Re: last_direction byte

From: Jeremy Elson (jelson@blaze.cs.jhu.edu)
Date: 06/30/94


> that the last_direction byte that ALREADY existed in NPCs made what I
> was trying to do redundant, since I didn't really want it on PCs anyways.
> But I do have a question about the last_direction byte: does the game
> constantly update that byte? The only thing grep turns up is some 
> references in mobact.c, which I guess means that it updates when the mob
> spontaneously wanders, BUT does it also update when a charmed mob is
> ordered to move for instance?

last_direction is not part of the playerfile in Circle 2.20 or 3.0.  It is
used in char_special_data of 2.20, which is not part of char_file_u; 3.0
has redesigned structures as you know if you've looked at 3.0-structs.h
but it's still not part of any structure written to disk.)

Well, I should say, it WAS in 3.0.  I was rewriting parts of mobact.c the
other day, and got to the part that uses last_direction.  You know, I'm not
even sure what that code is supposed to do (it was part of Gamma 0.0).  You'd
think that the idea would be to get a mob to keep moving in the same direction
for as long as possible once it has chosen a random direction (i.e., to make
it seem like the mob has some destination.)  However, the code does just the
opposite: it seems to _discourage_ a mob ever moving in the same direction
twice in a row.  And it doesn't even seem to do that very effectively!

Long story short, the code seemed useless, and the concept didn't seem
sound anyway, so I just deleted it from 3.0.  No big loss.



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