Post:Breath of Storms 3.0 - 12/31/2012 - 14:34

Re: Breath of Storms 3.0 · on 12/31/2012 02:34 PM CST	544
I'm sure it's been done, though I don't have any actual evidence of it beyond my gut. Generally speaking though it saves less time than you might think - they all have to be read, reviewed, edited (sometimes heavily), QC'ed, reformatted for our messaging system and actually entered into the system. Using Breath of Storms as an example there's maybe two dozen (depending on how exactly you count) messages just for intro/outro messaging, plus the various forms of misses, deflections etc. The hit table itself is 6x7 with some complex tokens and each message needs two versions (1st person and 3rd person), and in the case of BoS all of that is doubled for the cold message variants. If you really want to do it right (and frequently this isn't done just due to the massive increase in messaging overhead) you can write additional hit tables to account for noncorporeal undead, corporeal undead, amorphous creatures and exoskeletal creatures. That's how we make sure when you blast a ghost it doesn't bleed or have rotting flesh or make the carapace of a creature crack when you smash it etc. I didn't do that for BoS at this time, it was just turning into too time consuming of a process compared to what I need to do for 3.0, but it's something I'd like to go back to do at some point. Either way you're looking at around 100 different fairly complex messages (Many of which are close variants but need to be set up just right with grammar, tokens, etc) as the bare minimum for a TM spell and that can easily grow to a much larger sum. On the flip side something like Pyre was much faster to write since it uses simple hit messaging which is bland, but effect (And tends to get used mostly for multishot spells to cut down on the scroll). -Raesh
This message was originally posted in DragonRealms 3.0 \ Bards, by DR-RAESH on the play.net forums.