Re: CF: oddity in the pup_land raffle #2

[quinet@gamers.org (Raphael Quinet)]

On Thu, 09 Sep 1999, Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com> wrote:
> Seikoh Nishita wrote:
> > I thought of some "stage effects". I wanted players to see some
> > mysterious world in their vision(the world is made by some tough
> > monsters.) When they kill the monsters, the mysterious world made by
> > monsters will disapper and they'll find they are in a simple ordinary
> > room.
> 
>  In the current rewrite, as I have progressed, exits are background
> type objects, and are not meant to be carried.  My guess is that
> when the equipment/creature code is written, it is going to be
> assumed that anything in a monsters inventory is equipment, and thus
> the right thing can be done with that.  If a background is in some
> monsters inventory, not sure what will happen, so I can not say this
> will necessarily work.
>
>  I currently don't have a good work around for the warped world.  If
> warped reality is something that i really desired, I think we might
> need to re-investigate some objects or whatnot.

Hmmm...  The crux of the problem is to be able to do something when
the monster is killed.  This was implemented in the Pupland maps by
inserting an exit in the monster's inventory, so that the player is
transported to a different room as soon as the monster dies.

Instead of trying to solve that problem by using the monster's
inventory, we could think about other ways.  For example, we could use
a "connected" field in the monster, which would activate some other
objects when the monster dies.  In order to achieve the same effect as
in the Pupland maps, we could fill the room with invisible exits that
are connected to the monster.  As soon as the monster is defeated, the
exits are activated.  This also has the advantage that it works well
for a party: all players are transported simultaneously and they stay
in the same relative positions (assuming that the destinations of the
exits have a one-to-one mapping with their original positions).

We could have something even better than a simple "connected" field in
the monster: use the message field to implement a more complex
scripting.  We had a discussion about that one year ago, and I was
able to find some parts of it in the mailing list archive
(unfortunately, it looks like at least three messages from this thread
are missing from the archive):
  http://archives.real-time.com/rte-crossfire/Attic/msg01065.html
  http://archives.real-time.com/rte-crossfire/Attic/msg01074.html

If we add one more conditional statement "@killed", we could implement
some nice effects.  For example, the message field could look like
this:

  @match *
  Run away, poor mortal, or you will die!
  @killed
  Aaaarghhh!  I'm dying...  You are stronger than I thought.
  My mind goes away...  My magic dissolves...  Hhhhhhh...
  #activate 1

And all exits in the room would have a "connected 1" flag to be
activated as soon as the monster dies.  We could also implement other
effects in this way, such as some magic gates that open when the
monster die, releasing more monsters.  Or some spells that are
triggered by the death of the monster.


Hmmm...  I just though about another way to implement all this with
the current objects and without requiring any scripting: set the
weight of the monster so that it is very heavy.  Put lots of invisible
buttons that keep the gates or exits closed as long as the monster is
on them.  Make sure that the monster does not leave a heavy corpse
when it dies.  Then as soon as the player kills the monster, some
effect is triggered.  I don't know if it would really work in
practice, but that may be an idea for implementing that effect without
using an exit object in the monster's inventory.

-Raphael

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