really strict limits. Ultima Underworld was an almost perfect game, but its worst part (by a mile) was that you could take very few items so a large part of game time was spent micromanaging inventory, stashes and keeping track of stash location, which is like the opposite of fun. Some roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup have taken the step to semi-automate stash management (with commands to take you to one of your stashes, and things like that), which I think is absolutely crazy... if you need to automate a part of a game so that the player doesn't spend so much time in it, maybe that mechanic shouldn't be there in the first place?

Fortunately, Daggerfall is far from being one of the worst offenders in this.

By the way, another feature that I feel is detrimental in most games is level scaling. One of the few games that get it right in my view is, again, ADOM. In Daggerfall it's not too bad. In Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, it's terrible and the games benefit a lot from removing it.

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mikeprichard
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Re: Gold and encumbrance

Post by mikeprichard »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: Thu Sep 06, 2018 10:23 am On the other hand, I agree with you about encumbrance, it's mostly a busywork feature that makes the player spend time micromanaging without really making the game more difficult, just more tedious.
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: Thu Sep 06, 2018 10:23 am By the way, another feature that I feel is detrimental in most games is level scaling. One of the few games that get it right in my view is, again, ADOM. In Daggerfall it's not too bad. In Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, it's terrible and the games benefit a lot from removing it.
Couldn't possibly agree more on both counts. Level scaling in my opinion almost always destroys both immersion and the sense of player progression - i.e. two critical components that make a CRPG fun in the first place - and should be killed universally with fire. Encumbrance and other survival mechanics, depending on the game, may in some cases at least not detract from game aspects that are actually fun/challenging as opposed to tedious/busywork, but even when I played classic Daggerfall way back in the day, the gold/letter of credit micromanagement just became an annoyance. But DFU is still young - there's time for mods post-1.0 that might do something here. Appreciate everyone's input! (And sorry for hijacking the bug topic.)

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