Controlling ships and towers

Rich Skrenta (skrenta@blekko.rt.com)
Sat, 18 Jul 92 15:33:24 EDT

[This is a repeat for some of you]

This is about ship movement specifically, and how to control ships
and towers in general.

There are two problem with controlling ships and towers at the
moment:

1) Movement in a ship will unstack you if you hit land and
keep going. This is bad.

2) I want to get rid of the second SET argument, which is
only there so you can set the name on towers and ships.

Some have suggested that it would be nice if you could just submit
orders for towers and ship as you would for any other entity.

I like this idea. I am exploring it for problems.

In order for this to work smoothly, I would need to allow orders to
be queued for units which players do not yet control. This is probably
a good thing anyway, since you might want to queue orders for a unit
which you intend to PERSUADE.

Analysis:

o Ships and towers can name themselves.
o We can let them GIVE and TAKE their own inventory.
o Solves the ship movement unstack problem.

o The orthogonality gives me a warm fuzzy. Ship and
tower orders look just like character and location orders.
We don't need to add special "ship movement" commands or
other nonsense.

Now here is the strange issue:

o In order to work smoothly, when you lose control of a
unit, your queued orders for that unit should not be
flushed. Rather, the unit should simply begin taking
orders from its new owner.

Should you regain control of the unit, your orders for
it should pick up where they left off.

Why?

Because if all of your men get off a ship, you don't control
it anymore. If orders are flushed, you couldn't get off
for a day to look around, and get back on to go somewhere
else.

This also would let two players trade a ship or character
back and forth multiple times per turn, and be able to
usefully control it.

entity 501
work
swear 505
move s # go to Drassa when Steve's done with us

-- 
Rich Skrenta <skrenta@usl.com>


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