Porting ToME2 to the T4 engine

[HousePet]

I've got a Symbiosis category in Verdant, but its not very like the T2 one.
But then, without respawning monsters and a lack of high level critters to use, that isn't overly surprising.

Wild-gift/Symbiant
Symbiosis: sustain. Merge with an Ooze (options based on your level) for increased life, partial damage conversion to the Ooze's element and increased Ooze element damage.
Jelly Slap: active. A melee attack that triggers a small burst of damage from your symbiote in a cone.
Mucus Martyr: passive. Should you take a killing blow while Symbiosis is active, your symbiote will absorb all the damage. This saves your life, but causes your symbiote to die in a messy explosion, deactivating Symbiosis.
Oozesplosion: active. Force life into your symbiote, causing it to multipy explosively for a short time. This does a symbiote element damage nova and spawns friendly clones of your symbiote.

[Zizzo]

Well now, symbiosis was something I hadn't thought of in context with the T4 engine. interesting things indeed could be done with that. Hell, even resources for major/minor powers coming off both you and the symbiote, to prevent summonspam. (So casting summon dragons off a greater draconic Q, for instance, would drain X value off your resource, and Y value off your symbiote, adjusted accordingly for monster resource levels/regen values, and player access to greater regen means.)

*blink* ...Well, that's a bit more involved that I was expecting, but it's certainly an interesting idea. Does the engine allow a wielded object to confer a resource to the player? Monsters don't currently have mana, so we couldn't use that. We'd need to decide on resource costs for the various talents, and resource amounts for the various symbiosis-able monsters...

[HousePet]

All the resource pools are granted by talents, so it shouldn't be a problem.
You could even grant a Symbiote energy resource pool.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be quite that involved. I was immediately considering it based off the way current tome handles monsters and resource regen. I know summonspam used to bea problem for summoners and symbiotes both in T2, and a way to allow them to summon without breaking the system wide open might need some consideration. Balancing it so that the symbiote (which can't drink potions to refill mana) has to pay some greater or lesser portion of the cost would put more reasonable caps on some things.

But yeah, if nothing currently has mana, or any other resource, maybe that's not the smartest idea.

Failing anything else, worn symbiotes could be treated like rods, with X amount of resource, consume Y for each various power. But this is still far afield. Other things that could be considered would be sharing damage resistance (or weakness?) or various other stats of a given monster.

[Zizzo]

All the resource pools are granted by talents, so it shouldn't be a problem.

[sound F/X: source diving] Hmm, that's not engine code, though; the T4 module's doing that handling. I could probably reproduce it, I suppose, but it's using that weird trick of using a fake hidden talent like e.g. "Mana Pool" to mark the presence of of a mana pool (which I never understood the point of, actually; why couldn't you just check for the presence of the 'mana' field?).

You could even grant a Symbiote energy resource pool.

That was a possibility that had occurred to me, yes. Something like "Symbiotic equilibrium", maybe; you'd need a 100% bar to use a symbiote power, and it would regenerate at (100/N)% per turn, where N is the symbiote monster's "1 in N" spell casting rate, maybe with some random variance.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be quite that involved.

Hey, no worries. This is all a work in progress, after all; we can hash it out as we go.

But yeah, if nothing currently has mana, or any other resource, maybe that's not the smartest idea.

Well, we could try giving monster mana, I suppose...

[Zizzo]

And as long as I'm in the neighborhood, I have a small engine question: is it possible for an Entity's display or color fields to be functions rather than simple scalar values? I'm thinking ahead to handling monsters and objects with the ATTR_MULTI and ATTR_CLEAR flags, which should change color randomly as the player moves or as the monster moves across terrain. I've got sort of this effect working for cloud effects, but it's using overlays, which I don't think would work here.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Any further progress with this?

Also, since you didn't get an answer, stepping into irc and poking a few of the coders there is a decent way to rapidly resolve issues like this. (And it lets DarkGod keep tabs on you.)

[darkgod]

Display and colors cant be functions I'm afraid; the display code uses them once to resolve a MapObject which contains a generated texture.
If you want to do that you'll need to check for attr_multi in Actor:actBase(), change display/colors, remove the current MO and call for a map update to get a new one.

And yes. IRC.

[Zizzo]

Display and colors cant be functions I'm afraid; the display code uses them once to resolve a MapObject which contains a generated texture.
If you want to do that you'll need to check for attr_multi in Actor:actBase(), change display/colors, remove the current MO and call for a map update to get a new one.

Mmm, that doesn't really help, though; I don't want to change colors on Actor turns, but on player turns. The idea is to reproduce the T2 effect of the tile changing color each time the player moves or waits a turn. I can get away with that in ShimmerOverlay because Map.displayEffects() polls the tiles from the effect's overlay each time, so I can have it clobber its tile cache when the game clock changes. Not to mention I've got objects with the ATTR_MULTI flag too, and it seems like overkill to add an :act() method to Essences of Chaos just so they can change colors.

[Hmm, maybe I could have Level:addEntity() keep a list of entities with the ATTR_MULTI flag and clobber their MOs in Player:act()? ...meh, I can deal with that later.]

Any further progress with this?

Eh heh... I thought I was going to be able to get away with not having a "live" actor in the symbiote object for the first pass, but it looks like I'll need it to handle HP regen while the symbiote is worn. So now I've got to work out some kind of "party" structure akin to T4's, and figure out how to write an AI for an Actor that isn't actually on the map...

[Zireael]

My solution for changing colors would involve creating copies of said entity but with different colors, then loading them every player turn, if there's such a need (the entity is in player's FOV).

[Zizzo]

My solution for changing colors would involve creating copies of said entity but with different colors, then loading them every player turn, if there's such a need (the entity is in player's FOV).

Yeah, that's what I'm investigating at the moment; that appears to be the sort of thing the Entity.replace_display field is for. What's got me interested is that I might also be able to implement hallucination via this mechanism, which had me stymied before.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Oh GOD... The illusionary castle's gonna make a hell of a comeback... *shudders in dread*

[Zizzo]

Oh GOD... The illusionary castle's gonna make a hell of a comeback... *shudders in dread*

(shrug) Meh, no worries; I've only done Illusory Castle deliberately once (and that was Thunderlording to the bottom to get the Helm of Knowledge), so getting that to work is not going to be high on my priority list.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

A query arises. Given that you're adapting T2 to the T4 engine, will you be coding up some achievements for T2 as well? When (not if) this releases, it's going to have a fairly wide audience, building around that and mimicking the more modern tome can only serve to draw in more people, faster.

(And, then you can make an achievement for clearing hellish optional dungeons... Like the illusionary castle... I'm evil)

Careful design would probably be needed for what else deserves an achievement, so it's not overloaded with 'gimmes', but not everything is rage-mode hard to acquire either.

[Zizzo]

A query arises. Given that you're adapting T2 to the T4 engine, will you be coding up some achievements for T2 as well?

These are the achievements I currently have defined. Basically, the usual level-10/20/30/40/50, plus an achievement for most of the quests that get mentioned on the character sheet: winning the game, destroying the Ring, beating Maeglin, the Poison Water quest, the Last Alliance quest, re-forging Andúril, rescuing Merton, killing Uvatha in Bree, finding all five relic pieces (one for each Vala), and three separate achievements for Nírnaeth Arnoediad, depending on how many monsters you kill therein.

Given that, I'm certainly open to suggestions for adding or removing achievements.