Wrecking as a result of starvation

[mskala at ansuz dot sooke dot bc dot ca]

At present, units that starve to death simply vanish.  I would prefer that
they wreck (when wrecking is possible) instead.  That behaviour would be
more consistent with my reading of the docs, and it would also allow a
variety of clever tricks using unit starvation to create time-delayed type
changes.  Attached are a patch and a sample game file demonstrating the
behaviour - just move the human around until s/he starves; in present CVS
the unit doesn't leave a corpse, but with my patch, it does.  I don't know
if there are any games that presently depend on the unit vanishing instead
of wrecking on starvation; I imagine not, because someone who wanted units
to vanish would generally not define a wrecked-type for them.  But it
might maybe have consequences for clever tricks like the "zombie" one that
was described on this list a few days ago.  I don't think that particular
trick would break, but maybe some other might.

Note that at present, several other modes of unit death also lead to
vanishing instead of wrecking; the documentation leads me to believe that
if the unit's HP go to 0 then the unit will wreck, always, but in fact the
current behaviour is that wrecking only happens with terrain accidents,
(*not* attrition!), automatic wrecking terrain, and combat.  This patch
also cleans up the code a little by dealing with the occupant escape issue
and "use generic damage routine?" noted in the original.  The "should do
other hp loss consequences" comment suggests that something like this
patch may have been intended anyway by whoever wrote that comment.  One
FIXME remains, since I don't know what to do about player notification,
but the patched code is no different from the original in that respect.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/

Attachment: starvewreck.g
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Attachment: mspatch
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