Re: [Adonthell-devel] What's next?

[Alexandre Courbot]

Hi everyone! And sorry for the silence - I've been very busy and continue to 
be, unfortunately. Well, it's getting better - not perfect, but better.

Great that you managed to get binaries to build for 0.4. But unfortunately, I 
can't get 0.4 source to compile - I get a failure from the configure related 
to Objective C because of the Mac OSX support. And if I remove the concerned 
lines in the configure.in, then the build fails when compiling the main 
module. I guess this is reproductible on any PC/Linux machine. Kai, can you 
have a look at this?

Now, on to the topic:

> * gametime: in-game time and date classes, used to trigger scripts and
> actions.
>    It'll sit on top of the timer class, but it will belong to the event
> system.

I think I did some work for this - see base::timer. Might be a starting base 
for the new timing system.

> * event system: the connection between engine and event scripts. While
> I do not
>    want to touch the foundations of that, I am thinking of a different
> approach
>    for the interface between event system and Python:

Right. That's indeed much better. Actually I think we should make a more 
extensive use of the event system in 0.4 - since you seem to think the same, 
it'd better be efficient and well-designed.

>    - Each character will have a master schedule that defines its actions
> during
>      the day (or another period of time).
>    - Each action is detailed in a script of its own, so that actions can
> be
>      reused between characters. (That means, the parameters for actions
> are
>      defined in the master schedule)
>    - Characters can receive messages that override the master schedule. A
>      message will simply start a certain action. Messages may come from
> game
>      events, other NPCs, etc ...

That's what I had in mind when suggesting a more extensive use of the event 
system. Having the ability to pass messages through it would open the doors 
to plenty of cool things regarding the schedules.

> Okay, I think that covers everything I have originally worked on.
> Porting it to v0.4 may take a while, as there are a few things to
> rewrite. But once it is done, we'll have a good foundation for building
> the v0.4 demo.

I guess there are more things to rewrite than port :)

> As for the organization, I intend to add two more modules: event and
> rpg. Further will contain the gametime and event stuff. Latter the
> character related things: items, inventories, schedules, dialogues. The
> python script cache/pool will of course become part of the python
> module.

Sounds good.

On my site, I hope to be able to show you some more map stuff. It needs some 
extra work to be presentable. But this time I'm doing the tools along with 
the engine (in PyQt, hope no one minds).

See ya! Glad to see some activity back on this list! ;)
Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org