Post:PLAY 2.0 FAQ - 6/26/2006 - 6:45:52

Re: PLAY 2.0 FAQ · on 6/26/2006 6:45:52 AM	16
Heyo! Some more FAQ coming right up! Question: Can any style make a song more difficult than Confident & Masterful, or easier than Off-key & Halting? Answer: Masterful is as hard as it gets for styles. Off-Key is as easy as it gets for styles. Some other mood/styles may be as hard or easy, but they are the extremes. Question: Okay, that answers that, but how exactly do styles/moods modify difficulty? I'm getting odd results sometimes. Answer: Let's examine play difficulty completely. Instrument difficulty provides the base. If an instrument requires 100 ranks to play well, then you'll need to have 100 ranks to play a bonus-neutral song/style on it and be challenged. So far so good? Song difficulty is simply added to instrument difficulty, so if a song has a difficulty rating of 100, then you'd need ~200 ranks on the previously mentioned instrument. Still with me? Styles/Moods, on the other hand, are a percent modification, which may be why people see some unexpected results. In fact, I'll be specific. Off-key reduces the difficulty by 40%, Halting by 20%. Confident raises difficulty by 20%, and Masterful raises difficulty by 40%. The rest will raise/lower the difficulty by -40% to +40% varying from song to song, depending on the style. What this means is that in our original example, we have a 100 rank instrument playing a 100 rank song, for 200 ranks total difficulty. If we play that Off-key, it is reduced to 120 ranks. If we try for Masterful, we raise it to 280 ranks. Make sense? Question: Is it possible to play along with others? Answer: Not yet. The hooks and a lot of the mechanics are already in place, but since group mechanics is handled by SING, and SING itself needs an overhaul, we won't be seeing this feature until singing is tackled. Question: What about playing Song Scrolls? Answer: Same as playing with others. The hooks and a bulk of the mechanics are in place already, but the song scroll system itself needs to be updated to support it. In short, not yet, but it's coming. Question: What impact does the rewrite have on enchantes? Answer: Right now, very little. When Magic 2.0 was written, Enchantes basically got their own unique handling for PLAY and SING. That means many of the new features of play don't apply to enchantes. This will be changing at some point in the foreseeable future. One of our goals is to try to get more things using the same utilities and commands, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Many of the utilities made for the new play were made with the intent of having enchantes plug into them as well once I can get deeper into core magic. Question: Why /perform and /dance? Why not just PLAY PERFORM <message> or PLAY DANCE WALTZ? Answer: Those of you who use SING a lot can probably guess why if you think about it. SING has long had some issues with parsing because it will check for song scroll titles, enchante names, and emotes before it assumes the rest is messaging. This leads to some annoying situations where the first word in lyrics will be assumed to be an emote, enchante, or song scroll title. To get around this, we'll be moving to /commands for emotes and qualifiers so that they aren't confused with song or enchante names. In addition, I just wanted to keep things as consistant as possible between the new PLAY and the new SING once we get to that. - GM Dartenian
This message was originally posted in The Bards (21) \ Bard Guild FAQ (16), by DR-DARTENIAN on the play.net forums.