Shields! A Rant.

[lurker]

Just tell them to
1. use powers of 2
2. add

how it is

lua

[Argh]

A chart's easier, frankly, than any verbal explanation of this.

You don't want to try and explain this to the next whiz-kid artist type who comes along, man. Just send them to the chart. That was the least confusing part of it all for me, largely because I just followed the chart and only have one shield type.

The only part that was confusing there was the stuff that indicated that there were pre-set defaults. But I just set everything that's shoot-through to 0, everything that's blocked to 1, and voila, it works.

The only reason I even started this thread was because of stuff that wasn't working, that should have worked (I thought). I didn't even catch the Maxim bug until we played our big demo thingie with lots of people. Now it's all addressed, other than the bizarre behavior of the Z.A.P.'s beam-weapon.

[lurker]

Don't explain it.
Tell them to use powers of two, add to combine. Don't explain unless they tell you they really want to know. The chart is confusing because it's explaining something complex for no good reason.

[Argh]

Um, so basically, instead of just showing them the chart, and saying, "where you see X's, those are valid results for being blocked by any given shield type", you want to explain how to do it for a complex shield system? Hmm.

Which is easier for people- tracing a chart with their finger, or hoping a programmer will tell them what they need to know?

I know, I know, it's a hard call and all that. This isn't fun, and it probably should have used categories like everything else that's a bitfield does. That's probably the real fix, frankly.

[lurker]

Do you show them charts for target categories, or do you tell them to add the category? The only difference is that the cats here are all numbers.

[Argh]

I'd say, have them add a category, just like we do for armor types. Let Spring figure out what bitfield they need to have for it to work.

[lurker]

I know it would be easier to add a category name like 'palsmafour', but adding a category number as in + 128 is pretty close.

And category names can be done in the unitdef loading lua easily enough.

[Argh]

Yeah, that would probably be fine. I just figured that the first name would get assigned 2, the next 4 and so forth, then the weapons would get assigned the right bitfield according to what string values are given. But that's still a big improvement.

[lurker]

What's an improvement?

First bit is 1

[zwzsg]

I like the current system. It is simple and effective. Adding categories tags and categories list would be bloat, and it would make maintenance a lot more complicated.

If you really have trouble with bitfields, then use Lua in your mod to translate them to custom tags, but don't touch the engine!

Evil4Zerggin: Would be better to use | (bitwise or) than +. That way if you use a category twice, it still works.

[Evil4Zerggin]

Evil4Zerggin: Would be better to use | (bitwise or) than +. That way if you use a category twice, it still works.

Usually true, but not so easy in Lua.

Hmm, although there does appear to be a math.bit_or?