Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Problems Worth and Not Worth Solving

I've added the ability to mark a cutscene as a repeatable transition, and I've tought the borg to avoid these when pathing within a map, as well as to use them when navigating to a destination map. Marking a cutscene as such still happens manually, and will probably stay that way.



There's a lot of little fiddly things in this game that don't show up often enough to justify writing code to handle them. For example, there's a few places in the Ship Graveyard where you can hop from stone to stone to reach a destination. This just about the only place in the game where they use this mechanic, so I just included a few manual movement commands to get through those parts. Climbing the vines in the Worus Tower counts as a cutscene, but it only triggers if you walk into the square from the proper direction, *or* if you walk in from the side and then bump the right direction. This happens in more places, but it'll be a big pain to teach the borg that distinction, so I'm leaving that as well. If it happens to walk into a cutscene from the wrong direction, I'll tell it to walk next to the cutscene and add a manual movement command to approach properly.

Other stuff I'm willing to support with new code. FF5 has squares that quickly push you in a specific direction (such as the waterfalls in Worus and, I suspect, sand in the Quicksand Desert). These aren't cutscenes or transitions; they just happen. I haven't implemented any notion of what direction they push you, but I am giving these squares their own thumbnail in the atlas and treating them as obstacles until I find a place where I need to use them. Then we'll decide if anything more involved needs to be written.

There's also an odd quirk with NPCs when entering areas that show a title; NPCs don't seem to get marked as stationary until after that title window gets closed, so if the cartographer walks into a mostly explored map and the only unvisited squares are under stationary NPCs, it'll choose a path to that square, assuming at the time that the NPC could be pushed out of the way. I'll probably teach the Cartographer and Navigator to press A or B to close the title window before choosing their next path.
 

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