7DOMC - Day 4 - Planning and Monsters

So, after the craziness of the last two days, today is a bit more subdued. Part of that is a bit of burnout and part of it is busyness at work.

Even with the work {I've/I'm going to} accomplish, my chosen tasks for iteration 9 were a bit much. I pushed back 12 minor features to another iteration, giving me 28 total. For those doing math, that doesn't exactly add up to previous posts, which is due to me splitting a few tasks up into smaller bites.

Speaking on smaller bites, I'm working on refactoring monsters completely as well. I want them to be more attribute based, like skills and items, and have more flexible behavior. Since they touch a smaller portion of the code base, I'm doing my refactoring in smaller bit sized pieces.

Update -
So I'm not done yet, but here's the jist of it.

There is a set of tactics, which are discrete single actions that could or could not be preformed. Each tactics can be asked if it could apply now and ask to do it. Then a loop like this runs:

            m_tactics.ForEach(x => x.NewTurn(this));

            foreach (IMonsterTactic tactic in m_tactics)
            {
                if (tactic.CouldUseTactic(engine, this))
                {
                    if (tactic.UseTactic(engine, this))
                        return;
                }
            }

Each monster would have a set of possible tactics, for example, my healer AI can be stated as: UseFirstAidTactic, MoveToWoundedAllyTactic, DefaultActionTactic.

Each tactic setups the required attributes on the Attributes dictionary of the monster, which are serialized, so things are remembered past save/load like the cooldown on the first aid ability.

The cute thing about this is once i code up a great new behavior, I can slip it in the monster behavior list and it'll start acting that way. Once I'm "done", I'm going to be pulling the list of behaviors a given monster has out to XML.