The Interrogation Chamber

Re: Darmagon: Protos Update Tool

Here I sit on the most boring work night of the year, all my crew gone home and me with nothing to do but while away the time until the next shift comes in, checking out what is going on here with almost no way to do anything about anything and I come upon this accusation. Oh, how unfair... Anyway, the tool is doing fine, as a command line thing it works great. The GUI leaves something to be desired (ie. a GUI). Yeah I cracked the books and started learning windows programming all over again and came up against the realization that it really sucks having to do things that way when there are a lot of better and easier ways to do it. Couple that and the fact that I haven't had a computer to do anything ToEE related on for a few weeks now (and also the fact that I was more interested in researching and developing new spells ) and, yeah the GUI is not yet done.

Mea Culpa, I over extended myself and I don't know when I will get back to work on that. Once I have an actual machine I can do ToEE modding on again, I guess we will see. I appreciate your interest in the matter, however, and if I seem bitter it is only because I am almost entirely unable to do anything about it at the moment.....

Darmagon

 

I have to ask for clarification. How do you mean that huge numbers of skeletons are time consuming to spawn with scripting? Do you mean that the actual spawning take a lot of time in game? Or do you mean that spawning a lot of skeletons (or anything) takes a lot of time to write in a script?

Darmagon

 

I have actually toyed with the Arena Mod a while ago and added a third battle (with said White Dragon). I've got a rather nasty idea concerning the Prize... it's quite possible that the party might not want it once it is revealed. The Master of the Arena is a shady fellow...

As for the big skeleton battle, I had thought about nerfing the skeletons a bit and spawning them successively, i.e., first spawn a few near the party, then, when the party has killed them, spawn a dozen more further off, and so on. That way, Turn Undead will be less effective - unless your party consists of eight clerics of Pelor, of course. There was supposed to be one skeleton shaman (based off the priest Liv created), and I thought about including skeleton giants as well.

The scripting is easily done, it's just that it takes a long time figuring out proper coordinates. The skeletons have to be placed somewhere, and placed intelligently. I think the latest versions of ToEEWB might make this task somewhat easier, so I'll try that sometime soon.

 

so it is not the in game time thing. So potentially it could all be done via a loop (or several nested loops) using mathematical formulae to determine location and rotation. That is so long as Morpheus' plan for placement and facing can be reduced to a mathematical formula. But then just about anything can be ( and we could add a degree of randomenss if necessary.)

It could be just a matter of a loop to create any number of creatures and code within the loop to determine type, position and facing. Probably something like 6 to 30 lines of code (depending upon how involved things need to be) and we could spawn however many creatures of whatever type needed, wherever and facing whichever direction necessary in neglibible game time.

EDIT: for example the function below creates a number n (the default is set to 30) of creatures (proto number p) equally spaced in a circle of radius d centered on the party leader:

Code:

from math import *
def spawn_circle(d,p, n = 30):
	offx,offy = location_to_axis(game.party[0].location)
	i = 0.00
	while i < 2*pi:
		posx = int(cos(i)*d)+offx
		posy = int(sin(i)*d)+offy
		loc = location_from_axis(posx,posy)
		c = game.obj_create(p, loc)
		c.turn_towards(game.party[0])
		i = i + pi/(n/2)

this is just a short example but just about any kind of placement is possible using whatever information is available via a script in the game, plus whatever mathematical formulae you like. To test this, just copy and paste it at the end of utilities.py then use the console in game to test

Darmagon

 

What's more, it would even be possible to spawn them concealed (like the skeletons in Emridy Meadows) so that they rise up out of the ground. This would make the rotation less important, as when they rise up they would immediately face the party.

 

If you're thinking "Arena of Heroes", Lareth & Co. already have one. It's known to them as the Temple of Elemental Evil.