[Ohrrpgce] SVN: james/12694 New enemy bitset "Controlled by Player"

[Ralph Versteegen]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2022 at 13:49, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

> So I do have a few other changes related to this one planned.
> * An option to make heroes controlled by (random) AI
> * A concept of "traitor" which will affect targeting classes when an
> attacker is targeting
> * A concept of "turncoat" which will affect targetting classes when an
> target is being targeted
> * Attacks that can turn these effects on and off or set-to-default
>
> So an enemy with all 3 of Controllable, Traitor, and Turncoat would
> function as a hero for that one battle.
>
> To simulate a classic "Confuse" status, you would have an attack that
> turns Controllable off, and traitor on, but don't touch turncoat. Then to
> end that status, use an attack that sets Controllable and Turncoat back to
> default.
>

I was hoping this meant you were going down this direction :)

I'm not sure whether "Traitor" is proposed to swap foes and allies of a
target, or just makes everyone count as a foe. Those are two different ways
that you might want a Confused status to work, and it seems that these bits
would only allow one or the other.

What I was thinking was to give each combatant a team (default 1 for
heroes, 2 for enemies) and an "acting" team. A target is considered an ally
by an attacker if their team is the same as the attacker's acting team,
else they're a foe. Also team 0 could mean "independent", with no allies.
You probably wouldn't use more than a third team, for "Nature", say when a
clan of hyenas opportunistically attack while you're fighting someone
else).

So Confuse to make someone attack anyone indiscriminately would change
their acting team to 0 (so two confused targets still hit each other), and
to swap sides you'd change their acting team (although now I realise that
means the attack would need to be specific to use by heroes or enemies,
unless there was an attack bit like "swap target's acting team" that just
set it to the attacker's).

Maybe I've overcomplicated it again, while still not adding all that much
utility/flexibility (really should work on allowing script hooks for things
like this) vs just adding a third Independent bit.



>
> Or a classic Berzerk could be implemented with Controllable=Off and could
> end with controllable set to default (this would work for heroes, but
> wouldn't do anything meaningful on an enemy)
>
> This should allow a lot of possibilities, and is all pretty easy to
> implement.
>
> And yes, someone could totally fake 5 or 6 heroes in the party with this,
> by using an instead-of-battle script, and adding hero enemies to the
> formation with a script before the battle starts. Definitely not ideal, but
> fine if people want to try it.
>
> Actually increasing the size of the active party > 4 and increasing the
> number of enemies in a formation > 8 is something I definite;ly want to do,
> but it will require lots and lots of cleanup, which is outside of the scope
> of what I am trying to do right now. In particular, there are tons of
> places where the ID range within the bslot() array defines what a
> BattleSprite Instance does, so the first step of that cleanup will probably
> be to convert all access to bslot() to a set of accessor functions for
> heroes, enemies, attack sprites, and weapon sprites. Then those different
> ranges can be split apart into different arrays, which can be dynamically
> sized when you load a battle formation with 15 enemies in it, or something
> like that. But that is for later. I want to keep the scope of what I am
> working on broken down into bite-sized baby-steps to mix a metaphor :D
>

I don't think we would want to split bslot() into separate arrays for
heroes and enemies: being able to index across all of them with a bslot()
index is very useful and widely used (eg. targeting) so it would be a lot
of work to remove that. Why not just add is_hero and is_enemy attributes.
There's a lot of lines of code to change, but each would then be an easy
change. Could also start using polymorphism.

On the other hand, I do want to remove attacks and weapons from bslot() and
was considering doing it soonish. Almost all of the BattleSprite data is
irrelevant for them, and nearly all of the advantages of having them in
bslot are (or will be) gone now that battles are converted to slices.


> Fortunately I think the current features I am adding will not make any of
> that later work harder, and might even lead to a little helpful cleanup.
>
> ---
> James
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 8:22 AM Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Wow! That's not a feature I was expecting to see for a long time. A nice
>> surprise!
>>
>> I suppose this is particularly useful for giving the player extra actions
>> they can perform in battle. People are going to inevitable think to use it
>> to get around the 4 hero limit, but it seems really problematic for that.
>> Or is time to add team numbers to battles, so you can define which
>> combatants are "foe" or "ally"?
>>
>> On Mon, 17 Jan 2022 at 14:01, <subversion at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>>
>>> james
>>> 2022-01-16 17:01:32 -0800 (Sun, 16 Jan 2022)
>>> 39
>>> New enemy bitset "Controlled by Player"
>>> ---
>>> U   wip/bmodsubs.bas
>>> U   wip/enemyedit.bas
>>> U   wip/loading.rbas
>>> U   wip/udts.bi
>>> U   wip/whatsnew.txt
>>>
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