BSM Rank and Class System

[Kyle]

Yay, I'm back online and it dint cost me that much

Yay! Good for you and your wallet! Congratulations.

I needed some good news today; I wasn't able to get the primer painted over the now completely-scraped porch/steps, and there's a high chance of thunderstorms all day tomorrow. That means all of that rain will have access to the newly exposed pre-1978 paint, and that runoff could end up all over my lawn and sidewalk for my kids to get exposed to!

I'm honestly considering getting up at 4:30 AM and start painting with the just the porch light as my light source, and hope that the primer will be finished setting up before the first drops fall... I don't think that I have much choice on this matter. It's too scary to think of the alternatives.

I'm going to do a bit of writing, and then go to bed.

Yay...paint!

Good night!

[Kyle]

Is there some way whereby the Player could easily keep track of how his Parameters and Skills are advancing? For example, something like this...

Strength: 75 [+2](+1)
Sniping: 38 [+1]
Shooting: 43 [+4](+2)
Etc.

The red font is the current level, the green font would be from points spent by the Player whenever he leveled-up, and the blue font would be whenever the Player earned an attribute increase from doing something in-game (resulting from the game's default award system).

This way the Player could try and develop a "feel" on how certain actions in-game may/may not influence one's attribute advancement.

[R@S]

I'm not sure there is a way to change the color in the dialog, and even it was, it would require a lot of more coding. What you're suggesting would require the engine to keep a lot of numbers in the memory, something I always try to avoid due to the memory leak. I'm not inclined to change it since I'd never add something that might decrease stability. And if you ever get around to write the "How to train skills" FAQ it wouldn't be necessary

[MoreDread]

hey R@S, sorry for not getting back online that day.. i fell asleep before my laptop was returned

anyway.. i was fooling around with the class system and i came to these conlcusions:

first it would be great if you altered the dialogue... instead of first choosing to in or decrease your skills/parameters set it up like this:

first you choose skills or parameters
the response is a list of your choice, either all your skills or all your parameters

you can then make your pick, and once you have done that, your selected skill/parameter is shown yet again in the response.
you are then given the choice to either decrease, increase or go back.

this way you wouldn't have to print the whole list and click through the menu several times for every individual point you wanna spend.
only the skill/parameter you are changing would be shown, which should prevent a ctd because of too many lines in the dialogue. i was able to spend about 30 points before it crashes... this should make it possible to spend about a 100 or even more.

furthermore i think with 3 points to spend you're not really getting enough

its 48 points on a class skill or parameter
and only 16 on a non class one.

because there are only 16 cgls

so if you're starting with 30 in let's say stealth and you decide to max it out, you'd still only have 78 on cgl 16... that beeing the ONLY skill you raised.

how about 5 points per cgl, and 1 or 2 for every won battle?
that way you'd be able to max out one skill completely, or get 3 very high ones... and continue to get more points even when you've reached the max cgl... or without raising it if you prefer to stay in the earlier cgls to get better beforehand.

[Kyle]

MoreDread,

I wish that I had a more complete understanding of the cgl process myself. It leads me to ask questions like...

...if one maxes out the cgl level, will it impact one's ability to level up with the spending points method? I'm guessing that it wouldn't. The cgl level may be maxed, but one is still able to earn points and spend them.

Without doing any math, you may still be right that there aren't enough points being awarded in a timelier fashion. I can't say for sure because my hands have been tied from doing testing due to the porch work.

But at least I got the primer painted on yesterday.

One thing that needs to be kept in mind is the maximum attribute cap that R@S placed of 255. Again, without knowing for sure, I'd imagine that having Parameters and Skills at that high a number would make one's character virtually a god (where's the fun in that?), so R@S' leveling up setup may still work well in the bigger picture (which, again, I haven't been able to experience yet).

I hopped on to chat last night, but no one else was on. I logged in at 23:00 hours your time. Hopefully soon we can all bump minds on that thing!

[R@S]

I'm a bit tired after a very long day, but I'll try to explain it as best I can.

When you start a new game, after the vanilla skill distribution system, you'll get the opportunity to re-arrange the Parameters as well. This is the only opprtunity you'll ever get to decrease any stats, so the dialog changes mentioned dint make much sense to me. And these dialogs are "fixed", you can browse them as much as you like without having the "too long dialog tree" CTD.

Since you get 3 Skill points and 3 Parameter point to spend at every level up, this will be enough point at each level without the rick of a CTD. And I plan to remove the cheaterlvl function as soon as the testing of the system is complete, so no CTD by cheating either. In the meantime, please exit the Kill Book dialog when you sense that it's getting close to the limit, the point will still be there to spend afterward.

The level system is not tied to the CGL of the game, it's completely independent from it and is based on kills. After 20 kills you'll get to level 2, at 30 you'll get level 3 and so forth until you reach level 9, which requires 100 kills to avhieve. All the other levels also requires a 100 kills, and there are 100 levels. In the end, if you've killed 10550 enemies you would have had 300 skill points and 300 parameter points to spend. And I can also reward the player a few more points by adding it to the reward system in quests, making the total even higher.

Since I now have a new game progression variable, I can ignore the hard-coded CGL's and have things available at player class level instead. I could also have special shops available, selling stuff dependant on what class and level you have achieved, circumventing the entire vanilla CGL's.

[MoreDread]

aaalrighty then!