[airstrike] Airstrike levels and goal oriented game-play

Erik Auerswald auerswal at unix-ag.uni-kl.de
Thu Aug 3 03:32:34 EDT 2006


Hi,

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 09:13:25PM +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 August 2006 20:25, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> ...
> > > > Is airstrike supposed to support 4 human players?
> > >
> > > Well, at least player object and main() do that.  However, currently
> > > there seem to be only "player 1" and "player 2" AIs (sets of keys),
> > > so the support is not complete.  Adding "player 3" and "player 4"
> > > AIs would be trivial though.
> >
> > There are practical issues with the number of keys simultaneously
> > pressed.
> 
> Yeah, I think the HW in newer keyboards doesn't support that many
> simultanous key presses.
> 
> > The size of levels and planes might make it very crowded with 
> > more than 2 players. But in principle I would like 4 player support (or
> > even more ;).
> 
> How the joystick support works?  Maybe the player AIs should be:
> - keyboard 1
> - keyboard 2
> - joystick 1
> - joystick 2
> (- network :))

This could be done. Joystick control is independent from keyboard control
and any player ai can use any one of the connected joysticks. The mapping
of input devices to players should be easily configurable (via a menu
system). We could view a set of keys as an input device. And there should
be a way to have an additional keyset that can be used concurrently with
the others on most keyboards (using the keypad).

> > > The goal is the same for each players (e.g. do N laps around the
> > > level).
> >
> > OK, just the way the third level is at the moment.
> 
> The objects & goals & rewards on most of the levels would need quite
> a bit of fine-tuning ocne the engine is working well enough...  Current ones
> are mostly examples of what's possible with triggers & generators.

Of course. I just wanted to make sure I understand you correctly. :-)

> Btw. can SVN contain symbolic links?  It would be nice to re-use the same
> bg graphics for different goals without copying the image files.

Taken from the svn FAQ:

Subversion 1.1 (and later) has the ability to put a symlink under
version control, via the usual svn add command.

Details: the Subversion repository has no internal concept of a symlink.
It stores a "versioned symlink" as an ordinary file with an
'svn:special' property attached. The svn client (on unix) sees the
property and translates the file into a symlink in the working copy.
Win32 has no symlinks, so a win32 client won't do any such translation:
the object appears as a normal file.

> Or maybe the bg, mask & thumbnail gfx should be in separate directory 
> from the level settings files?

An alternative could be to use different settings files for different
goals resp. game modes.

The most flexible setup would be to use a config file to define the
level properties (bg, mask, thumbnail, and settings) instead of the
level directories.

Erik



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