Serum

[Zyx]

Reported by Parallax:
No matter which level the serum potion is, it cures any level of poisonning.

[beowuuf]

This is exactly how it works in DM - clones and DM2 handle it differently (even RTC subtly has high level poisoning not cured right away) but the standard serum potion simply removes the poisoning bit!

[Zyx]

ah ok. I wonder if would be hard to make it work differently, so that higher levels of serum potions become useful.
Paul, what do you say?

[Parallax]

Another option would be to turn a pound of cure into an ounce of prevention. Have the anti-poison potion actually prevent further poisoning for a while after it's ingested.

[beowuuf]

Well, given the iterations it took to get RTC right, and the fact DMJava has this effect too strong, and givne the fact people play CSBwin to be as close to the original as possible (so starting party killed when they can't cure poison instantly) then perhaps it would be better this was merely somehtign you could do with DSAs in a custom

If so, at the moment we can't actually interrupt the poison message to downgrade it ourselves, and I seem to recall Paul sayign doing anything to a message in play was bad

It seems to me that what we need as a &POISON+ or &POISON- message that will basically a) do what the serum posion currently does, however it does it (which is stop all poison messages and reset the poison tag of the character) but then b) has read the values on the poison counters, and then c) creates a new poison damage message with either a slightly increased or decreased frequency (essentially expanding what the current &poison tag does) - at this time you would also need to re-set the poison flag if the message has been generated. Oh, of course, if the decrement made whatever poisoning values negative then the poisoning event woulnd't happen

That way when you drink a serum, you can use the feeding filter to tell you are drinkign it, how powerful it is, and then use the &poison-, or use &POISON with a negative value say to sure poison

You oculd also therefore create an increasing poison event until you found the cure too - you can constantly &poison+ a charatcer and ensure the poisoning stays and increases

Just a thought

Also, you could ennact parallax's suggestion too this way - when you drin ka serum, a das could go through continues loops to the number of it's strength, each time generateing a huge values &poison- message to stop poisoning

[Paul Stevens]

This is not
a variable stored with the character's
other attributes. The poison effects
are buried in timer entries. There are
only two calls to 'CurePoison'. One when
a character dies (to get rid of those
timer entries that would othewise be
directed at a non-existent character) and
one when an Anti-venom is drunk.

We could add a parameter to the call to
'CurePoison' that would deleted all or some
of the timer entries or reduce the length
of time that a timer entry will exist and
repeatedly cause poison damage.

Who would decide how each level of
Anti-venom should work? Not I. But
it seems reasonable that something like
that should be implemented.

Each entry has a value that says how
many times it will cause damage. It is
decremented each time. The actual damage
done is that number divided by 64 (or a
minimum of 1).

[Zyx]

Then how many times it would for the strongest poison? 255?

In this case, since the serum would have a range from 1 to 255 (casting at max power gives a potion of strength 240 i think), the length of the poison could be reduced by that amount for example.

[Paul Stevens]

If you want to set up a mini-dungeon
and provide a recording of examples
of min/max poison effects and min/max
serum effects......

I can step through the code to tell you
the exact numbers I see. Then you could
decide what mathematical functions to
apply to get the effect you think best.