Re: (TFT) Animated TFT Battles

[David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com>]

Cris:
> If it's random, then you have a simulator, right?

Yes, that's the point of the project.

> There must be some decent AI, too?

Of course. Brilliant AI. That the heroes and monsters just scream and leap
without a thought for tactics or survival? I must have wanted it to happen
that way.

Seriously, the AI it has now is pretty basic. They just run at each other
and they don't even think about where their friends are. Though they think
a little harder about their facing. Sometimes they feel so happy with their
back against a wall that they stay out of the fight for a turn or two.
Better AI would be a possibility but it sounds hard and I don't know if it
would make the program any more fun.

I just added terrain: random groups of blocked hexes. And logic to stop a
battle if the two sides find themselves isolated. :-)

That's a good question: what *would* make this more fun?

> What language did you write it in?

It's Java. Very bad Java. I didn't think before I started typing. For
instance: in retrospect the hex map should have made less use of Cartesian
coordinates and more of arrays of neighbours.

> Will you make it open source (put it on Github)?

I think for the moment if anyone wants it they can ask me and I'll mail.

Thanks for mailing me privately about methods of displaying hexes but
really displaying the hexes is the easy part and I'm not going to change it
now. Unless this is somehow relevant to converting it to a web app, which
might be a very good idea. Converting to Javascript should be easy,
shouldn't it?

Greg:
> Do the blue guys always win?

Not in general, there's the occasional total party kill. But there might
not be one in the battles I put up, I didn't check.

The program adjusts the strength of monsters after every fight to get an
average of 50 points of pain for the characters each battle. One dead
character is 50 points, and one point of damage on a character is 1 point.

Each battle the number of characters gets randomly chosen. If there's too
many some get benched for a battle. If there's not enough some new ones get
made. Characters accumulate experience and each time they get a level they
have a 50% chance of increasing ST (perhaps with a change of weapon) and
50% of increasing DX. Then they might change their armour and/or shield.

> The animation was a little fast for me to see what was going on
>  at first.  Maybe added a speed setting or a scrubber bar so that you can
> go back to see what happened.

The program makes a sequence of PNG images, which I turned into a GIF
animation using VirtualDub. I read on the web it makes small GIF files,
which seemed important. I also tried FFMPEG but didn't have much luck: got
it to work once but the file was huge and then I changed settings and it
never worked again. :-( I could certainly slow the animation down, but I
don't know how to do speed settings. It's annoying that browsers, etc.,
don't let you change speed. Anyone got any thoughts?

Marc:
> how it compares with Lloyd's simulator?

There are many duel simulators but I haven't seen any other skirmish
simulators.

Thomas:
> If your map allowed for entering turns/tokens in a simple
> format then displayed the map with movements/facings/attacks
> from a simple text input it would save a lot of time in that regard.

If you want the code I'll send it but I think you'll getting nicer results
from a simple drawing package.

--
David


On 20 November 2015 at 02:23, Greg Thorne <Greg.Thorne@sas.com> wrote:

> Very cool.  The animation was a little fast for me to see what was going on
>  at first.  Do the blue guys always win?
>
>
> Very Cool!  The animation was a little fast for me to see what was going on
>  at first.  Maybe added a speed setting or a scrubber bar so that you can g
> o back to see what happened.
>
> Question:  Do the blue guys always win?
>
> -Greg Thorne
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2015, at 11:58 PM, David Bofinger <bofinger.david@gmail.com
> <mail
> to:bofinger.david@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I wrote code to generate animations like this, and I'm interested in
> people's thoughts.
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/8kf98b1vtng46nh/tftbattles.gif?dl
> It has a lot of the Advanced Melee rules, some of them approximated,
> twenty-eight character templates, thirty-one simplified monster
> definitions. No wizards, no missiles weapons (wouldn't be that hard to add
> but might not be much fun), no tactics much other than "Charge!" Tell me
> what you think.
>
> --
> David
>
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