Moai personal thread

Scripting & Code
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Alpha 15: Adding an enemy to microworld

(I am using the title as a note to myself to track compatibility with versions.) When needing to test enemies that attack (and are attacked) by your citizens, we’ll need to follow a set of steps. I prefer using Radiant’s Microworld due to its similarity to the main game and simplicity of use. We’ll spawn our enemy and equip him with a weapon, but we’ll also add him to another population hostile to our player.

Stonehearth uses populations as a way to manage, well, populations, players, factions, and the like. They share a relation map (called amenity map in the code) with each other which determines how each population regards the others. I have not yet found a way to make an entity that attacks another entity while belonging to the same faction, though I’m sure some hack is possible.

  1. Let’s create a population. Open microworld.lua. Under where it says local LOCAL_PLAYER = 'player_1', let’s add:
    local LOCAL_ENEMY = 'enemy1'
  2. That was the alias of our testing enemy population. Now to register it as an in-game population, find where it says stonehearth.player:add_player(LOCAL_PLAYER, 'stonehearth:kingdoms:ascendancy'), and add below:
    stonehearth.population:add_population(LOCAL_ENEMY, 'stonehearth:kingdoms:undead')
  3. We added undead to the game. Now below the last line, add the next one to make the undead and the player at war with one another:
    stonehearth.player:set_amenity(LOCAL_ENEMY, LOCAL_PLAYER, 'hostile')

We’re set to add some undead to the game now. While adding a custom enemy faction and a custom enemy are beyond the scope of this note, in general, keep in mind that they should be created with the faction in mind first.

I have used the function MicroWorld:place_citizen() as a template for writing the following function. It was placed immediately following it in the code.

function MicroWorld:place_enemy(x, z)
   local pop = stonehearth.population:get_population(LOCAL_ENEMY)
   local foe = pop:create_new_citizen('skeleton')
   foe:add_component 'render_info':set_scale(0.5)

   local weapon = radiant.entities.create_entity('stonehearth:weapons:jagged_cleaver')
   weapon:add_component 'render_info':set_scale(0.5);
   radiant.entities.equip_item(foe, weapon)

   local town = stonehearth.town:get_town('player_1')

   radiant.terrain.place_entity(foe, Point3(x, 1, z))
   return foe
end

Using this function we are given the ability to spawn a giant enemy skeleton. To make him a garden-variety enemy skeleton, remove the render_info parts.

To use this ability, we navigate to mini_game_world.lua, and add microworld:place_enemy(-16, 10) to the bottom of the function MiniGame:start.

TODO:

  • Engine error after killing skeleton
  • Skeleton’s attacks really slow, why?
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