Combat: Cover and flanking system.

This week I've been slogging slowly through the code to integrate combat in to the game. It's different to the way I did it when the game was real-time, but also kind of similar. A command is sent from the turn manager (a sub process of the main environment which has different functions behavior depending on whether it's the player or enemy turn) to an agent to fire its weapon.

That weapon then checks if the target is valid and if it is ready to fire, and then it sends a message to the target with some stats so that the target can process the hits.

Of course, the messages aren't really sent, they are just dumped in to a list in the main environment, and then agents pull out those relevant to themselves using their unique id.

Each stage is separate from each other. Each process can fail without collapsing the whole game loop. For example if you fired a burst of shots at a target and the very first shot killed the target, the others simply won't be processed. The shooting unit though, will still go through all their actions, including using ammo, setting their weapon to a fired state and so on.

You can see in the example that the target determines if it has been flanked, or whether it benefits from cover. Generally it's best to resolve hits in the target object, rather than in the shooting object, or as I was doing previously, in an external process in the main environment.

If you want to flank an enemy unit you need to be in the back 180 degrees of it. If so you can benefit from thinner armor on the flanks.

Cover has 4 directions, North, East, South and West. If there's cover in the tile next to an agent, facing the enemy, then the agent can benefit from better defense.

Lots of work to do yet, but it feels like I'm making a lot of progress right now.

Comments

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