Re: [ADMIN] Combat systems Feb 04, 2000 at 04:33:02PM -0800

From: Christian Loth (chris@gidayu.max.uni-duisburg.de)
Date: 02/05/00


Greetings,

On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 04:33:02PM -0800, Chris Costa wrote:
> Ok I'm going to throw this question out there because I've been considering
> and trying various things but haven't come up with anything really useful.
> It's not specific to experienced coders, or even to the Circle codebase, but
> because I run a Circle derivative and you are all my favourite people (ahem)
> I put this to you:
>   Has anyone contrived (|| seen || conceived) a completely new and
> innovative system to imitate physical combat?
>

My team for 'Gidayu' is currently designing a combatsystem which
is pseudo-realtime (i.e. divided into 250 ms timeslices, so that
it seems to be of one 'flow'). Okay, this does not count, as
you excluded roundless combat. Also Gidayu is *not* a circle
(though it borrowed look and feel) so don't ask for patches,
you wouldn't be able to use them (it's a from-scratch C++
implemented MUD and far from done).

The innovative part that will become part of it is what I call
damage-chains/defense-filters. If damage is dealt, it is a list
of dam-amount/dam-type structs. e.g. if a firesword deals out
damage, it has the damage chain that might look like this:

  Fire-damage: 10 --- Melee-damage: 15

This chain is passed to the victim and runs through the victim's defense
filters. Say, the victim has cast a 'fire shield'. The 'fire shield' then
reduces fire damage by half, so after this first filter, the chain will
look like:

  Fire-damage: 5 --- Melee-damage: 15

I think you get what this might result into: instead of boring
combat message scrolling by, you can actually do tactical decisions,
which might influence combat. E.g. in the midst of combat you see
that the evil mage cast an 'ice shield' around himself. 'Fine,' you
think, 'he's now harder to hit with ice spells, but as any
apprentice knows, this protection doubles fire damage!!!' ... so
what do you do? Right - get out the good ole fireball.
Or what will players do when they encounter a monster completely imune
to meele damage (i.e. the monster's defense filter 0s melee damage).

Some food for thoughts,
- Chris

--
Christian Loth
Coder of 'Project Gidayu'
Computer Science Student, University of Dortmund
chris@gidayu.mud.de - http://gidayu.mud.de


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