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[Ukrainian Ranger]

PTW

[BlindKitty]

Some good news from the front - I've successfully implemented rudimentary anatomy. Right now only player has one, and it doesn't actually do anything, but I will soon add second anatomy type (quadrupedal), give monsters anatomy and add an option to aim at different body parts. Soon probably means next week, but it might be much quicker - if I will get the chance to work on weekend.

And also, I would like to ask you a question - how should be chances to hit different body parts be calculated? I mean, if you aim at a given body part (let's say, knee), it is more difficult to hit than torso, obviously. But what formula to use to get the actual difficulty?
I'm leaning towards using size modifier (with 1 being size of the torso, and thus standard to-hit difficulty), which would be about 0.1 - 0.05 for a knee, to calculate additional difficulty (in form of bonus to the defence). But since I'm operating on linear difference between attacker skill and defender skill, it is impractical to modify one by a factor; it would quickly become either too weak, or too powerful. So I thought about flat bonus to the defence based on size modifier - every 0.05 size under 1 would give defender +1 point to defence. Does this even make sense to you?

Anyway, back to work for now.

[ptb_ptb]

Yo Kitty,

Does this thread include a download link?

[BlindKitty]

Yes, there is one in the very first spoiler of the opening post. It's my SkyDrive (OneDrive, I guess? I think it changed names) public folder, with current version and old versions in separate folders (not worth looking into, really ^^").

[ptb_ptb]

Interesting start, but unfortunately it crashed as soon as I went up the first set of stairs I found. (killed 2 or 3 rats, gained one level)

[BlindKitty]

Well, the problem is, you start on the first level on dungeon, and you should only go down from there. Going up will (in the future) get you to the surface (and the town/village/shops/whatever), but right now it is unimplemented and thus crashes with Argument Out of Range exception (as there is no floor -1 in the array). You can try again and ignore the stairs up on the first level, it should work better.

Got up the hotfix version - it doesn't generate stairs up on the first level of dungeon, and I've also removed a bug throwing a player into infinite loop sometimes, so I'm putting it up even if there is nothing really new (as anatomy doesn't yet work).

[ductape]

Some good news from the front - I've successfully implemented rudimentary anatomy. Right now only player has one, and it doesn't actually do anything, but I will soon add second anatomy type (quadrupedal), give monsters anatomy and add an option to aim at different body parts. Soon probably means next week, but it might be much quicker - if I will get the chance to work on weekend.

And also, I would like to ask you a question - how should be chances to hit different body parts be calculated? I mean, if you aim at a given body part (let's say, knee), it is more difficult to hit than torso, obviously. But what formula to use to get the actual difficulty?
I'm leaning towards using size modifier (with 1 being size of the torso, and thus standard to-hit difficulty), which would be about 0.1 - 0.05 for a knee, to calculate additional difficulty (in form of bonus to the defence). But since I'm operating on linear difference between attacker skill and defender skill, it is impractical to modify one by a factor; it would quickly become either too weak, or too powerful. So I thought about flat bonus to the defence based on size modifier - every 0.05 size under 1 would give defender +1 point to defence. Does this even make sense to you?

Anyway, back to work for now.

A knee is not necessarily harder to hit than the torso, it depends on the stance, body type, etc. Perhaps you could have an attribute for each body part called "vulnerability" that reflects how hard it is to hit. It might have a base value and then be modified by a particular stance or some other situation of the battle.

[BlindKitty]

The stance - and several other modifiers too, probably - will be implemented in the future, but independently from the size modifier. What do I mean here is - because we have a computer to do all the calculations for us, we can use as much modifiers (and as complex ones) as we want. So I'm planning to eventually calculate the to-hit chance through a few different stages, from relative size of the combatants (it is harder do hit someone shorter then you in the leg, but it is easier to aim for his head), through relative size of a body part (doing that now), stance and other modifiers finally. But I can't throw it all at once - I would get lost in the amount of data.

[BlindKitty]

So, the first, small iteration of the anatomy is in and - what is more - seems to work! It doesn't do much now, though. You can take a look at a character sheet, and it lists all 23 body parts, their current HP and max HP, and that's it as far as gameplay goes. But there is more behind the scenes - equipment slots are now governed by the anatomy, although most are dummy slots now (only torso and both hands have meaningful ones - armour, weapon and shield), the anatomy is loaded from XML and generated based on body type and so on. But there is a lot to be done still; for starters, I need to put a link between body parts HPs, and character main HP count*. Then I will implement a chance to hit body part different than torso (actually, right now you are still attacking general HP pool, not body part's one), and than, unless something comes to my mind about anatomies, or you give me some idea, there will be movement with fighting iteration version 0.2 - Bouncy Boulbasaur**.

*For now the idea is as follows: a creature has HP pool, let's say, 100. Every body part has it's own pool - from 10 (foot, hand, neck) to 100 (torso). Every time a character is hit, the damage it directed to one of the body parts, and it's Current HP are lowered by a given amount. The same amount of damage is taken from creatures' HP pool (the general one). For example:

Urist McShepherd has 100 hit points. His left foot has 10 hit points.
Urist McShepherd drops a hammer on his foot. The hammer hits him for 15 damage points.
Urist McShepherd's left foot drops to -5 hit points.
Urist McShepherd himself drops to 90 hit points.
Urist McShepherd's left foot is disabled (since it is below 0 HP).

If creature's HP pool drops to 0, creature dies. If creature's head, neck or torso is disabled (drops below 0), creature dies. If any other body part drops below 0, it stops working and every body part downwards of it stops working too (so if you have disabled elbow, your forearm and hand don't work either).

**After I have read about Utopic Unicorn Ubuntu version, I decided to go crazy myself every other time. But don't get attached to such bursts of creativity, I don't think I will remember them myself in a few days.

[BlindKitty]

And after a month, it seems that other projects - both meat and cyber - have taken me far from the Little Shepherd, and are not letting me go. I'm actually planning to come back to this again, but probably not any time soon, unless something dramatically changes in how my time is organized...

[n9103]

We'll be here.
Hope everything is working out for you.