2010-07-31, 04:24 AM
I've always thought monsters in games should fight/eat each other when the player is not around. I mean really, these killer creatures have an absolute armistice until a player shows up, then scramble for the chance to be the one that gets to kill the player 
This thread is the right place to talk about this kind of stuff as far as I'm concerned. I think the enemy data is pretty well laid bare. There are definitely some possibilities. Does monster melee hit other monsters? I'm not sure, testing that might be difficult to setup.
I think it might be possible to even add monsters on the fly. So summoning might be easier than controlling them. If they just did spectacular magic attacks and disappeared that might be pretty simple.
BTW: I'm thinking about holding back on the D3D9 release for a day or two because the build is a little out of order because last night I got a wild hair about supporting 16bpp mode because it dawned on me there was no way to truly support 16bpp under Aero but it could be replicated as a visual effect. To be honest I love Som in 16bpp mode. It only seems interesting to me when it's in 16bpp honestly. In 32bpp it seems really drab and washed out and dead. In 16bpp it's incredibly lush and has a painterly effect and the constant peeling caused by the fog makes everything (including the shadows) seem to be alive. That said I've had a lot of complications. First attempt was to just add a line of code to the pixel shader basically remove the 32bpp colour information from the pixels (large ranges of colours get collapsed into one) which looks better to me, but D3D9 applies the fog after the pixel shader, so A) it's 32bpp, and B) you don't get that awesome peeling effect, and all the surfaces seem dead (static never changing) ...so I could do my own fog with a vertex shader but the way Som works that would be a nightmare to manage and I prefer to implement things in a way that is agnostic to Som (so any game could be hooked up to the Direct X code in theory) ...so now I'm trying to render to a 16bpp texture then just plaster it over the screen in the end (which is also a good time to apply other effects) but for some reason just switching the render target over to the texture isn't good enough (worse I can't imagine why) and I'm kind of at a loss to think of something to try / am beginning to think this trouble I'm having may not supposed to be happening. But I won't give up, and I expect to get it done in the next few days, schedule permitting.
This thread is the right place to talk about this kind of stuff as far as I'm concerned. I think the enemy data is pretty well laid bare. There are definitely some possibilities. Does monster melee hit other monsters? I'm not sure, testing that might be difficult to setup.
I think it might be possible to even add monsters on the fly. So summoning might be easier than controlling them. If they just did spectacular magic attacks and disappeared that might be pretty simple.
BTW: I'm thinking about holding back on the D3D9 release for a day or two because the build is a little out of order because last night I got a wild hair about supporting 16bpp mode because it dawned on me there was no way to truly support 16bpp under Aero but it could be replicated as a visual effect. To be honest I love Som in 16bpp mode. It only seems interesting to me when it's in 16bpp honestly. In 32bpp it seems really drab and washed out and dead. In 16bpp it's incredibly lush and has a painterly effect and the constant peeling caused by the fog makes everything (including the shadows) seem to be alive. That said I've had a lot of complications. First attempt was to just add a line of code to the pixel shader basically remove the 32bpp colour information from the pixels (large ranges of colours get collapsed into one) which looks better to me, but D3D9 applies the fog after the pixel shader, so A) it's 32bpp, and B) you don't get that awesome peeling effect, and all the surfaces seem dead (static never changing) ...so I could do my own fog with a vertex shader but the way Som works that would be a nightmare to manage and I prefer to implement things in a way that is agnostic to Som (so any game could be hooked up to the Direct X code in theory) ...so now I'm trying to render to a 16bpp texture then just plaster it over the screen in the end (which is also a good time to apply other effects) but for some reason just switching the render target over to the texture isn't good enough (worse I can't imagine why) and I'm kind of at a loss to think of something to try / am beginning to think this trouble I'm having may not supposed to be happening. But I won't give up, and I expect to get it done in the next few days, schedule permitting.