OK I got distracted in yet another direction. I know that I have many unfinished projects. But I feel that if I annotate them here maybe someone will snatch them off my workload and finish it.
This happened while playing with the MegaVanilla project to create a mod that allows everyone to play with the same nation.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=41415
Which was itself a change of direction while working on the SemiRandom AI project.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=41376
which creates a mod of a nation with semi-random choices on units, gods, and starting sites.
Then I remembered the Monster Scenario Project
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=39304
which was supposed to incorporate the ability of a server to change the mod in mid-game.
SOOOooooooo.......
anyway, now we are down to the new random hacker thought. I always meant to explore more what parts of the mod are important on the player side vs which parts are only important on the server hosting side.
So far, here are my findings. If the player loads a stub.dm such as this..
Code:
#modname "stub file"
#icon "../guihead.tga"
#description "stub file to be replaced later"
and the server uses a stub.dm which includes a nation then it DOES work. But creating new monsters and magic sites etc can cause a problem. And for some reason when that nations castle is invaded the game crashes. Possible for not being told which castle to display to the player.
On the other hand. If the players stub file contains minimal nation info then it works much better. Something like this..
Code:
#modname "stub file"
#icon "../guihead.tga"
#description "stub file to be replaced later"
#selectnation 79
#name "Szurprise"
#epithet "Born of Chaos"
#era 1
#end
then the server can add almost anything to that nation. A players stub.dm which creates basic info for nations 72-95 would only have to exist in the players mod directory. It would never have to be enabled.
On my server I could create a dozen games called MC_game-name and each one could have 3 randomly created nations with new gods, a semi-logical batch of units, randomly starter sites, starter armies, defense units, etc. The player would only need the one stub.dm in their mod directory and each MC game they play would have a new batch of nations thrown in. The 79 nation would always be named Szurprise but other than that it would be different each time. And the player would have no way to know ahead of time without scouting it out for themselves.
In my initial tests Ive decided that completely random such as I use in the Chaos games on my server
http://game.dom3minions.com/bin/Chaos_chk.cgi
is too insane. Some of the units that can be granted as recruitable are high level summons and have no gold costs with 1 resource cost. I dont want to fight that!
So now Im thinking that I need to go SemiRand much as Ballbarian did with my other projects. I can create lists of wild but acceptable troops, commanders, gods, mages, clerics, magic sites, etc. Then randomly select from those lists. Or maybe logical lists with seperate lists for throwing in one or two wilder ones in each nation. Heavy use of Edi's wonderful database. I have to do some more experimentation to figure out the limits of what can be done with this. Unfortunately it involves alot of programming and modding. Both of which I am a real novice at.
Im still debating how "impossible" this is (its a computer, nothing is impossible but some things are not worth the effort it takes to get it working). So if anyone else wants to tackle this...
MORE Chaos
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