Fisty-cuffs!

Short and sweet update this evening. I managed to set up the right triggers for a combat mode to be engaged when monsters were actively attacking the player, which switches the game from its normal mode into a different mode where things stop being "active" and switch into turn based activations (well, they don't do all that yet, but the mode is set up for them to do all that) - and I managed to get everything working again in terms of on-screen triggers and such when combat has finished.

So, overall, it's been very successful this evening. With some luck, tomorrow and over the weekend, I'll start to have some very rudimentary combat working. That's going to be super exciting - it's felt like this has been way too long in the coming.

Un-Rutted and Engaged

So, there's a bit of a pun in the title, as I've been rather in a rut of late, just a bit tired, not in the right headspace to really get anything worthwhile written in terms of code, but I have been working to get back into the right frame of mind through a bit of outdoor activity, spending some time relaxing and generally trying to get back into the right state - and today seemed to be the day where the conditions were met finally. I picked up the code pretty much exactly where I left it off and tweaked out the next bits of logic for creatures.

Possible encounters now get the right info from their lead creatures to determine if they have ranged attacks, what the actual range of those is, and if they're annoyed with something, they'll try to engage to either get into ranged attack range, or move right in for some hand to hand combat. I've got some extra text in the output showing what they want to do, which is below each one on the screen. In this image, you can see how the Goblin only tries to get in close enough to be able to shoot, while the two spiders clamber to get right into my face.

I'm not expecting time tomorrow afternoon (though, who knows) but I'll be looking forward to picking this up again to finally start to set up the combat system itself.

Monster no dum-dum!

I've been at work on monster and encounter logic. I had it working reasonably nicely, but it really felt like bandaids on bandaids of code - and that's never good. So it's been a redo, taking into account all the things I want them to do, and even though I'm barely halfway through doing what I want, it's already much neater and nicer than what I had - which is always a great thing.

The logic is now directly controlled by settings I can pick and choose in the editor when creating a monster, so the setup is easy, then the encounter on screen simply inherits those characteristics from the biggest and meanest thing in there. I've also introduced a smarter way to deal with both party and general threat, but redoing the code around how monsters pick what to start a fight with - and how they go about it. There's still some ways to go with this, but at least some of what I am doing here will be able to be re-used for the combat logic itself - or similar versions to, so I'm happy to spend some extra time to get it right.