Proposals/Stronger Aliens

Stronger Aliens

We need the few alien races we have to assist during the whole campaign. To be able to make it balanced we need weak aliens for the beginning and stronger to the end.

A first crude try was trippling taman team to have some diversity in their stats. It was the only solution possible without coding with the current script systems. However it had some bad sideeffects on the UI, so it's time to fix up the system.

The good news is that we have (almost) everything for a correct system, we just need to do some wiring.

We have

Character templates for aliens

That contains the skills of an alien

 chrtemplate alien_taman_light {
   strength  "20 20"
   ...
 }
 chrtemplate alien_taman {
   strength  "38 38"
   ...
 }

Alien teams

That describes the species and lists the useable character templates

 team taman {
   name  "_Taman"
   tech  rs_alien_taman_autopsy
   ...
   templates (
     alien_taman
   }
 }

Alien team definitions for missions

Which says which aliens go to missions in early/mid/late game and what can they carry.

 alienteam scouts {
   category ("recon")
   equipment ("alien_workers")
   teaminterest {
     mininterest 0
     maxinterest 49
     team (taman)
   }
   ...
 }

The solution

... is easy: allow selecting character templates in alienteams

 alienteam scouts {
   category ("recon")
   equipment ("alien_workers")
   teaminterest {
     mininterest 280
     maxinterest 309
     team (taman/alien_taman shevaar)
   }
   ...
 }

Where

• taman/alien_taman means only alien_taman chrtemplate of taman teamDef can play, while
• shevaar or shevaar/ means any character templates of teamDef shevaar is useable

Sounds good? How to implement?

Implementation

Store character templates in alienTeamGroup_t structure too.

  typedef struct alienTeamGroup_s {
    int idx;
    int categoryIdx;
    int minInterest;
    int maxInterest;
 
    const teamDef_t *alienTeams[MAX_TEAMS_PER_MISSION];
 +  const chrTemplate *alienChrTpls[MAX_TEAMS_PER_MISSION];
    int numAlienTeams;
  } alienTeamGroup_t;

If an entry has a vaild template set, store it's pointer, if not, store NULL. This needs extending the parser in cp_parse.cpp (CP_ParseAlienTeam) and the structure change above (cp_campaign.h) and maybe some lookup functions for character templates.

In GAME_AppendTeamMember -> CL_GenerateCharacter -> CHRSH_CharGenAbilitySkills chain, CHRSH_CharGenAbilitySkills generates a character from a chrTemplate->rate based random template. It needs to be changed so we can ask for a specific template and to the random stuff if get NULL chrTemplate only. This would also help eliminating the @HACK for the soldier_mp multiplayer character template too.

Resistance, Body models

... are out of question for 2.5, but for later:

Even "weak" humans react bit differently to heat or electricity so it is the characters' attribute too not only the races'. So I think we should move resistance values into character templates ... partially. I say partially to save some typing for us and modders, it has no use to copy&paste the same values without any real value. So let's have a base value in the teamDef (values default to 0) and a modifier value in the character template (values default to 0). Resistance would be simply calculated as base + modifier ofc.

This will probably need more coding on server-side which I guess uses the teamDef to get resistance values and not the actors.

About models, I can suggest similar: allow adding models to the chrTemplates. If we want completely different models for a race. Leave the models out from the teamDef definition and add them to the character templates connected to it.

-- Geever 01:10, 8 February 2013 (SAST)