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[JasonPickering]

So I am going to need some people to do some testing and answer some questions. Would anyone be interested?

[Purcy]

So I am going to need some people to do some testing and answer some questions. Would anyone be interested?

I've been following this for a while and I'd love to

[JasonPickering]

been working. Enemy descriptions are in now and redoing some spirtes.

[antoniodamala]

So I am going to need some people to do some testing and answer some questions. Would anyone be interested?

yeap

[Franklin's Ghost]

Hadn't realised you'd restarted this. Nice to see

Think maybe you could try animating some enemies patrolling the top of the tower. Or even something just as simple as flashes of colour in one of the windows to represent the evil wizards experiments.

[Sarge]

Was the first one hosted for play on a website at some point?  It feels like it has been a while.

Glad to see it is moving again.

[JasonPickering]

antoniodamala: Send me a PM with your email if you are still interested.

Franklins Ghost: I tried the patrols I had like guys popping up in the windows and such and it looked strange. I was going to see if I could figure out a way to make like bats flying around it, just like 3 pixel wide guys flapping. the window flashes might work.

Sarge: yeah the older version was hosted, but the new version is completely rebuilt from the ground up. removing a lot of the messed up parts of the last version.

[Sarge]

I enjoyed the first version, it had hiccups but was off to a great start.

Looking forward to this one.

E: Can't believe I didn't catch that typo until now.  Oops.

[JasonPickering]

Okay guys, so I might need some help here. I am not a great coder and sometimes getting my head around certain game logic ideas can be a problem.

Monster generation.
so the way monsters work now is I have a list of monsters that are available and each monster has an amount array. so a Rat looks like this

<Monster Name = "Rat"   Levels = "5,4,3,2,2,1,1,0" />

when I go to spawn the levels I basically have a bag of monsters and then I randomly draw them out. So on the first level there are 5 rats in the bag, on the second there are 4, and so on.

is this like a really goofy way for me to spawning guys? I like the idea of setting rarity by level and it also means I can set the maximum amount of rats. Is this the way its usually done in games?

[Sarge]

That's more of a game design question than a programming question.

As far as the programming works I'll give you a piece of advice I heard at my old job:

"If it is stupid but it works, it isn't stupid."

The statement does a lot to justify the things people have to hack together to get something to work.  

Could it probably be done better?  Yeah, maybe, sure.  Is your solution so terrible that it is screwing with the performance of the game?  Probably not, unless you're running this thing on an old Apple II.  So it works and it doesn't break anything else, so screw it.  Good enough.

So I don't think, from a programming perspective, that it is necessarily a bad way to do things.  If the code runs, accomplishes your goals, and doesn't piss on anything else then it is automatically "good enough."

From a design perspective, the solution you have is a more than adequate way to randomly seed enemies into your game.

All of this is of course assuming I'm understanding your explanation correctly.

[JasonPickering]

as I am just learning I am always afraid there is something horribly wrong with how I am doing things. I still haven't figured out a good way to code percentage stuff yet. like making a monster spawn 30% of the time. I guess you write code to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100. and then use a greater then or equal if statment?

[Sarge]

As you read code and learn more about code yourself, you'll realize that in order to do anything even the tiniest bit complicated there are thousands of ways to do it.  People will talk about good code or bad code and I even have a book titled "Beautiful Code." 

I used to get really hung up about this stuff, I was self-conscious about my code, but now I think that is all just nit-picking.  If it works and doesn't crap all over the code it interacts with then that is some pretty damn fine code.

Getting a random number between 1 and 100 and then using a greater than or less than sign is a perfectly acceptable way to do what you're talking about.  It isn't an elegant solution, but it is easy to write, easy to read, and easy to have other code interact with it.

[rek]

as I am just learning I am always afraid there is something horribly wrong with how I am doing things. I still haven't figured out a good way to code percentage stuff yet. like making a monster spawn 30% of the time. I guess you write code to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100. and then use a greater then or equal if statment?

Given the example is based on a percentage, 30/100 and 3/10 are the same thing, so I'd simplify it there. But if "a third of the time" is just as good as 30% of the time, do 1/3.

[JasonPickering]

Luckily I am using flashpunk and it has this nice feature called FP.choose(). I can just put an array in the choose and it will select one. Nice and fast.

[JasonPickering]

Okay, So currently trying to tackle the largest problem I have had so far and that's enemy sorting. People have said that the main problem is a logic of which enemies go in which order. which can cause some problems. I currently have an idea of how I want things to go, but the list has become a bit complicated Logic wise.

Idea:
1. any eye that can currently swap places with the player should go first
2. All enemies that can move should, based on their distance from the player
     - this complicates what happens when a monster moves that was blocking an eye. does that eye go next, do I then redo the enemy sort order for the new position with the remaining enemies.
3. Some enemies have spells that they will use that would work better happening after all monsters moved. they will be relegated to the end, unless they wanted to move then that should have been done in part 2.

[JasonPickering]

Or would it be easier to give the player a enemy turn list if they wanted it.

[Code_Assassin]

Just make a priority queue or something and give each of your monsters a type or a special class? That will save you the time from having to type out every monsters name in the queue

[Pemanent]

as I am just learning I am always afraid there is something horribly wrong with how I am doing things. I still haven't figured out a good way to code percentage stuff yet. like making a monster spawn 30% of the time. I guess you write code to randomly choose a number between 1 and 100. and then use a greater then or equal if statment?

Dude I am a shitty programmer. My code is obtuse, poorly commented, and inefficient... but it works. It seems like you're worried about the best way to code things. In my opinion the best way to learn is to write code that works, then the best code for your specific situation will become obvious. I enjoy game design, not code design, so I just write code that works.

As for turn lists I always thought it was a speed check or something like that.
- Gameobject with highest speed goes first.
- If two gameobjects have the same speed the player goes first, otherwise its random.

[JasonPickering]

that might actually be a good way to sort it, by monster. so I can say Rat is the fastest and always goes first. skeleton is second and always got next.

Pemanent: the biggest worry I have about code is usually going back to fix something and then its just this like cluster.

[Pemanent]

Pemanent: the biggest worry I have about code is usually going back to fix something and then its just this like cluster.

And that is a totally valid worry. I probably should be more worried about that too.