I used Ethelon's free system for a long time, but I was never really involved in combat that much. I recently started a new character, bought credits, and I'm developing my own system from scratch. So far it's coming along fairly nicely, but I was curious about the way other people implement Psionics.

Typically I like to have an alias for any skill I learn that will attack my target variable if I just type the alias, or will attack whatever I type after the alias otherwise. With psionics and telekinesis you have to also specify the channel that you want to use, but some skills can only use certain channels, and which channel affects how quickly you can use them. I was wondering how other people integrate psionics into their systems.

I currently have a bunch of combos that I use in combat most frequently, but I'd still like to have an individual alias for each skill. The ways I'm currently considering are setting up a tracking system to remember what channels are currently available, and which are off balance or locked. Then it would cycle through in order of preference checking each channel that skill could use and that one. Alternately, I could ditch the tracking system, and just whore each available channel and gag the spam.

Like I said, I'm just curious.

Just make aliases for using the skills on each channel. There's really very few skills you'd want to use on multiple channels anyway (for example, even though trip works on id and sub I'd only ever use it on id; and even though heartburst works on id and super I'd almost only ever use it on id because I'd bodyscan with super first).

So you're saying to have two seperate aliases to use Heartbust on id and on super? Something along those lines?

Yup.

"hb": psi id heartburst @tar
"hbs": psi super heartburst @tar

Morik's system apparently figures out dynamically which channels are open, between substratus and superstratus.

I was working on that. I didn't find it to be worth the time, because you still have to remember what can be used on what channels in order to get anything interesting done.

I use zMUD, but my Psionics script keeps track of which channels are available, and automatically selects which ones to use for each power, going in the order of of Substratus, Superstratus, ID. Only ones I force a channel for are locked channels.

If you're going to do that though, I'd suggest having a small status window or the like which tells you which channels are free (And which ones are coming up to be free), so that you can time your attacks more efficiently (And also easily decide if you're coming around to a point in your attack cycle where you can stop using Psionics without wasting a lot of time doing nothing).