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[Bersu]

Oh, nice! You are much more advanced programmer than I am, sounds very fancy.

I like the sneaking and reputation mechanism, I have had the very same idea about that. Have you planned on making Faceless Man a chosen profession right at the start or should one go to the temple to endure ardurous training to become one?

The point about skills was that if you think about it, being a warrior smith is somewhat unrealistic in ASOIAF lore. Most warriors buy or get their weapons and armor from their masters, so in that respect I think building a character with good smithing AND fighting skills should take a very long time in my opinion. Atleast a legendary smith should not be able to also be a legendary warrior if you want to take things realistically. Of course it is up to you how you want to make the vanilla game and these things should be moddable too?

I also like the multiple ways to learn. In the books I think most of the good warriors usually have high level of training combined with combat experience. There are exceptions to both tough; I think characters like Bronn has very little formal training but just have learned to fight dirty trough experience. Then there is also the highborn knights wich have all the resources and training but poor actual combat ability.

[voodooattack]

I think becoming a faceless man, a red priest, or a water dancer should be a big deal, such training will be hidden deep within the game. And you'll have to find a way to become one. So I'll keep them as playable professions for now and later add quests and hidden clues on how to become one mid-game.

I'm more inclined to allow multiple professions, a smith can learn combat (actually, a smith's body is well suited for combat), and a knight can learn to smith. Mythical or not, this (**SPOILERS**) also suggests that it should be possible.

I agree about experience versus training. Both should be distinct and tracked separately. But we'll see how the learning system evolves as I code it along.

[Bersu]

Okay, I got you. Sounds nice

I have a question for you about how are you going to present big NPC's like giants, mammoths and dragons? You said you are going to make entities multiple cells, like humans 2 cells tall and so on. I'm just wondering how are you going to present them in ASCII, are you going to just present the bodyparts wich exist at the current z-level or what? Can you perhaps draw an example for us or even give a video demo?

EDIT: Ah you already pondered on this question previously on the thread:

That's probably a good idea although it complicates things immensely for the renderer. How am I supposed to render a humanoid player if their body spans two different z-levels in a top-down view? Start at the waist and have the head invisible to the 2D camera? Or start with the head and have the body extend to the secondary layer?

You also mentioned the way DF solves this with "quantum tiles".. Does that mean that all entities are 1 tile big but just with different properties? I know that is the easy way to go about it, but doesnt really do justice to large dragons and mammoths. Giants might just be okay in my opinion. Altough these huge legendary creatures are relatively rare in times of the books, so you could also choose to just drop them and do only humanoids + similar sized creatures. Then again.. its ASOIAF RL and Dragons are Dragons

Perhaps multiple cell entities would not be so bad, since with 3D FOV you have to always show multiple z-levels anyway. Just make the default presentation range enough to show all of the mammoth/dragon/giant at once and the problem is solved?

What are your toughts about this now?

[voodooattack]

To be completely honest I'm not entirely sure yet.

The real problem is the renderer, not the representation in memory. It's only an issue of how to represent the tiles when rendered. I mean, a rabbit would take one tile, rendered from the player's point of view it would show up one tile under, so slightly darkened. But standing next to a giant, the renderer will only be able to render the giant's legs. So here I'm not sure, should it draw the giant's symbol and say "giant's feet" in the description if you move to free-look mode, or render a different looking tile entirely?

[Bersu]

To be completely honest I'm not entirely sure yet.

The real problem is the renderer, not the representation in memory. It's only an issue of how to represent the tiles when rendered. I mean, a rabbit would take one tile, rendered from the player's point of view it would show up one tile under, so slightly darkened. But standing next to a giant, the renderer will only be able to render the giant's legs. So here I'm not sure, should it draw the giant's symbol and say "giant's feet" in the description if you move to free-look mode, or render a different looking tile entirely?

But what if you would always render the giant completely given they are standing the same level as the player? Just make sure that your renderer z-level range is the same as the tallest creature. Ofcourse flying Dragons is an exception to this and should only be rendered completely if they are in the the rendering z-level range.

Example: Giants, dragons, mammoths are at most 5 cells tall, so make the presentation range in renderer 5z levels. This would also mean that player would always see 5 levels up/down as FOV permits.

Is that feasible?

[voodooattack]

The most that can be done is 1 level up and 2 down (and a hidden 3rd below that shows a dot or empty space depending on what's below)

Theoretically, I could do 255 levels by shading pixels accordingly. But the more I draw the less distinctive the levels are and the more confusing the view gets.
This doesn't take into account dynamic lighting either, so the actual range at play here is much less.

[Bersu]

The most that can be done is 1 level up and 2 down (and a hidden 3rd below that shows a dot or empty space depending on what's below)

Theoretically, I could do 255 levels by shading pixels accordingly. But the more I draw the less distinctive the levels are and the more confusing the view gets.
This doesn't take into account dynamic lighting either, so the actual range at play here is much less.

Well.. then you are kind of limited in options if you dont figure a way to seperate presentation/rendering from the actual game physics or something. What about making creatures multiple cell only horizontally (x/y axis)? That would mean giants would not really differ from humans, but mammoths and dragons would be larger. That would solve the presentation problem.

Besides that only solution that comes to mind is DF quantum cell.

[voodooattack]

The renderer is an accessory right now. It's completely separate from the game itself and pulls its metadata from extra fields in the JSON files.

Perhaps if I make it more integral it would be easier to identify and render things.

I guess the best method is to experiment, we'll see what happens when I implement the code for entities. Last time I was working on it I was busy with worldgen. The thing needs a lot of optimisations since it requires a monster machine to generate terrain seamlessly. (with its current state at least)

[Bersu]

The renderer is an accessory right now. It's completely separate from the game itself and pulls its metadata from extra fields in the JSON files.

Perhaps if I make it more integral it would be easier to identify and render things.

I guess the best method is to experiment, we'll see what happens when I implement the code for entities. Last time I was working on it I was busy with worldgen. The thing needs a lot of optimisations since it requires a monster machine to generate terrain seamlessly. (with its current state at least)

Yeah, I'm excited to see what you come up with ! Please do tell when you make progress. In the meanwhile I may start coding myself again.

[voodooattack]

Well, I'm fixing some stuff in my free time right now. A lot of libraries were updated and now the source is slightly out of sync. Thank god nothing completely broke.