> that the last_direction byte that ALREADY existed in NPCs made what I > was trying to do redundant, since I didn't really want it on PCs anyways. > But I do have a question about the last_direction byte: does the game > constantly update that byte? The only thing grep turns up is some > references in mobact.c, which I guess means that it updates when the mob > spontaneously wanders, BUT does it also update when a charmed mob is > ordered to move for instance? last_direction is not part of the playerfile in Circle 2.20 or 3.0. It is used in char_special_data of 2.20, which is not part of char_file_u; 3.0 has redesigned structures as you know if you've looked at 3.0-structs.h but it's still not part of any structure written to disk.) Well, I should say, it WAS in 3.0. I was rewriting parts of mobact.c the other day, and got to the part that uses last_direction. You know, I'm not even sure what that code is supposed to do (it was part of Gamma 0.0). You'd think that the idea would be to get a mob to keep moving in the same direction for as long as possible once it has chosen a random direction (i.e., to make it seem like the mob has some destination.) However, the code does just the opposite: it seems to _discourage_ a mob ever moving in the same direction twice in a row. And it doesn't even seem to do that very effectively! Long story short, the code seemed useless, and the concept didn't seem sound anyway, so I just deleted it from 3.0. No big loss.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/07/00 PST