I am building new, GPL-friendly code for all of the commonly-used Includes used for COB scripts. Everything is getting altered enough to qualify as "original Art"
One of the things that I encountered, that lead me to a very intriguing possiblity, was that BITMAP1, 2, 3, etc... aren't actually used by the COB interpreter, and do not cause error messages if they aren't defined.
What I was thinking was... that it should be pretty easy to have the COB interpreter check for BITMAPX, where X is a string, say, "BITMAP_ARGH_EXPLOSIONSMALL"... and then have some way to tie this to a Custom ExplosionGenerator. Then we could (if we feel like taking the extra effort) build death events and use EXPLODE events that just had a BITMAPX defined, allowing us to do cool stuff like:
1. Blood splashes, sparks, small smoke, etc., from units taking damage, specific to the unit- not to the weapon!
2. More detailed explosions, but without having to write and maintain several hundred lines of code in a custom ExplosionGenerator.
3. By abusing EXPLODE | BITMAPX, we could have all sorts of called FX for other purposes, without having to build some giant new system within Spring.
... basically, I think this would be a great idea, as it would solve a bunch of issues, involves very little new code (just some way for the COB interpreter to see that BITMAPX is being called, and then a way, probably in the unit FBI, to associate that with a custom ExplosionGenerator... say, a line like "BITMAP_ARGH_EXPLOSIONSMALL=custom:ARGH_EXPLOSIONSMALL"
