Quote:
Originally Posted by lch
Ah, screenshots! 
That picture would look a lot better with a sprite graphic instead of a big green blob, I'd say...  |
yeah but those take precious time, and i'd rather get a game going before worrying about sprites.
speaking of which, I'll have new screenshots soon. i've almost got the character sheet put together, which signifies the fleshed out unit (or character) object.
right now I'm wrangling with equipment slots; i wanted them to mirror the way i've got the body and applying damage to the body setup, but that would require alot of cumbersome hierarchy. while a couple of functions for determining strikes on arbitrarily shaped bodies (represented through arbitrarily shaped hash tables) make dealing with a lot of hierarchy in the body pretty easy, all that hierarchy would have to be included in each and every equipment item (eg. armor[arm][left][hand] : gauntlet; as opposed to armor[hands] : gauntlets). That's too much to include right now. There's also a bit of a problem with equipping items that way. For example, a dog has a thorax, and a breastplate covers the human thorax, but a dog can't wear a breastplate. The only solution with such an equipment system is to have an equipment function which checks if the thing attempting to equip that thorax item also has arms, which a dog doesn't, but say a werewolf does. Then I suppose you could also have a breastplate covering the thorax which requires that the equipper have only legs, which a dog does... But once again, that's getting way too much cumbersome hierarchy. it is certainly possible and pretty straightforward, just a lot of rote coding of content to include. Not something I want to get bogged down in.
So therefore, equipment slots are probably going to be pretty straightforward, similar to what Dominions and virtually all RPG games do.
I'm also trying to get some initial skills laid out. At first, only wielded item skills will be included (that includes shields, which are actually trained as a 'melee weapon' since they are used paired with a melee weapon and typically contribute to both the offensive and defensive action of a melee weapon.) I want weapons to be historically accurate, but not overly specific. Thus, the ubiquitous longsword will be equivalent to the typical RPG 'bastard sword', which is actually what a longsword was (if not an outright 2h sword!). The typical RPG longsword is replaced by 'sidesword' which is a general term for all 1h cut and thrust swords of the Early Modern Period. All sabers, cutlass, messers, falchions, are 'backswords'. all daggers and some messers are 'daggers'. all 1h thrust swords are rapiers. all bastard or 2h thrust swords are Estocs. bastard or 2h sabres, swiss sabers, kriegsmessers would probably be called 'ulmish sabre' or something. All 2h double edge swords are... 2h swords.
Swords are probably the most diverse, other weapon groups hopefully don't need to be reduced so. The reduction here I think is good though. 'Backswords' probably ended up catching the most categories. However I read that training weapons like Dussaks(sp?) were used to train virtually all backswords (any single edged, typically curved, weapon). What I'm worried about here is training use.