Aggravating actions?

[Chud]

How difficult might it be to have situations where certain player actions result in aggravation (maybe temporarily, maybe until leaving the level)?

It occurred to me recently while dispatching a selection of dragons that it might be fun if killing a baby dragon aggravated any older dragons nearby - maybe within a certain range, maybe anywhere on the level, not sure. It may well be more work than it's worth... but it might be fun.

Of course in some situations it might also be quite dangerous...

[Derakon]

But would anything except the older dragon care about the death of the baby dragon?

It's not difficult to code in an effect where, whenever a given effect triggers, the game checks each monster that can see the effect to see if they should be aggravated. But it'd basically be a big tangle of special cases.

[Chud]

But would anything except the older dragon care about the death of the baby dragon?

No - and I imagine there isn't an easy way to define "only aggravates dragons, nothing else?" That did occur to me after I posted the idea, so I guess it would be a pretty substantial change just for some flavor.

How many different types of creature are there that one might want to aggravate independently? You could change the "aggregate" flag to a bit mask of appropriate length, and set 1s in the position(s) you were interested in, maybe... but I should probably really go look at the code before throwing out specific ideas that may make no sense at all. Nevermind...

That reminds me though of another question (as I hijack my own thread...) out of curiosity, what's the reason behind doing everything with integers and disallowing real numbers in the code?

[Derakon]

That reminds me though of another question (as I hijack my own thread...) out of curiosity, what's the reason behind doing everything with integers and disallowing real numbers in the code?

Angband's old, and there was a time when the calculations it did between turns required a decent amount of processing power (and you could tell if hounds were in the area because the game slowed down). Avoiding floating point math speeds things up a bit; not much, but every bit counts. Nowadays floating point operations are faster and of course so are computers in general, so it's less of an issue, but for consistency's sake floating point is still avoided.

[scud]

Avoiding floating point math speeds things up a bit

That would make a good 'eye'...

The floating point blasts you with extended precision… The floating point flops limply…