Castle Paradox

[Battleblaze]

Well before I woulden't have considered asking. But now since were in the new age of windows where anything is possible. Could we get scripted NPC movements seperate from other scripts.

For Example

In Adventures Of BattleBlaze* where I had a zelda type battle system.I found myself wishing that my enimies could do more than simply "chase player" and run a simple "touch" script. I just wish that I could be running the attacking script while seperate miniscripts can direct how the enimies move. What would be prime is NPC's responding to things like how close the player is or what script he just activated.

You could attempt this with the current system. But with the 1 script at a time limit it'd be buggy as heyell

*Was destroyed by hardrive wipe of 05
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Indy OHR! and National OHR Month Contest going on now!

"Aeth calls PHC an anti-semite; PHC blames anti-semitism"
-squall

[TMC]

Hey, that sounds like a neat idea indeed. An "each tick" script available on NPCs would have many uses besides just movement. That is the way things are done in GM, and it also is a way to get around the "only one script at once" problem.

However, there might be problems to sort out, such as what happens when one of those scrpts waits? Depending on the answer, it might only become possible after a restructure of scripts.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[Ysoft_Entertainment]

Why stop at npcs? why not implement it in maps as well?
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[Camdog]

Can't this already be done with a looping on map load script that just runs through all the npcs? I don't see why that would be buggy.

[Moogle1]

"each tick" per NPC is a very good idea. You can set it up so that scripts with wait commands are not allowed, since by definition these would crash the game. These should be able to pass in the NPC's reference.

"each tick" per map seems unnecessary, since background scripts already do this.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Bob the Hamster]

The ability to have a separate NPC AI script that runs once each tick for each NPC instance would be pretty darn cool... although I suspect that the performance would be terrible.

It would actually not be very difficult to implement, so we can just try it out and see how it works. (if it turns out to suck, we just won't commit it)

[Mike Caron]

You know what else we need, which is mostly related to this? Pseudo-threads (henceforth refered to as threads).

Threads in the style of Stackless Python (eh, James? Got your attention? Good.) where scheduling is as easy as "a thread runs until it terminates or goes into waiting, then the next thread is run". A thread would be defined as a script called from a distinct trigger.

For those not in the know of how the OHR deals with multiple scripts (say, double-triggering a script), it basically sticks everything onto a giant stack. If a new script is triggered while another is running (well, sleeping, anyway), it's stacked on top, and the first script has to wait until the second goes away before it can run again, kind of like a function call.

However, this way, each script can run "side-by-side". They still have to take turns (real threading would be a nightmare with too many pitfalls, and too little benefit), but instead of the first script sleeping until the second script is finished, it only sleeps until the second script is sleeping itself.

Naturally, this fits in with the NPC movement scripts in that each tick, a thread is spawned from an NPC.

I can't imagine this would be too difficult to do (main problem being dealing with the various buffers and stuff), and would have tremendous benefit.

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That said, this npc tick script would be a horrible way of dealing with custom movement. It would mean that you'd have to micromanage the movement, pixel-by-pixel, and use globals to keep track of NPC state. No, that blows. NPC Tick is a good idea, but for different reasons.

Instead, I'd like to see movement scripts built in, and created like this:

[Battleblaze]

I thought I'd be laughed out of town. Looks like I said something to get things moving *pats own back and gets back to work*

Now zelda style games will be 10x better with enimies that do...stuff. If used right this could change much of OHR forever. I presume a new wave of 'action' RPGs would be much easier to create.
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Indy OHR! and National OHR Month Contest going on now!

"Aeth calls PHC an anti-semite; PHC blames anti-semitism"
-squall

[TMC]

[Mike Caron]