Re: [Adonthell-devel] inventory news

[Alexandre Courbot]

> > We can retrieve the owner by following the inventory link. I think we
> > should rather do that way, because otherwise we'd have many character
> > pointers to change if, say, an whole inventory is given to someone
> > else(and that's the kind of situation where we would FORGET to do it,
> > and hang ourselves one week long to find the bug! :))
> 
> I'm not sure, but I guess the item-owner and inventory-owner are
> different things. If you steal an item for example, it would still
> belong to the original owner, no matter how often you put it into a
> different inventory.

Ah, that's right. It's probably safer to leave the owner field then.

> Also, if a NPC temporarily joins the party, you might redistribute the
> items he has, but when he leaves he might take them with him (and leave
> your items behind).
> 
> That's something we talked about when we discussed NPC's perception of
> their surroundings.

Right. With NPCs reacting when they realize you have an object that
belongs to them. :)

> > Actually, our items representation via Python classes is just fine.
> > Look at this example that just popped out of my tormented mind:
> 
> Yeah, I think inheritance like that would work well. We'll see that when
> we have a basic item/inventory functionality in place. And it might also
> be interesting to model some of the items Nils will come up with
> eventually. That way we can easily see whether things are working
> properly.

Yup. I'm glad to see some progresses are made in the Item/Inventory
area. Since the time we're talking about them! Keep up the good work
guys! :)

Ah, I remember you asked how would the map engine interact with objects.
This made me think about what's the role of the map engine exactly. I
came to a conclusion, that I never thought of before but seems obvious
enough to be mentionned:

The map engine by itself should be nothing more in practise than an
interface to the actual game system. The game system would consist of a
database of characters, objects, quests and so on, that the map engine
connect and interact to using the map_characters, map_items, etc... The
actual game should even not depend on a map engine to work (but of
course, it would be the only way to actually play). So you could
(roughly) represent the game structure that way:


---------------------------
|Input system             |
|(keyboard, joystick, ...)|
---------------------------
  |
  v
------------           ------------------------------------
|Map engine|---------->|Output system (gfx, audio modules)|
|GUI system|           ------------------------------------
------------
  ^
  |
  v
--------------
|Game system |
| -characters|
| -items     |
| -quests    |
| -dialogs   |
| -ia        |
--------------

Maybe that's obvious and you guys already thought about this, but it
seems important enough to me to get shared anyway :)

Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org