by pheonix » Tue Jun 12, 2018 6:25 am The weight based system has been implemented in many rpgs and even...salem (to a decent degree ish) and when done correctly is a fun mechanic to work with, but when implemented by a brain dead moron with no concept of mass it can be horrendous (ie metal bars in salem weighed so much you could only move a few at a time). Now the weight system on its own is one thing but to be effective here we need to couple it with an extended inventory of at least a few hundred slots but for this situation ill suggest a nice 640 slots or 10 cupboards worth with a simple ui of 8x8 with a scrollbar.
So to begin we look at the Pros and cons of this system and whether it would be of any use or we should live with 20-90 slots forever.
Cons:
1700 ish items would need to have weights assigned to them a tedious event but once done is done.
All future items created need a weight assigned
People can only carry a few of current items they could hold dozens of (B12s, metal bars) currently until they adapted.
Deciding on what affects the weight of an object and whether we could carry it
Needing more storage to hold the amount of items we hoard. (if i can hold 72 items atm and i have a few hundred cupboards how many would i need if i can hold 9x that?
Needing high strength to accomplish alot of tasks we do now.
There is more but atm i cant think of them and people will no doubt point them out.
Pros:
Increased inventory to hold lots of light items (seeds, food items, forageables).
Alot of currently tedious tasks such as farming, block and board gathering, construction, tree forageable gathering( mulberry and apples) and gardening harvesting become alot easier tasks for people as we can go along and do entire harvests at once.
less clicks needed when doing current tasks (server load perhaps this might affect).
For example in order to harvest a mulberry tree i need to click tree>pick leaf>right click leaf on ground> shift left click put 73 leaves in> then repeat this 4 times whereas if i have an expanded inventory and because 250 leaves is like maybe a couple of kilos i could do this in 1 go and then move it to my desired area in one go.
Forces farmers to actually utilize strength leveling just as much as a fighter does now so they can also switch to fighting in dire situations and not be like oh no i only have 100 str vs your 2000+ (next world i really doubt we have to deal with 20k titans again for a very very long time).
Raiding and thieving are both pro and con as you can takes lots of curios in one raid but you have to use up alot of hp and have to balance out what you take vs being able to run properly. Say you wanted to raid a base with 3 friends and your going through and find a ton of gold bars you grab them and then reinforcements show up, now your encumbered do you drop some or all of your loot to fight. i can see alot of situations where greedy raiders will be slowed down and then get ganked because they didnt want to give up their loots. this leads to other situations where inventory weight has to be managed.
Now where do we start since this isnt an easy implementation but we need a starting point as we have a few problems initially to deal with. Well we look at the basics of what a character currently needs to be able to do when starting fresh. we need to be able to lift 100kgs above us but hold 10-15 kgs for buckets of water or barrels of water.
i would suggest we seperate the 4 movement speeds like this:
Crawl => Lifting >= 100 Kg where max strength is less than 100Kg ( can be applied for chests and cupboards as weight of contents >= max strength )
Crawl => carrying > 150% of max inventory weight capacity
Walk => Lifting >= 100 Kg where max strength is equal or greater than 100Kg ( can be applied for chests and cupboards as weight of contents >= max strength )
Walk => carrying <= 149% of max inventory
Run => Lifting >= 100 Kg where max strength is 3x or greater than 100Kg ( can be applied for chests and cupboards as weight of contents >= max strength )
Run => carrying < 100% of max inventory weight capacity
Sprint => Lifting >= 100 Kg where max strength is 10x or greater than 100Kg ( can be applied for chests and cupboards as weight of contents >= max strength )
Sprint => carrying < 50% of max inventory weight capacity
So that sorts out character speeds but what about item weights and building weights calculations do we go through every item and guess a weight? of course not we need to add in a calculation for all items of the base items and maybe add multipliers for certain ones. for example.
metal ingots = 1 kg
board of wood = 0.5kg (maybe different woods are lighter and more valueable)
block of wood = 1kg (maybe different woods are lighter and more valueable)
Shovel = 1 metal ingot +3x block of wood and hence thats a 2.5 Kg shovel and we apply that onwards and assign bas items weights and then crafted items a weight based on that and in certain situations add a multiply by 1.x or 0.x.
For foods this is easier as alot of the weights are already done for example bread weighs 2 Kg as dough and i assume lighter once baked
meat pies weigh 350grams flour 500 grams water egg at say 50grams and steak at 300grams (btw one day id hope we get cuts of meat from animals like t-bones ribs rumps for different dishes)
this brings a meat pie dough to 1.2 Kg which is about the right size for a decent meat pie for a family.
So taking this logic we can go through all base materials like boards blocks metals flour liquids and assign a base weight and then add to all crafted items a weight equation that just sums the base materials. we then have situations like food trough = 4x block +4x boards = 6 kgs, pretty easy to move about right but then remember it can hold 200L so if you were to pick it up you would crawl with it unless you put it into a cart and pulled it.
And finally we talk about how much strength a character should have starting out and in this case i would say minimum is 20-25 kg and probably do the same formula we have atm like strength is 20* sqrt(strength /10) so at say 251 strength i can walk with a barrel and when at 2250 strength i can run around with a barrel on my head. I would also suggest credos that add in modifiers for example miner adds a mod that makes ores, rocks and metal weight half as much or nomad adds a flat max weight capacity or farmer makes lifting produce weight a third as we know how to carry a bunch of leeks properly and not awkwardly. As for sacks and backpacks my idea was that they are separate inventories that have a flat % mod to make them lighter when carrying items like back packs make everything 40% lighter as its in an easier to carry method.
Oh and for the love of god we dont need stamina drain while holding items above our max weight limit, thats a tedious mechanic that only slows us down. alot of this can be said to slow us down but tbh when you start fresh faced in a new world you need to work into being a strong character that can do all these things and not some Goliath that can lift 500kg bears above our heads and run like a madman. you want to lift alot of things then gain more strength and or credos to increase limit.
