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

Wed Jan 19 17:56:04 PST 2022

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 6:49 PM Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

Yeah, I think teams will overcomplicate it for now-- and yes, having
scripting hooks so people can customize this behavior will be the best way
to get advanced fancy effects

I do kinda like the idea of being able to make a confused enemy target all,
rather than only the opposite side, but I'll have to think if there is a
nice simple way to do that.

>
>
>>
>> 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.
>

Yes, you are right. is_hero and is_enemy attributes are much better than
what I was thinking of with the accessor functions for bslot. Glad you said
it :)

> 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.
>

Ah, right! Those only get used in animations, so the slice is all that
really matters :)

>
>
>> 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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