Drugs (Programming)

Drugs are used to affect some change on the player over time. In this simplest case this is simply the player ingesting a drug of some sort. For instance, the speed drug will boost your reflexes and lower your cool for a while. Drugs can also be used to cause things like diseases, or bleeding, or damn near anything else.

To get an idea of what is possible, take a look at the output of the command '@leaves $drug':

 thc (#798)
 crank (#5066)
 bleeding (#814)
 healing (#796)
 shock (#646)
 radiation sickness (#1324)
 rot (#1522)
 black lung (#1883)
 ebola (#1813)
 stage I zombie rot (#2511)
 stage II zombie rot (#2282)
 organic tobacco (#1328)
 suffocation (#1042)
 coma (#919)
 thirst (#1065)
 water (#1088)
 curare (#1530)
 alcohol (#1112)
 nutrition (#895)
 caffeine (#2652)

Drugs are a way for you to affect a players stats or cause some action on every heartbeat.

Verbs

• $creature:ingest(OBJ drug, INT doses) -- add this many doses of the drug to the creature's bloodstream

• $drug:onset(user, doses) -- do whatever needs doing when use first takes the drug. By default this just prints a the drug's .onset_msg to the user, if it exists.

• $drug:reup(OBJ drug, INT doses) -- do whatever needs doing when the user takes this many more doses of the drug. By default this just prints the drug's .reup_msg to the user, if it exists.

• $drug:overdose(OBJ user) -- do whatever needs doing when user overdoses on this drug. By default this just prints the drug's .overdose_msg to the user.

• $drug:metabolize(OBJ user) -- this verb is responsible for removing the drug from the user's bloodstream when his heart beats. How this happens is governed by the properties defined below. This verb also checks for an overdose condition and triggers that. If the drug is metabolized in part, the verb will print the drug's .decay_msg, if it exists. If the drug is completely metabolized, the verb will print the drug's .final_decay_msg, if it exists.

• $drug:effect(OBJ user) -- this is the verb that calls :metabolism on every heartbeat. This is what you would override to cause the drug to perform some action on every heartbeat, like inserting actions into the action queue, etc.

Properties

• .onset_msg -- what's printed to the user when they first take the drug, if anything
• .reup_msg -- what's printed to the user when they take more of the drug, if anything
• .decay_msg -- what's printed when the user partially metabolizes the drug, if anything
• .final_decay_msg -- what's printed when all of the drug is metabolized, if anything
• .overdose_msg -- what's printed when the user overdoses on this drug, if anything

Note that the _msg properties can also be lists of strings. If so, the drug will pick one of these strings at random when printing the message

• .halflife -- this is a list {INT chance, INT min, INT max} that determines how the drug gets metabolized. First, the drug rolls to see if the metabolization happens at all. This is where 'chance' comes in. Chance is the percentage chance (0-100) that any of the drug gets metabolized. If roll succeeds then the drug eliminated between 'min' and 'max' doses from the user's bloodstream, at random.

• .overdosage -- the threshold number of doses that can trigger an overdose

• .skill_mods -- a list of lists, with each sublist containing {OBJ skill, FLOAT modifier}. For each dose in the user's bloodstream (up to the .overdosage level) this modifier will be added to that skill for the user. Negative numbers mean a penalty, positive numbers are a bonus.

Note that these can be fractional, so that if you set it mod to be {skill, 0.25} you will only get a +1 when you have four doses (the fractional part is ignored in the final comparison).

• .addiction -- this points to the addiction drug that corresponds to this drug, if the drug is addictive. See Drug Addiction for more info on that.