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Re: CF: Free Time


I'd suggest that CF be rewritten to be completely object oriented.  In that
items, monsters, characters, movement, the maps and even time passing are
all objects.  Program then becomes a matter of one object interacting
with other objects.

A first change would be to have all fields of the objects to be referenced
through subroutines or macros to make the structure transparent to the
rest of the program.  So fields which are currently overlaid would be
referenced by the correct purpose.  That would allow rewriting the low
level object handling stuff such as having optimal object size for
current type of object (ie could define several object structures and
field referencing macros/subroutines would check object structure type
to determine how to find desired field).

This should also simplify making changes since then any attempt to write
to a particular field could then cause a cascade of other (desired)
actions to occur.  The only place that would have the checks to see if
other actions should happen would be the field referencing macro/subroutine.


An interesting game playing change would be to add the concept of altitude
to maps.  So terrain such as cliffs, ledges and pits becomes part of the
game.  Where one can't melee attack across too much of an elevation change,
though thrown objects have a large downhill bonus.


I just played out Command & Conquer which is a commercial game.  CF has
a larger, more interesting world and CF's computer controlled adversaries
are much smarter.  C&C had some nice video segments with actors which
apparently is a critical part of computer games nowadays.  So maybe we
should add otherwise useless video segments to make CF more popular.
C&C is a pretty good game, but after winning a couple of levels since
the game's harvesters got themselves stuck so adversary ran out of credits
and winning other levels since adversary kept rebuilding where I could easily
destroy (as compared to near it's forces) then I wonder how much they
play tested the game.

							sdw
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