Sunday 22 November 2009

Task structure

Figuring out how to do npc and player tasks can be difficult, at least without very good plan. Data-driven approach is good in this case too, but guess who didn't organize that earlier. It's important trying to do low level functions for tasks that both player and non-players can use without extensive use of special case coding (usually checking out if the creature is player).

The important layer of data that I still am missing is the task structure: the list of commands and which ones can be executed by non-players. It's not good if you go straight from keyboard Get() into a command subroutine. You can't do that in large scale game. There must be series of stages to go through before that.

I need some planning before looking at the source code. Need to list all commands and try to figure out what those commands have in common, then create the data structure.