Three thoughts

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, Eric McDonald wrote:
> > seems like I have to give Item units ACP and movement,
> > which is an annoyance to the AI and player and uglier
> > gameplay.  Anyone have any suggestions?  
> 
> I'd see what Matthew Skala came up with. He was working on "cow 
> patties" for a while.

I couldn't get it to work.  Like Elijah, I found that I had to give the
"item" units some ACP and movement capabilities, but that still didn't
allow me to get the kind of behaviour I really wanted.  As I think I
mentioned at the time, I had a lot of trouble preventing the item units
from constantly waking up and demanding the user's attention even when the
user didn't want them to do anything but sit there.  I also wanted my item
units to be indestructible - so they'd end up just sitting on the ground
if their transport was destroyed for *any* reason - and it proved tricky
to cover all the cases for that.

When the fancy wrecking behaviour started to be defined, I realised that
if I changed my game concept a little I could use fancy wrecking instead
of item objects (basically, have one unit type for "has item" and one for 
"doesn't have item", although it also meant changing my vision of what
that signified), and produce a more fun result.  Wrecking seemed to be in
a lot of flux and then my workload at school started to ramp up and so I
decided to leave that project alone for a while, hoping that by the time I
got back to it the fancy wrecking behaviour would have gelled into
something I could use.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/