Pyrel dev log, part 2

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

No; you wouldn't be projecting from the tile to its adjacent tiles, but from the adjacent tiles to the player. Basically you're floodfilling out from the player to find all visible tiles, with the assumption being that if a tile is not adjacent to a visible tile then it is not itself visible.

But I'll check out that shadowcasting approach. Why bother re-inventing the wheel? Thanks, mtadd!

There were also a number of really detailed threads on this forum, and someone even set up a wiki to continue the discussion. This must have been two or three years ago by now, but it was the closest we ever got to resolving the LOS/FOV issues. It got too abstruse for me, but I ended up with the sense that there was a way to do this much better than Angband currently does. Maybe the shadowcasting stuff is it.

[ekolis]

I think there's a whole bunch of articles about various FOV/LOS algorithms over on roguebasin, too...

[ekolis]

Hey, I finally got that patch queue thing (mostly) sorted out - see if you can import my changes!

[Derakon]

Ekolis: I'll get to your pull request today, I swear. Sorry for the delays -- I've just been distracted by work and by other projects.

On a different note, I've been thinking about some of the major features that still need to be implemented, and what they're waiting on.

* Melee combat: should probably wait until creatures (especially the Player) have more stats than just HP, which means it should probably wait until character generation is done.

* Character generation: we can start working on this now, if we don't mind having to create a new character every time the program starts. My current thinking on this is that we should stick racial attributes into some creature records (thus, all creatures should be able to have STR, searching, magic device, etc. attributes) and class attributes into creature templates. Of course we'd have default values for the bulk of the creatures, but this leaves the door wide open for having more kinds of player race, as well as for having opponents who mimic the players' capabilities.

* Affix system: should be doable now, but can't really be tested without melee and stats.

* More detailed level generation: doable now.

* Enemy AI: should probably wait until effects are in. However, fundamental AI like pathing and interacting with terrain can be done now.

* Porting in all the different effects currently in Angband: some are doable, some aren't. For example, anything dealing with projectiles is waiting on me to finish the animation and line-drawing subsystem. Anything that detects or identifies will have to wait until we can restrict the knowledge available to the player.

* And of course, eventually we'll need a system to save and load the game, which means we need to be able to (de)serialize every Thing and Container (since the Containers hold the Thing relationships).

There's also lots of refinements, like ekolis's change to make item descriptions prettier, or implementing jump-to-nearest-interesting-thing in the look code, or doing the remaining work to enable macros, or adding a run button (and disturbance code)...

[Magnate]

Have you thought of starting a new Pyrel To-Do List thread with this as the first post, that you can go back and update?

(Oh, and this thread is way too long now - though I would have made that suggestion even if it wasn't!)

[Derakon]

A wiki post would be better, but yes, good idea. As for the thread...sigh, fine. Silly threaded-viewer user.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Derakon

A wiki post would be better

http://trac.rephial.org/wiki/Pyrel?

EDIT: Found your new thread and the link to the wiki ...