Game Development: Improved kin system

[Chakravanti]

This limits the ability of players to hide behind objects.

I know, I'm not perfectly happy with that either. I'm not entirely sure what to do about it, though.

Make it so names only appear if you are kinned and Rollovers only appear if you have memorized someone.

[CG62]

Idea: Make it so that if you don't see someone you've memorized for a while, you forget them. Intelligence would warrant how long, but I'm thinking about a week or two.


If you see someone often, it should be several months, or even years before you forget them (ingame, of course).

[Laremere]

Scents being turned into wanted posters that you could memorize off of so that when you see them ingame you notice that, or you recognize someone you've memorized on a wanted poster would be cool.

[nefadbr]

I've addicioned a Kin today, and make a party with him, his name appears normal in the Party Chat, but my name appears "????".

[eql]

ius there a limit to how much you can memorise?

Not currently, but I have been considering if it might be a good idea to limit it by Intelligence or so. I'm not sure yet.

my thoughts exactly

[Potjeh]

That would be 10 times worse than the perception requirement for viewing quality.

If you really must tie in intelligence somehow, have it used for describing people. Ie, you can share your nicknames for people with other people. If some intelligence rolls are passed, the other guy will recognize the described person even if he sees him for the first time. It shouldn't be a sure thing, of course, but even in real life you can often recognize people just from hearing their description.

[sabinati]

yeah there's really no good reason to limit it.

[loftar]

yeah there's really no good reason to limit it.

Ah, you mean apart for the reasons of performance when someone's character takes measurable time to load and when it starts taking significant bandwidth to transfer the kinlist to the client, because that someone has decided to memorize a million users? ;) I do frown at every new loop I have to introduce at the server side where the length is player-controllable. Sooner or later, someone's going to abuse it, wittingly or not.

Also, it is arguable that it is unreasonable to be able to remember the face of an unlimited number of people, especially for an unlimited amount of time, and even more so when you've only seen them once and briefly. To be more precise, though, if I were going to do the limitation at all, I was only planning to limit the number of memorized-but-not-kinned characters; the number of characters someone has kinned will probably limit itself naturally.

[sabinati]

well i see your point, i just hope that if you do some limitation that it's not something like noobs can only memorize 10 people or something like that. maybe have it be a reasonably large static number increased by one percent for each point of int, or per, or the average of the two, or something like that? maybe have the memorization expire after a period of time determined by int? i dunno i'm just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, as it were.

it is reassuring though, that number of kins wouldn't be artificially limited.

[Gauteamus]

That would be 10 times worse than the perception requirement for viewing quality.

If you really must tie in intelligence somehow, have it used for describing people. Ie, you can share your nicknames for people with other people. If some intelligence rolls are passed, the other guy will recognize the described person even if he sees him for the first time. It shouldn't be a sure thing, of course, but even in real life you can often recognize people just from hearing their description.

I can not understand why it would be so hopeless to tie this to intelligence?
Why is it bad that intelligence is a desired trait (maybe tie it to Charisma instead, as it currently has no uses, and a major part of a persons charisma I'd say is tied to his ability to remember and have interest in people (more so, seeing that all hearthlings look the same, and all have the same level of personal hygiene: none)).

The effect should not be linear of course, maybe something like (WARNING: randomly chosen formula ahead):
Max_kinlist = 50 + sqrt(Cha)