A Land Far Away

I've been away quite a long time so I may have forgotten something already in place or missed a discussion on this but what system do we have or plan to have for identifying the material composition of items?

For a module I wrote a little while back I added a single letter to a carefully formatted tag to represent this data. eg.

A = iron
B = steel
C = oak
D = ...

In my module I used this to determine among other things whether a rust monster could destroy an item, also I totalled up the quantity of metal on each PC within range and had the rust monster go for the most metalicious PC.

I know some items are a composite of materials but I wasn’t aiming for an all out simulation - just for a simple check such as wooden items vs. fire damage etc.

I've actually thought about this quite a bit, and the possibility of using a local variable or item property to specify what material an item is made out of. The problem is, I don't know if builders will actually use such options properly. I think an item property stands a good chance of being used rather often, though a GetObjectMaterialType() would likely execute a bit slower with item properties when compared to local variables.

We won't start making items for the base mod until NWN2 has gone gold, so we have some time to think about it. However, the best solution might be to simply ommit the rust monster from the pallet, and concentrate on other things. Unless there are a significant number of features we need material types for, it may not be worth the effort (mostly the builder's).