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Re: Item Units


Lincoln Peters wrote:

I experimented with control-range in a game module involving
necromancers and undead armies.  The idea was that undead units would be
helpless if they were more than 16 cells away from the necromancer,
except for vampires and liches, which can function normally up to 24
cells away and can relay orders.

It seemed to work decently, but it was around the time that the
pathfinding code was radically re-engineered (and later radically
un-re-engineered), so I ran into a bunch of problems that may have been
totally unrelated to the control code and eventually lost interest in
it.  Maybe I should take another look at it.

Yes. I bet it will turn up some bugs. Depends on how well the actor/agent (unit/unit2) separation has been honored and enforced in the kernel action code.... Actors are units which have ACP's and are doing the controlling, whereas agents are being controlled and using the actor's ACP's. Or, at least, that is my understanding of the code.


I tried to implement armor in a game module I wrote a while ago (the
game module was never interesting enough to add to the library).  I
discovered that I could not provide more than one kind or armor without
running into the following dilemma about how the armor "occupies" the
knight:

1. If I use unit-capacity-x, I can prevent a knight from wearing two
suits of plate armor, but I can't prevent a knight from wearing a suit
of chainmail over a suit of full plate.  (If I was to allow a knight to
wear two suits of armor simultaneously, I'd want to find a way to adjust
their ACP's and hit chances accordingly.)

Encumberment should be able to be modelled with the 'occupant-adds-acp' table. I am thinking that I forgot to test it with negative values, but did deliberately set it up allowing values between TABLO (-32768) and TABHI (32767), and so it should be able to be used to model negative effects on ACP as well as positive ones.


2. If I use generic capacity, I can ensure that a knight can wear one
and only one suit of armor, but I lose the ability to do anything
similar with other items (different kinds of shields, helmets, magic
rings...).  I would have to make various kinds of armor, shields, rings,
etc. fit in generic capacity; therefore a knight could wear one suit of
plate armor normally, and one on his finger in place of a ring of
protection (now *that's* a silly mental image).

Don't forget the 'occupant-max' table. You can set the total capacity high, and then limit certain types using 'occupant-max'.


One exercise you can do is:
Sit down and draw a square, say a 5x5 square, representing the unit's total capacity. Then, place, say, a 3x3 square inside the larger square, and let it represent the "armor slot". Then, lay out other squares and rectangles representing other contents the unit may have. You can, of course, use rectangles for your container instead of squares.


After this, you have a crude visualization of your space consumption, and can fill out the various tables accordingly.

Yeah, no kidding. And I thought it was 10000 in order to win the magic donut.

I guess I need to get back to work on knights.g!

I thought it was 'red-wizard.g' now. But, whatever it is called, I think it did have promise last time I looked at it.


A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle
unless there be two.  -- Seneca

Quite true.
(Publilius Syrus is still my favorite Roman author of such sayings, but Seneca isn't too bad either.)


Eric


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