Proposals/Actor Generation

Actor generation

Author: BTAxis (talk, contrib)

This is describing a scripting structure that governs the random generation of all actors in the game, from PHALANX soldiers to aliens to civilians to workers.

The general idea is to define an actor "class", with each class containing the parameters the game uses to generate actors that belong to that class. This allows for specialist recruits, i.e. actors who are good in a single field and mediocre in all the others, as well as allround recruits. It also allows to tweak actor generation rather precisely.

The definitions are used when a character is generated. For soldiers and employees this means when they show up in the hire screen. For civilians and aliens this means at the start of a mission. Information about what classes to be used for the aliens should be provided by the campaign framework (this also means aliens can grow stronger as the campaign progresses, as the framework will gradually call higher classes).

Here is an example of how the definitions look.

chrtemplate soldier_common {
	rate	74
	strength	"15 25"
	speed	"15 25"
	accuracy	"20 30"
	mind	"20 35"
	close	"15 25"
	heavy	"15 25"
	assault	"15 25"
	sniper	"15 25"
	explosive	"15 25"
	health	"80 110"
}

chrtemplate soldier_close {
	rate	5
	strength	"15 25"
	speed	"15 25"
	accuracy	"20 30"
	mind	"20 35"
	close	"25 40"
	heavy	"13 23"
	assault	"13 23"
	sniper	"13 23"
	explosive	"13 23"
	health	"80 110"
}

chrtemplate soldier_heavy {
	rate	5
	strength	"15 25"
	speed	"15 25"
	accuracy	"2 30"
	mind	"20 35"
	close	"13 23"
	heavy	"25 40"
	assault	"13 23"
	sniper	"13 23"
	explosive	"13 23"
	health	"80 110"
}