Coding Task List - Before IB2 Initial Release

[youngneil1]

That's awesome feedback, Dorateen, thank you very much ! Keeps me motivated to stumble forward valiantly .

[youngneil1]

Good news here - just had the first enemy caster summon a creature in combat !

Getting crowded on my battlefield with temporary ally added by script at start of encounter, summoned friendly bear by my own mage and summoned enemy spider by the enemy lizardman shaman .

I have some work ahead still for the summon code needs adjustment for oversized creatures...

[slowdive]

That sounds awesome, Karl! Big congrats on that code addition as it was/is probably challenging. Look forward to checking it out in the future.

[youngneil1]

Thank you, Jer . Yep, the challenge level rises as more and more systems interlock (oversized creatures and all the pathing related complications they bring, summoned temporary allies, summoned temporary creatures, attacks of opportunity including their animations, cast times and interruptions...). This is especially tricky as I am bad at tidily structuring stuff, still often taken a modder's route of simply being happy with an ugly, but working solution. This sadly creates additional problems later down the road when trying to add another building block upon the dangerously winding and asymteric tower, sigh . That said, it feels good to see it all work in conjunction, duct taped as it is .

[youngneil1]

Real life is very busy here the next four or five days. I will try smuggle in some coding hours , but the outcome of this endeavour is open at best .

[youngneil1]

Back from holiday trip and hopefully more frequently present here (and coding) again .

[youngneil1]

IB2 Beta v52 - no liabilities/no warranties, use at your own risk:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g549q5fxymx5t ... 2.zip?dl=0

- again lots of work on pathfinding in combat, especially for oversized creatures
- also fixing the one or other potential crash reason in combat
- summoning allies via spell or script is fully implemented (minus an optimization for the creature location if original target square is occupied)

[youngneil1]

I am preparing a documentation for summoning spells (for creature AI casters as well as player casters) and scripts right now, along with adding such to the default module.

Also, I fixed a bug of mine with determining square index: On non-square shaped areas my mistake caused pathfinding to fail (see Phil's/Pongo's bug reports). This should work now (next beta). Still, I would recommend to use square shaped areas in general as the most fail save setup (e.g. when building seamelssly connected neighbouring areas or when it comes to potential other pathfinding troubles).

[zach_holbrook]

Great work. I'm going to try to use square-shaped areas from now on, too.

[youngneil1]

I am bit slower here than usual (the fine weather takes its toll ). Still, work is done all the time. I finished mechansims for script based calls of temporary pc and temporary creatures (these were in already, but lacked the code for determining alternative lcoations in case the intended summon target square was occupied). This closes the full suite of summon options (via spell and script, both for enemies and the party).

The summon code for enemies allows them to call oversized creatures of all kinds which is kind of neat (eg a little goblin summoner calling a large, 2x2 wyvern ). Players who call allies can only call allies of size 1x1 though (as players generally can be only 1x1). All calls come with a duration so you can set it up that the summoned creatures or pc disappear again after eg three rounds.

I also worked on the toolset in order to automatically add new premade stuff (ibscripts, spells, traits, effects) to your modules. You can get rid of these again by deleting them in the default modlule as well as your module, so there is, of course, an opt out. I hope this makes the barrier to trying out new stuff lower as it will be ready to use from the get go. Maybe I should allow a switch (module property) that authors can turn off and their modules will never do such automatic pulling in of new premade stuff?

Finally some work was done on pathfinding for wide (+1 in x-direction, 2x1) and tall (+1 in y-direction, 1x2) creatures. It was basically updating them to the same standard as the large creatures(2x2) which were my testing guninea pigs.

Now, I "just" have to wrap it all up and document it in a nice and shiny new tutorial thread on summoning.