(TFT) Online Melee

["Steve Reinhardt" <stever08@fastmail.fm>]

Hi Lloyd, Richard, Greg and everyone else who has thought about making
an online version of Melee/Wizard.  Your experience and suggestions are
very helpful in the game I am working on.  So far I have pretty much
neglected the display and player interface.  My first version I imagine
will be functional but ugly.  The result I am aiming for in this version
is a browser-based (javascript) game for running the combat parts of the
various microquests and small arena combats on one PC.

Richard posted a nice list of many of the implementation challenges, and
he and Lloyd offered some useful suggestions for the user interface and
for incorporating spells.  Lloyd's map and figures look great.  If you
have any more gifs or jpegs of figures or a blank map I would greatly
appreciate it if you could send them to me.  I would be glad to send you
what I have built so far.  It addresses many of the challenges from
Richard's list but it is pretty crude and not well documented.  Some of
it may be useful in the app you are working on.

So far I have not had to resort to trigonometry for anything.  Hexes are
identified by a pair of coordinates and distances are measured by
counting hexes rather than along a straight line.  Line of fire is also
handled by looking at intervening hexes based on these coordinates.  I
haven't planned on building the map.  I was just going to overlay
figures over an image of the map, tilted so the hex-grain runs
horizontally.

One thing I have been putting off is handling turning of multi-hex
figures (and these will be limited to 4 hexes).  Also, the display right
now is pretty laughable.  The figures are pairs of ascii characters used
to show ID and facing.  And I really don't want to show off my giant
8-).  All in all, though, I think it is coming along pretty well.

Have a good weekend everyone.
-- 
  Steve Reinhardt
  stever08@fastmail.fm

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