Heh, that's all we'd need is monsters popping up in the middle of walls, or halfway in sloped floors, then
falling into netherspace to attack us with impunity. I don't think it's a bad idea, but I think you're
oversimplifying the difficulty in implementation. It has already been demonstrated how fragile the thin
plane of ground we walk on is. Certainly with respect to getting things to stay on that ground, and not
below it.
Laluni Songhammer of E'Ci
"Kimes, Dean W." wrote:
> From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>
>
> I can think of a couple ways to fix that fairly easily. Whenever a Mob
> spawns, just offset its location by a random number in the X and Y
> directions and pop him to the nearest surface. This would make the game a
> heck of a lot more difficult at higher levels where a spawn that pops up on
> the other side of a wall is suddenly part of a melee in another room that
> wasn't expecting more trouble because everything was 'predictable' Camping
> a spawn in a dungeon would become really tough if anyone was camping nearby
> spawns as well.
>
> Just the amusement of have the PGT Mucktail suddenly spawn between the two
> medd'ing wizards instead of in front of the tanks would be worth the coding
> difficulty. This cannot be that hard to code, obviously monsters spawn at
> fixed locs, just insert a function call to the random number generator to
> offset the database coords passed to the spawner and you'd be done. If
> their design is any good, this should be easy to implement.
>
> Kitasi
>
> In all seriousness, Verant has painted themselves into a
> corner with the basic game design where nearly everything is
> predictable. The same mobs spawn in the same places carrying
> the same items and can be killed using the same tactics. The
> only things that really require strategy are multi-mob fights,
> and exploring. Given the high degree of predictability, it's
> virtually impossible to make things challenging - once you
> figure out how it works, it's predictable, and no longer
> challenging; so they're stuck with making things tedious.
> --
> John H. Kim
>
> > Please send submissions for the eqbards newsletter to lol@... with the subject submissions.
--
Steven S. Klug
sklug@...