Hi all,

I am making an IF game for my university dissertation and am trying to implement a combat system. I'm looking for a basic means for the player character to do battle with some of the NPCs.

Does anyone know where I could look for some ideas about how to go about doing this? Are there any existing IF games that use a combat system that I could look at? Just trying to get some idea of where and how to start.

Thanks for your help,

John

Just out of curiosity, are you looking for a combat system for TADS3? If so, you might want to try a different forum, since this one is specific to Quest.

If you're looking for one for Quest, then it would help to know how you'd like it to work. There are any number of different ways to write a combat system, depending on the features you wish and the interaction style you desire.

there's Pertex' Combat Library, Pixie's Combat Library, Pixie's Spell Library, Pixie's Clothing Library (equipment), Chase's Wearables Library (equipment), and you can look at my combat coding in this forum board (search for HK's Noob Help Me thread ~ look at its last ~ most recent posts. credit goes to Pertex' as he helped me with it, and it also uses his code structure design). I think there was one other library+person, but I can't think of it now..., (oh, and there's also Sora's Stackable Library too, for organizing items ~ but I this isn't the one that I can't remember, if there is still one more person+library out there)

If you need help navigating the site in finding these, let me know, and I'll get the links to them for you.

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Also, exactly what type of combat system do you want? do you want all action to stop while you're engaged in the combat 'turn ~ battle' action, or do you want to still be all other game actions along with being able to do combat actions. How do you want your combat design to be setup ?

Thanks for your help. Sorry, I didn't realise it was a Quest specific forum! My game is made using TADS 3.

I want the combat to take the same form as a conversation might, so the player would type 'attack' (NPC) and then enter a process of determining whether the attack was successful or not and change the player and NPC status. I was trying to attach a variable of health, attack and defence to the various actors and use those stats to determine the battle process.

Unfortunately I can't find anything about this and so don't really know where to start. I already have a full World Model with all the necessary rooms, items and NPCs, just trying to implement the battle system now.

Thanks for your help,

John

You can take a look at this thread (the link below), while TADS will have a different format, the coding design methods used are universal, so this can give you some ideas (though you'll have to adjust it to TADS' structure of course):

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4324
(this is a locked combat event, aka 'turn combat', you're in one large script block and can't do any other outside-of-combat actions, so if you want a more 'real time' combat system for a text game, where you aren't trapped inside of a large combat script block, then take a look at Pixie's Combat Library)

and also, again, take a look at the library files that I mentioned in my previous post, for more combat coding. If you can't find them, let me know and I'll help you navigate to them or just directly provide you with the links to go to them.

That's excellent, thanks for all your help, it's been really useful!