ACR Rollout

[Zelknolf]

We're rolling out another version of the ACR onto our servers this weekend.

Related to the discussions in Standards about adjusting loot drops by the looting party, slain monsters are now going to have wealth vary both randomly and by the wealth of the looting party.

People who are uninterested in the details need to only really pay attention to that the ACR will follow our (very old) DMA guideline to drop less in mixed parties, with the expectation of making it up to the poor people later. There is also handling for if items are dropped or exchanged between PCs before looting (with a fairly-long-term, but not permanent, definition of "before" -- giving something away a month ago doesn't count for anything, but if your best pal in the next area is suddenly at the cutoff because of all the stuff you gave him, the ACR will not drop anything for you, though that too functions with more-reasonable limits; giving low-value gear to the guy with the bag of holding doesn't really have an impact), but not if items are destroyed (as they're gone forever) or sold (as you now have money, which counts).

I might extend advice to people to try to play in diverse groups if that's possible, as being in the same mixed group every time you adventure makes it very hard to make random drops fix anything.

For actual changes...
-- The problem with SetHitPoints behaving oddly, as recorded in the last changelog, is corrected. SetHitPoints should now actually try to place the creature's current hit points to its argument
-- The Touch Attack monster feat now accommodates Allips (doing wisdom drain until driving their target insane) and Greater Shadows (doing 1d8 strength damage until it kills their target). The string values of "ACR_TOUCH_ATTACK" are "ALLIP" and "GREATER SHADOW" respectively.
-- The OOC horse appearance item should now weigh a little less, to help mitigate its brutal OOCness.
-- ACR_Candlekeep now stores information about all base item types, which the ALFA.Shared assembly can provide on request.
-- NPCs on the ACR AI are now better at identifying which items in their inventories are actually weapons, and should no longer attempt to wield non-weapons as weapons.
-- Slain monsters now modify their loot dropped by x4 (for very-poor parties), x2 (for poor parties), x1 (for near-target-wealth parties), x0.5 (for rich parties), x0.2 (for very-rich parties; decimal truncation is the reason this is not in practice 0.25). Parties containing members who are above the wealth cutoff will receive no loot for killing monsters.
-- The acr_wealth_i library provides ACR_CalculateMultiplier(object oPC) and ACR_CalculateCombatMultiplier(object oPC), if module-specific content wishes to work with these systems.
-- A bug that could cause incorporeal creatures to still drop corporeal things is corrected.
-- NPCs who slay other NPCs will not prompt the dropping of loot.

[Zelknolf]

Followup rollout fixes a crash when creatures on the new AI would call to one another for help but not know what to do.

Also fix cases where stacks of nonmagical special material ammunition would be grossly-overpriced.

Also dragon disciples need 8 ranks of knowledge (arcana) instead of 8 ranks of Lore. (but, due to the mechanics available with the engine, Red and Gold dragon disciples are the only options that work right).

Also fixed (greater) shadow touch attacks, which were healing strength damage caused by other shadows this last week.

[FoamBats4All]

Released another bump a couple of days ago:

• Custom poisons work now.
• A fix that makes the Set Description button on PC tools call up the same GUI for editing as the context menu when brought up on oneself (that is, the one that works).
• Creatures on BEHAVIOR_TYPE_FLANK should now try to backstab nearby people who are beating up their friends instead of attempting opportunistic strikes on distant foes (as that tends to mean doing dumb things like running through tangled melee and drawing AoOs, or drawing a ranged weapon and drawing AoOs).

[Zelknolf]

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/view ... =3&t=51057 ?

[FoamBats4All]

Oh, bler. Missing news post on the front page, just assumed.

Carry on.