Jim's complete combat AI override insanity project

[JimTheDinosaur]

Thought I'd stop cluttering up the interesting dev ideas thread. I incorrectly said there that projectile animations are already present in the spike trap scripts, which was hopelessly naive (those only "work" because they move in one of the six cardinal directions, and even then go way too fast on modern processors).

So I made my own based on my line drawing script used when I made that custom burst cone thing (I just had to remove some tiles in the sequence to avoid the zigzagging silliness):



I made it nice and slow so you can follow the beautifully smooth motion of it all.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Here's a little script I put together that creates an array for a critter registering each tile he can reach. Each (minimum) distance is its own sub-array (so, e.g., array[2] is a sub-array listing all the tiles that can be reached with two steps). Here's each sub-array shown with a different item (to show that there's no overlap):

           target:=dude_obj;
           tile_marker_array:=create_array(11,0);
           tile_marker_array[0]:=create_array(0,0);
          call array_push_no_return(get_array(tile_marker_array, 0), tile_num(target));
           counter:=1;
         //display_msg(debug_array_str(tile_marker_array));
           while counter < len_array(tile_marker_array) do begin
              tile_marker_array[counter]:=create_array(0,0);
              array:=get_array(tile_marker_array, counter-1);
              new_array:=get_array(tile_marker_array, counter);
              foreach tile in array begin
                 direction:=0;
                 while direction < 6 do begin
                    new_tile:=tile_num_in_direction(tile, direction, 1);
                    if obj_blocking_tile(new_tile, dude_elevation, 0) == 0 then begin
                       check_break:=0;
                       foreach check_array in tile_marker_array begin
                          if len_array(check_array) > 0 and is_in_array(new_tile, check_array) then begin
                             check_break:=1;
                             break;
                          end
                       end if check_break == 0 then begin
                          call array_push_no_return(new_array, new_tile);
                          tile_marker:=create_object(PID_10MM_PISTOL+counter, new_tile, dude_elevation);
                       end
                    end
                    direction+=1;
                 end
              end
            //display_msg(debug_array_str(tile_marker_array));
              counter+=1;
         end

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Know how explosions make everybody fly around and how much fun that is? There's two things wrong with it: (1) flying critters don't bowl over existing critters, which they totally should, (2) they don't fly away from the epicenter of the explosion, but away from the attacker, which doesn't make any sense. Now witness how much more fun it is if they do both (I mostly wanted to demonstrate point 2, so I was a bit hasty, but there's some examples of point 1 too):

 

[Drobovik]

That's some bad ass stuff you're making, @JimTheDinosaur!

Keep it up, who knew back in 1998 that such cool AI things would be possible one day