Problems with the new ability system in svn trunk

[Elvish_Pillager]

• The description of "Regenerates" is spelled incorrectly in abilities.cfg.
• If the healing amount given by a village is less than that given by regeneration, the unit will gain the lower amount. (this probably goes for Heals and Cures as well.)
• Poison curing happens only when the healing amount is >= cure_amount, rather than being a setting
• In general, the code seems not to be switched over to the new heal/cure/regen system.
• All abilites seem to be able to be filtered, but not all of them are affected if you put on a filter.

The system is a wonderful new development! I'm just pointing out a few problems.

[Soliton]

Fixed the typo in abilities.cfg.
The behaviour of poison curing is intended that way afaik.

[Noyga]

Well abilities are still a work in progress...
It is true that filters don't work for every ability, some aren't used yet.
IIRC, it currently works with hides (ie ambush/nightstalk), steadfast, illuminates.
Thank you for pointing problems with heals/regenerate, we shall improve it.

[anatelos]

What about the opposite to illuminate - cast shadow?

[Elvish_Pillager]

What about it, you ask? The thing which is about it is that it has been proposed in the past, and rejected thoroughly. Do your research.

[Noyga]

What about the opposite to illuminate - cast shadow?

It's .... illuminates :wink (with a negative level).
I don't know if it works btw.

[Elvish_Pillager]

*That's* what "level" means? How does Illuminates work now!?

[Noyga]

Well i haven't looked exactly how it works, but :
* i don't know if having level >1 changes something to the lawful bonuses
* if it is positive it is a normal 'illuminate'
* if it is negative, it should be a 'desilluminate'
* if an hex is 'illuminated' by two units, one with a positive level, one with a negative level :
- there is no change of the time of day if they have the same absolute levels
- otherwise the 'lilluminates' ability with the biggest absolute level wins
I presume that level should be usually 1 or -1

[scott]

The game makes a rank-ordered list of all unique lawful bonuses created by your [time] tags.

Then, it just moves you up and down the ladder based on the level of illuminates.

There is a limitation for scenarios with very fine gradations of lawful bonus, for example if you had 24 time-of-day settings with a 5% bonus increment. You might want the Mage of Light illuminates ability to give you the normal 25% bonus when instead it gives you 5% only. It's a corner case I guess.

[Elvish_Pillager]

Yuck.

I'd rather just have consistent behavior - 25% bonus or malus.

[Xan]

Yuck.

I'd rather just have consistent behavior - 25% bonus or malus.

Illuminates never gave bonus or malus. It changes the time of day in the affected hexes.

[Elvish_Pillager]

True, but that's a lot better than sorting the daytimes in a totally nonintuitive way... basically, all it does is screw up the Illuminates ability when an out-of-the-ordinary set of daytimes is used, and I can't even see a way to hackily fix it with WML.

In other words, it removes versitality, rather than adding it.

[Noyga]

Hum good point, it seems that there are things to fix with [illuminates] :
- on some scenarios, like underground scenarios, illuminates should use some time of day that would never be used as a normal time of day.

- on other scenarios, like 24h scenarios, you should be able to specify that you don't use the next time of day as illuminated time, but a larger offset. I think this should rather be defined in the scenario itself than in the unit.

[Xan]

EP, you could suggest a system that would work better.

Anyway, I suggest adding three new keys to [time]:

(optional) scheduled: no/yes ; If no, this time will not be used in the scheduled times of day.

(optional) lighter: an id of another [time] tag.
(optional) darker: an id of another [time] tag.

lighter and darker would be used to find the proper illuminated time, by traveling through the same number of lighter or darker keys as the level of illumination.

[Elvish_Pillager]

EP, you could suggest a system that would work better.

That's true! In fact, I could suggest four:

1) Revert to the old system. It works better, after all.

2) Like (1), but have illuminates's "level" be the radius of the effect.

3) Give a 25% lawful-bonus for each level (or malus for negative levels). If Wesnothian dogma deems it necessary, also add illuminate_cap and deilluminate_cap attributes to the scenario.

4) Give a 25% damage bonus per level to adjacent friendly lawful units and a 25% damage malus per level to adjecent enemy chaotic units, i.e. like (3) but making sure to always be a beneficial effect.