Thanks for the interesting replies. I couldn''t find anything much than a paragraph description of Amiga Vision(at Google or Altavista), but it sounds like its along the lines of part of what I''m looking for. Loom sounds really cool, I just looked at it, It''s good to know that at least someone else tried something like this once .
Does anyone think this could enhance other aspects of game play? I was thinking of ways to make Magic systems more fun and evolutionary and thats how I got started on this idea, but I''m wondering what other kinds of things this could be used into. Weapon smithing? Religious orders? In my MMORPG, player characters can eventually be "translated" into deities. There are plenty of issues this brings up, but gods will have plenty of ways of having fun without molesting mortals; however they can influence the mortal plane by creating items to give(or "bind") to mortals. Maybe the deity could enhance the items by attaching a script to it? Of course I''ll have to work this into my item existance equations(some kind of component system is looking good here too). The Equation is a test which determines whether an item can exist, the simplistic expression of it is: Add all the "good" enhancements(damage, stats bonuses, etc.) and subtract all the "bad" enhancements(slow attack, stat detriments, etc.) and there are some scaling factors. Anyway, if the value exceeds a certain value, the weapon cannot be created.
I like the idea of "elemental" stuff, and runes, and some of the other things suggested. Here''s some more of my thoughts after reading some replies, was thinking(more like a programmer) of "components" which require certain things(like reagents, stats, environmental conditions, nothing). They would have inputs and outputs. You connect them to anything else. A complete spell could also be used as a component. There would be targetting components(area affect, person, location, etc.), summoning, elemental, inverter. Very "basic" sorts of things. The components individually succeed or fail, and the results feed forward(or backward) through the rest of the spell. If they all fail or feedback to the caster, sucks to be him. Perhaps there could even be components which prevent things from flowing back on the caster(at the expense of the qualities it feeds forward into the rest of the spell).