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clintbellanger / flare

Free Libre Action Roleplaying Engine
http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Allow enemies to enter combat in packs #44

Closed clintbellanger closed 13 years ago

clintbellanger commented 13 years ago

Right now a careful adventurer can easily pick off a large group of monsters by pulling one at a time.

Fix this by allowing enemies to enter combat in packs.

One simple way I can think to do this: when a creature enters combat, make that creature emit a graphic-less area hazard that targets enemies but does no damage. Nearby creatures will automatically enter combat because they think they were attacked, even if they can't see the hero.

Maybe each creature has a beacon range. So maybe zombies have a very low range, but goblin scouts have a very high range.

Maybe some creatures ignore beacons. E.g. maybe gargoyles always act alone.

wokste commented 13 years ago

Another way would be to use the rectangular areas from issue 46.

A third way is writing a seperate function in EnemyManager / Map like alertFriends.

pennomi commented 13 years ago

I've got the test code up in my fork: https://github.com/pennomi/flare/ Give it a try and see if that's what you want.

I found that radius=256 seems to be a sweet spot for the beacon. Any less and it doesn't work as you'd expect, more than that can pull in creatures which feel like they don't belong to the same group.

It's possible that certain uncommon creatures may have a different radius than that (scouts, for instance). But if it is common to have a large beacon radius, it produces unexpected results.

It's all configurable, of course, so if a creature shouldn't emit a beacon, you just leave the line blank (bosses are this way right now) or if you want to create units with larger beacons, you just add a new beacon power.