Those of you who have played (or DO play) text-based games probably know this: usually distance fighting (across multiple rooms) tends to be rather awkward and unrealistic.
The reason behind this being that it is hard to see what lies in the rooms ahead of you, and since you are pretty much limiting to firing in a straight line.
My first idea to counter this annoyance would be to have all of the 'distance fighting' to take place on X and Y axis.
Let's say Bob is located at 1:1, and Jim is at 5:5. Now let's drop a box smack-dab at 3:3, between them. Now, Jim and Bob can't see eachother (unless maybe a height factor was added to the objs/mobs), and they can't shoot at eachother.
Now, Bob has his crossbow nice and loaded, so he dashes over to 5:1 and takes a shot at Jim, who is sitting peacefully at 5:5. Bob fires, and wham! Jim is now dead, or horrifically wounded.
Of course, this system removes the entire room-based system that text-based games tend to follow.
My question is this: Would such a system be difficult to follow, or just plain boring? If so, how would you improve it, or go about making a different distance fighting system?
- Malver
ID:154096
 Jun 11 2002, 1:03 pm
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It might be annoying to have to calculate line of sight as well. You'd have to find the equation of the line then plug in the points that could block you to see if they are on the line. That is pretty simple but I wouldn't want to have to do it continuously just to see where I need to be to shoot at something.
I think those things are best left to graphical games. It's kind of like trying to play a text mud of chess where it tells you all the positions. You could do it but it would be more of a headache than anything else. | |
In the MUDs I've seen that use room-based-targetting, there's usually a way to see several rooms ahead of you. Once nice MUD had an option that would let you scout out the rooms in a certain direction, and based on size I guess it would return a list of what you saw, and where you saw it. Now, with room based targetting, it would be pretty easy to just calculate which rooms you are able to aim at, and which mobs inside those rooms you can see. After that, if their selected target is in the list, just give a chance of a successful hit.
At least, that's how I'd do it. | |
Foomer wrote:
In the MUDs I've seen that use room-based-targetting, there's usually a way to see several rooms ahead of you. Once nice MUD had an option that would let you scout out the rooms in a certain direction, and based on size I guess it would return a list of what you saw, and where you saw it. Now, with room based targetting, it would be pretty easy to just calculate which rooms you are able to aim at, and which mobs inside those rooms you can see. After that, if their selected target is in the list, just give a chance of a successful hit. Well, it's not the coding portion that I am concerned about, I can handle that just fine. :) I'm worrying about the actual "fun-ness" of the system. Text-based distance fighting can be confusing and aggrevating if done wrong. (Which is not hard to do :P) - Malver | |
My goal is to make a cyberpunk/fantasy text-based mud, so of course I've put a lot of thought into ranged combat (guns and spells). My number one thing is to keep it simple. If its took complex that you can't quickly react to a bullet wizzin into the room the player will get frustrated/die/and quit. Tryin to figure out which x and z I wanna goto would be a pain, so I'd try to stick to fairly standard mud rooms. In my opinion this can all be pretty much solved with a fairly standard mud command 'scan'. It quickly scans the areas around you (lets say 1 room away normally, 2 if you have a magnicication scope) for mobs. somethin kinda like;
You scan the area around you... North: goon East: Rothchild East(2): thug West: goon, thief I always found it helpful in ranged combat... | |
I can't remember what it was -- some kind of French Renaissance MUD -- but it had a system where people could be in different places within the same room, and it was so utterly confusing that I left within the first five minutes.