Permanent Screen Features

[jacobabrennan]

Screens currently consist of Tiles and Movers. Tiles are static and only provide movement flags in terms of gameplay. For anything interactive like passages (ladders) movers are currently used. The problem is that movers don't persist through screen deactivation and reactivation, so needed features can disappear. This needs to be fixed somehow. For example:

• Some movers could be set to be persistent. This is the easiest fix for now.
• Tiles could be made to be more interactive, so that movers would no longer be used. This probably makes the most sense logically, but would require all sorts of BYONDesque hooks like tile.enter() and tile.entered(), which might slow down the game dramatically.
• Screens could have a movers_grid property in addiction to a tile_grid, such that needed features could be restored each time they're needed.
• Something else entirely.

[jacobabrennan]

I've implemented persistent movers for the time being. This may be an acceptable long term solution, but any future project would have to have a way to save a region, persistent movers and all.

Also, perhaps persistent movers should have optional activate and deactivate hooks, such as an NPC that mills about, but always resets to a starting position, or a boss that resets to full health on deactivation and respawns any needed minions on activation.

[jacobabrennan]

The "persistent movers" option has become a stable (if not mature) system.