Hi list inhabitants! I've just been lurking for quite some time now - been able to figure out things lately on my own without having to ask, but this stuff has stumpted(sp?) for quite some time, so I figured I'd ask those on the list who seem to know every little nuance of the code about this:
affect_data for the most part, I can "read" the code enough to figure out what it's doing/what I need it to do - but affect_data seems to be ... I dunno - either too large or too convuluted or something for me to be able to handle holding it all in my head or something. For example - at one point I thought about having objects provide perm affects (this has actually been recently covered in the list, iirc) - so I look to the code -- first off, some objects in stock code appear to already do this - obj #904 from olympus (winged sandals) -- give flying affect -- not as a spell affect with a duration of -1 however - they appear to do this by setting the flying bit of ch->affected. Changing it's affect type from AFF_NONE to AFF_SPELL_AFFECT crashes the game (I see why once I run it in gdb, and undo my changes). I check for ANY object to have the AFF_SPELL_AFFECT affect - none do -- olc doesn't even seem to SUPPORT this. Bah! I'm rambling now as I always seem to do when I send to the list. Basically, I'm wondering if anyone can actually claim to UNDERSTAND affect_data not in general, but in specifics - I've made notes on what each variable in the structure MEANS - but when you try to take the structure as a sum of it's parts - that's where it seems sometimes like the entire structure is just a bunch of stuff added on as the need arose -- perhaps it was :) so - could anyone explain it? :) -- I'd be most appreciative. don't get me wrong - I can code in a new spell that creates/assigns new affects to a character - but I'm trying to understand the basic underlying meaning of the structure itself - perhaps that was clearer. Oh - while I'm at it - does anyone else have this problem? every once in a while I just decide my code has gotten to be too ... "hackish" with my seemingly random addons, and I tar up the whole thing, store it somewhere, and start from clean source, trying to do it "better" only to have the same thing happen 3, 5, 9 months down the road. Just wondering - seems pointless as I never get a truly good mud - just a bunch of fair ones (and a helluva lot of experience I suppose *grins*) Sorry to bug you all with such a long-winded pair of questions - I'll send this off now and go back to staring stupidly at merc.h and trying to figure out the APPLY_NONE and TO_WEAPON and the bitvector flag (which as far as I can see is useless except to make lookups run faster). Oops - I said I'd stop - doing so now. Thanks for any thoughts :) - Brian E. Ermovick - midkemia.dyndns.org 4000 (the latest incarnation of amalgam)
