[ian-reeds-games] Re: AI control
- From: abigail prescott <abigail.prescott@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 19:38:51 +0100
For the tripwire, couldn’t you just take away all the unit’s movement points
too? That way the AI can’t complain about still having movement points and not
being able to move, because it won’t have any movement points.
I might be able to modify the randomise_unit_positions script to work for
effects. I’ll give it a look. If I can, would you prefer it to use the old
events system or the new script flags system?
Abi
From: Carlos Macintosh
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 10:37 AM
To: ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ian-reeds-games] Re: AI control
I was thinking that perhaps you could put in a command, such as ctrl shift-A,
into the map editor, that could toggle the AI status on units. It could toggle
from “this unit starts out AI cotrolled” to “this unit starts out without AI
control”, and this way you wouldn’t have to go into the map pack by hand and
find the line containing the unit you want to keep unfettered and disable it.
Come to think of that, you can’t really disable a boolean flag if it’s set In
the default unit flags file. Maybe you can add =false to the flag to turn it
off? I’ve never really tried.
In other things, we need a step_effects flag for terrains and effects. I’m
making my capture the flag map and I put in a feature called the tripwire
which, if stepped upon, immediately stops the unit on it from moving. I made it
a tile effect and gave it the no_movement flag so there is no way to get the
unit off the tile once it’s stepped on to it, as wel as no way to reuse it
because the tripped unit iss just stuck there. This does present some problems
though. The AI, for one, tries to move past the tripwire and it says there’s a
bug in the AI if a unit steps on it and still has movement points left, because
the effect stops the unit from moving. I also can’t use the announce flag to
say that the unit triggered the tripwire, so unles you are looking out for
them, you’ll never know your unit was hobbled. I also plan to make a spike
terrain that deals damage and also causes bleeding, but without the
step_effects flag I can’t really make the bleding work.
Also, I asked for this a while back, but I’d love an ai_empty_tile_curse
option. Currently, the AI doesn’t know weree to place traps. It would be nice
to just tell the AI to choose a random square in range and place it there. It’s
better than nothing, at any rate. The AI_summon flag does a similar thing, but
since the trap placement only changes the terrain or adds effects to it, the AI
uses it on the same square over and over again.
Sadly, the lac of these flags has slowed me down a bit for some unexplained
reason. I focus on them even when I realize there’s nothing to be done about
them, and it stops me from working as effectively on the other stuff that I
can' actually control.
Also, converting all 60 or whatever units of tomb robber into the new unit
format is going to kill me. Maybe you could keep parser versions below 10 for
simple maps that still use the old syntax and keep parser vversion 10 optional
for the new/more advanced stuff? Besides scripting flags,map creators who used
the older stuff would be conceding their use of the newest features you would
be putting in, but, usually I don’t really overhaul my maps to take advantage
of the latest features, so that’s not really a problem with me And we’d all use
the new syntax for any new stuff we create so it can take advantage of those
features. I say this on behalf of creators like Allan Thompson, whose warlords
pack has over 170 unitss and structures to convert to the new system. And I
haven’t found a global find and replacer so I’ll be doing tomb robber by hand
for sure when I’m warned of the eminent disappearance of parser version 2,
unless some other development comes up.
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