Re: active walls

["Rupert G. Goldie" <rgg@aaii.oz.au>]

> bulletwalls, firewalls, lightningwalls.
> 
>   Those are the only three walls available right now.
> 
> I think we'd gain a lot in crossfire if we generalized the idea--
> I call them 'active walls'.
> 
> 

Cool idea. It wasn't very hard to hack bullet walls to make lightning walls,
but it would be much better if there was a general method. (The time consuming
part of adding lightning walls was doing all the bitmaps ;-)

>   Sometime soon, I'd like to re-do this wall code so that you
> could stick any 'game effect' (spell) in it that caught your 
> fancy.  This would give some more flexibility to the map designer.

Mmmm, wall of paralysis, that could be nasty 8-).

[...]

>   The walls would use the cast-spell set of routines to produce
> their effects.  When I put in the level dependencies on spells,
> this means you could make a mild wall of lighting or a very very deadly
> wall of lightning, by changing the level of the wall!
> 
>   Other things about active walls should be made more flexible if they're
> not already, such as frequency of fire, and whether or not they
> can be torn down.  (This may have already been done.)
> 

I think you can already do this with the 'speed' attribute. It may be possible 
to set 'tear_down' at the moment, but the animations won't have the steps
of being torn down so it might look crappy/strange.

I would also like to see a way of limiting the number of child spell effects
active at one time (ie I want to limit the number of bullets flying around from
one wall to, say, 10 to stop the game from crawling because there are 200 
bullets bouncing around reflectors)

> My proposal boils down to:
> 
> modify the archetypes so there is one active wall archetype.
> modify the code to support this
> make a pick map of popular active wall types
> 
[...]
> Regards,
> 
> PeterM
> 


Rupert