2013-06-14, 10:25 PM
(2013-06-14, 07:23 PM)HwitVlf link Wrote:I think this would be extremely helpful to SoM users. I just meant using simple terminology in the labels seemed like a good idea. Being a lifelong lover of 'communication through written words', things like "hit_outcome_quantifier" seem needlessly computer-geekish to me (ala concatenation, obfuscation, parse etc). But the functionality is the main part and that's great.
Well if you call it "Damage" what kind of damage is it? This extension is in the [Damage] section already. If its not called _quantifier then how do you know what it is? That tells you that there are input parameters involved. How do you search for it in the documentation? And how do you differentiate it from 100s if not 1000s of other extensions? Truth is the name here is quite short. It's part of a group of hit_ extensions, of which there are quite a few. There are extensions with much longer names.
Simple isn't always simpler. It doesn't scale. If you do things simple, then you are limited to doing everything simple, and simple can never be more than, you guessed it, simple. Besides just the process of parsing and evaluating an infix mathematical expression with operator precedence (in other words calculator syntax) is an incredibly complicated (this is one of if not the biggest jobs I've yet to do in service of SOM. And just the (1+2)-(3*4) bit alone is a good chunk of it.)
Also consider. I didn't ask what Attack1 and Attack2 means. Why two? How many are there? But if you add them together with just (A-B)+(A-B) you won't get the results you are looking for. You'd have to do something like max(0,A-B)+max(0,A-B) and as you can see that is already far from simple.
Quote:When you get it up and running, please post. I might take the effort to revamp SoM's starting enemy stat slots so that people can start with balanced "leveled" creatures built in.
Starting enemy stat slots? What does that mean? The monsters in the King's Field sample? Anyway. I would leave everything alone. The default behavior will be the same as SOM uses no matter what. I would remove the bug where stats are 0 or negative, but I worry it would break existing games because the math is so messed up...
Probably I will fix the bug because its a bug. And older games will just have to turn off the fix. Or better yet, fix their monster's stats. I wonder if any of the monsters in the KF remake have 0 stats.
PS/EDITED: I too love communicating via the written word. That's why the names of the extensions are very literate. Or at least I am not a fan of cryptic configuration files. I'm not sure which is which. But the site I visit the most while I am working is thesaurus.com.
PPS: Literate programming is also a thing, which I am a strong advocate of and adherent too (edited: but don't go by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming ... that isn't literate programming, that's programming with literature. No one in the real world does that. I'd never even heard of that. Anyway, literate programming is programming without commentary because the code itself can be read like a book so any comment you could write would just be translating things for non-programmers -- who of course don't read code)