Re: CF: RE: Footprints (was: Long term experimental ideas)

[Mark Wedel <mwedel@scruznet.com>]

Peter Mardahl wrote:
> 
> > Just a side note: the reason I was able to kill a Greater Demon with two
> > icestorms (not even large icestorms) from a level 70 wizard was because the
> > Greater Demon occupied so many squares that it was practically taking the sum
> > of all damages caused by the icestorm on every square of its cone effect.
> > Which, with the current code, amounts to an incredible amount of damage.
> 
> This is exactly the reason I made the "CONE_NO_PROPAGATE" patch to
> begin with.

 But as a note - if you want cones to propogate but big monsters not take more
damage, it is more difficult.

 If you change the code so that the 'head' has to be hit, you get affects where
it appears the bulk of the monster is engulfed, yet takes not damage because the
head is out of it.

 My immediate thought on this would be something like this:

 In the spell effect object, add a tag that is the object tag of the last
creature to take damage from the spell.  Initialize it to 0.
 As the spell moves along, the new spaces inherit this tag.  If it hits a
monster, compare the tag in the spell effect to that of the monster - if it
matches, do no damage.  If it doesn't match, do damage, and update the effect
tag with the new monster.  Either way, have the spell move along.

 This fixes the problem of a monster taking multiple damage from the same spell. 

 But the other question would be:

 Should a creature at the center of a cone/center of a ball explosion take more
damage than if it was at the fringe?

 I am not sure exactly how the above change woudl work - I seem to recall that
the effects are not merged, so you actually have 5 or 10 or whatever fire
objects on the space.  So the above idea would probably still result in big
monsters taking more damage (since if you are a couple spaces away from a tall
monster and cast a cone horizontally, it might have spread 4 wide before it hits
it), but it would reduce damage some, and would certainly eliminate the
bug/feature of bolt spells doing extra damage to big creatures.
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