Large Monsters in game.

After spending a lot of time going through the code and adding in some special conditions I now have large monsters working pretty much as I want them. Well, as far as movement is concerned anyhow. When it comes to combat there really shouldn't be any trouble, it'll just be a case of checking which characters are next to the occupied squares for the intention of performing an attack.

One of the big monsters in game. The green circle represents the "home" square from which movement.

I've prepared a video which shows how the routes are calculated and how it looks in game.
You can see it below:

Working on this has thrown up a whole host of issues with the code so far. There'll be a lot of polishing going on over the next few days. One problem is that at times the game was calculating things based on a static floor height of z=0.1 rather than a dynamic z=walkmesh_data height. That will have to be corrected if my later experiments with variable height floors will work. Another problem was that many things were using the player object's world position (dependent on the visual representation of the player, i.e. object orientated) in their calculations, when they should have been using the character's ['xy_location'] (a property dependent on the walk mesh dictionary, i.e. data driven). This is one of the hazards of having a data driven game system represented by an object oriented visual overlay. Data can influence visual representation, but visual representations should not at any time influence the underlying data.

In theory you could strip away the visual representation and replace it with an old school roguelike UI, or upgrade the graphics engine, or transmit the data across the internet for a multiplayer game, without the local visual conditions having any effect. One player could be using an ASCII display, while another could be using a 3d display and it wouldn't matter.

Well, that's the idea anyway. :) I'm not sure I'll ever follow through with that scenario, but it's something to consider when making the game.

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