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Re: scorekeeping and materials


>My first thought was to implement it as a material; units could gain or
>lose it in combat, and scorekeepers could watch the total amount possess
>by units of side A and the total amount possessed by units of any side to
>evaluate the victory condition.

You could try implementing them as units instead, and assign point values
for the scorekeeper to that unit type only. Then make capture of these
special units easy. Check out how the ring works in the lord-rings game for
an example.

>Second issue: how to compute "total amount of material X possessed by
>units of side A"?  There is a "sum" scorekeeper function, but it seems to
>want the (atomic) name of a unit property.  "Amount of material X" is not
>an atomic unit property - it is an element at index X in the vector value
>of the "m" property.  I don't know the correct syntax for that.  (There
>are, of course, other serious problems with scorekeeper syntax
>documentation - this is just the one that seems worst.)

That's one reason why I suggested that you make them units.

>Fourth issue: what is a "test"?  Where are they documented?  The Users'
>guide gives a few examples, but not enough to infer the actual rules.

Tests are mostly for use by hackers, who write new kernel code, not for
game designers. See the hacking manual.

>Fifth issue: this one isn't directly related, but it sure would be nice if
>I could make some types of terrain damaging (not immediately fatal) on
>movement, not occupancy.

You can specify that a unit type wrecks into another type on certain
terrain, and this second type (the wreck) doesn't have to be dead. In
effect, you can build a chain of wrecked types: bus -> slightly wrecked bus
-> a little more wrecked bus etc. with less and less movement points. That
would pretty much achieve what you are asking for.

>One problem there is that Xconq crashes whenever I try to save a handmade
>file >containing a border terrain type

Do you mean handmade as in hacking the map file yourself? That will
certainly cause crashes unless you know exactly what you are doing. Or are
you using the built-in map editor? In that case, you have found a bug that
should be fixed.

If you are using the editor, please send me the saved game before you edit
it, and some more detailed comments about how to trigger the crash (like:
change ttype of cell (11,15) from forest to plain, and then try to save).

>Is there any hope?  Is it possible that the scorekeeping is actually
>implemented somewhere, and I'm just looking at the wrong function?  Or is
>advanced scorekeeping just an unimplemented feature and that's it?

Yep. In this case, it seems that Stan wrote the docs before he wrote the
code, and the latter was never finished. Most of us sin the other way, as
Eric pointed out. There were some games that had experimental advanced
scorekeepers, but I commented them out since they did not work.

Hans



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