[Wesnoth-dev] AMLA

[John McNabb]

Fellow Wesnothians,
        As per a request from Dave, I have implimented an AMLA of 3HP/100XP for 
all units, except the Necrophage.  The AMLA does not cause the units to heal 
when achieving the bonus 3hp, so the Necrophage's special ability is still 
preserved, although it is now done using AMLA code instead of having it 
advance to itself.  The Necrophage has not been given any bonus HP when this 
happens.  In doing this, I had to make a change to unit.cpp 
(revision 1.156 5 lines) that now makes it so that units that level to 
themselves do not automatically heal.  This means that the effect of 
a unit advancing to itself via the advanceto tag is really only to remove 
temporary modifications such as slow.

It should be noted, that it is quite easy (and therefore tempting) to add more 
flavor to the AMLA by adding different effects for different types of units, 
or even giving the player some choice in the upgrades for certain units. 
I will be happy to do so if it is desired, but we must remember that any AMLA 
should be sufficiently weak that it is still better to give XP to lower level 
units, even if the XP gotten by max level units is now not completely wasted.

It also should be noted that this commit touched all the unit files, which is 
a dangerous thing to do.  I have tried testing the changes as well as making 
sure by eye that this didn't add any bugs, but please let me know if you find 
any, especially if it is across all the files.  It is easy enough to rerun the 
advance.pl script.  On that note, I am uploading the latest version of 
advance.pl to the forum so that people who want to play with the AMLA over a 
lot of units at once, can do so easily.

Enjoy
Darth Fool

P.S. one issue that this does bring up is that these modification advancements 
do not curerntly show up in the unit descriptions.  It would be nice if there 
were some way for people to know that when they achieve the 100xp to level, 
what will happen.  Unfortunately, this could mean a big code change.  I haven't 
really looked at that part of the code, so I am not sure.

-- 
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        "In theory, theory and practice are the same, 
                but in practice they're different."
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John W. C. McNabb
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