Hi Ron,
That's a very good question. Unfortunately, do to the way side-scrollers
are designed randomly placing items and monsters is a very very
difficult process. I can't really do it without doing a lot of work
placing each item and creature in rooms randomly.
Here is a very simple example of the problem involved with the kind of
random placement people are asking about.
In a game like Shades of Doom if I want to randomly place an ammo pack,
sword, or monster in a room all I have to do is randomly generate an x
and y value, make sure there is no doors or walls in the way, and drop
it on the world map. Because you have full movement and the world is
flat you don't have a problem walking over and picking up that item or
targeting that monster. You also don't necessarily have to worry about
items and creatures winding up plastered to the ceiling either.
Side-scrollers are different in that the x axis moves left and right and
the y axis is up and down. As a result if you tried to generate an x and
y value items and monsters would wind up floating in mid air or end up
plastered to the ceiling or some place you can't get to. As a result the
only way to randomly place a monster or item in a side-scroller like
MOTA is to write a function that gets the current level, randomly
generates a room, and places the item based on those two factors. Here
is an example of what I mean.
// Randomly place some gold coins.
int room = calculate.GetRandomNumber(1, 25);
// Place coins on level 1.
if (isCurrentLevel == 1)
{
if (room == 1)
{
gold.SetAmount(10);
gold.SetArea(1);
gold.SetLocation(10, 0, 1);
gold.SetName("gold coins");
gold.SetPoints(1000*isExperienceLevel);
}
if (room == 2)
{
gold.SetAmount(10);
gold.SetArea(2);
gold.SetLocation(45, 0, 1);
gold.SetName("gold coins");
gold.SetPoints(1000*isExperienceLevel);
}
}
As you can see if I have to do that sort of thing for 25 rooms for every
singl level I am going to have several hundred lines of code generated
to just randomly place one single item on the map. That's unrealistic,
and the reason why I am not going to randomly place items in the game.
It is just to difficult to do if I want to get this game out by the
spring. In Genesis 3D the full engine items can be randomly placed
because all I need to do is randomly generat an x and z coordinate and
supply a manual y coordinate to place something in the game world. In
side-scrollers like MOTA it can't be done that way just because of the
way the levels are laid out.
Cheers.
Ron Schamerhorn wrote:
Hi Tom
I think I'd have to say go for putting the new elements of gameplay into
mota. Granted the obstacles in Monty were good but as someone pointed out
they were sort of limited. By having different traps and monsters it may
give the game better replay. One question about the new boards. Will the
various monsters, traps and such be fixed into each room or will there be
some degree of randomness incorperated?
Look forward to seeing and or helping out.
Ron
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