Re: xConq alternate combat engine project

[Hans Ronne <hronne at comhem dot se>]

>             Hello everyone. I'm part of a small team (two people) of
>undergraduate students at Portland State University. We are looking into
>the possibility of building a pathway for alternate combat engines into
>xConq.

<snip>

>              What we would like to ask is:
>1. Is there any logical way to do this without changing xConq's code?
>
>2. If not, where might be a good fissure point in xConq's action/combat
>system to interface a "black-box" combat resolution system? Hopefully as
>early as possible after combat being joined.

<snip>

>               Our idea, if this functionality is not already built into
>the system, is to add a GDL tag that would turn on this extension and give
>the system the name and/or location of the combat resolution system to be
>used.

Welcome to the list! Glad to hear that you like Xconq enough to think about
how to improve it.

As for your questions, Xconq already has two different combat engines,
called "combat model 0" and "combat model 1". Combat model 0 is the
traditional engine used in most Xconq games, while combat model 1 is
similar to combat resolution in Civ2 (absolute attack and defend values,
combat in several rounds until one unit is defeated). You decide what
combat model to use in a game by setting the GDL variable "combat-model".
if you want an engine with decisive until-death battles, you should use
combat model 1.

Right now, the two combat engines are intertwined within combat.c. I've
been planning to separate them and put them in different files. Once that
has been achieved, it would be easy to add more combat engines as plug-in
modules, similar to how the AI code already works (mplayer, iplayer etc).

Any code you would like to contribute would be welcome. We need more Xconq
developers.

Hans