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Re: Mutilple maps?


On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 09:24, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >From hard experience, I should say that this approach, while
> having the appeal of greater abstraction in the code, doesn't
> work very well in practice.  What typically happens that the
> abstraction is easy to understand and implement, you do it, but
> then the real purpose of the abstraction is hard to implement and
> never gets done.  Xconq is littered with hundreds of these - clouds
> for instance, which have map layers, GDL, etc, but there isn't any
> way for a game to use them (I originally had the idea of using them
> to protect parts of a battlefield from air attack and maybe ranged
> fire, but that part was never done).

It seems to me that the best way to implement clouds might be to use a
terrain coating that behaves like a particle system, using position,
velocity, acceleration, and gravity.  It could then affect affect units
using thickness, attack-terrain-effect, and/or defend-terrain-effect. 
It could even be flexible enough that the same algorithm could be
adapted to nebulae in space games, or forest fires in games that deal
with guerrilla warfare (using attrition to damage units).

I might have enough time this summer to work on such a project.


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