Dear all,

After a little hiatus due to personal reasons and game playing (finished Skyrim and starting Deus Ex), I got round to do the next big step in the BackToRoots engine: monster scripting. That is something of the past since now monsters can have a Lua script attached to them and we have a few callbacks from the core engine to diversify the behavior.

As shown in the following post, monsters can now have particular behaviors not automatically handled by the core engine.

The first example can be seen here:

For the curious programmers out there, the Lua script for a slime to divide itself is really easy:

-- If a slime gets hit and is not dead, it divides
  function gotHit (gameState, us, attacker)
    isDead = LuaInterface_CharacterIsDead (us);

    -- If not dead yet, we will divide
    if (isDead == false) then
        found, x, y = LuaInterface_CombatViewGetFreeSquare (gameState, us, 1);

        if (found == true) then
            LuaInterface_CombatViewSendText (gameState, "Slime divides!");
            LuaInterface_CombatViewAddMonster (gameState, "Slime", x, y);
         end
     end
 end

One important element that is clearly visible is the difficulty balancing. I have to work on that and, once I’m doing that, I probably won’t want slimes to always split if not killed as is done for the moment.

The next step is to handle Daemon summoning but, with the interface I just set up for slimes, it should be a matter of minutes to get it done. The only thing missing is to be able to request a summoning instead of just adding it for the slimes.

Jc