Talk:Plan for turn-based battles
The Mad Cacti (talk): I'm going to be very pleased when this is implemented, halting the endless requests!
Regarding attack delays: delays are also used as animation delays as well as for penalties, right? So it seems like a loss to reinterpret it as number of turns delayed or a factor in determining turn order rather than adding new options for those.
Bob the Hamster (talk): That us a good point. Delays (even if only intended for animation) are inappropriate for turn-based battles-- but simply disabling delays in turn-based and adding new separate number-of-turns-delayed data would be less confusing than trying to give two different purposes to the same data.
The Mad Cacti (talk): Animation delays are inappropriate for turn based battles? I don't understand.
Bob the Hamster (talk): Hmmm. maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. I am just talking about the delay value for chained attacks. I would expect it to be ignored for turn based battles. delay as a value in number of ticks doesn't belong in turn based battles because turn-taking is not measured in ticks, it is measured in terms of every character and enemy having done one action. Attack animations of course, still happen in ticks, I am not saying that part is inappropriate for turn based battles. I just mean the attack delay before the first attack starts, and the attack delay in between each part of a chain.
Bob the Hamster (talk): ... but thinking about it even more, there is no good reason to disable delays. Delays in chains are used as dramatic pauses, and those still make just as much sense in turn based battles. I think I understand now :)
--Msw188 (talk) 14:20, 16 August 2012 (PDT): In trying to interpret attack delays for turn-based battles, the first thing that comes to my mind, and seems most similar to their use in active-battles, would be to use attack delays in the equation that determines what characters take their actions first. So the equation could be something like ACTION INITIATIVE := CHAR SPEED - ATK DELAY, then the actions in the turn happen in order of decreasing attack initiative (with some possible randomization). Then if there is a chain, each attack in the chain inherits the attack delay of all the previous attacks. That is, if atk1 chains to atk2, then when atk1 is run, atk2 is queued into the initiative chain (can't be put in at the beginning of the battle, because the chain might fail) with atk2 ACTION INITIATIVE := atk1 ACTION INITIATIVE - atk2 ATK DELAY. Does this make sense?
Bob the Hamster (talk): Yeah, I see what you mean. And I re-read what TMC and I had written about attack delays previously. I guess I need to re-think delays a little further
The Mad Cacti (talk): I'm still concerned about what I wrote above long ago. What is the minimum delay between attacks (when the attack delay is set to zero)? Is it one tick, or more? I consider this an off-by-one bug. I want to see a fixbit added that changes all the attack delays to their actual atack delays, to let people set the attack delays to 0 and put attack animations together seamlessly. But this is a third meaning of "attack delay from the other two, and I guess the other two are much more important and useful than my committee-design suggestion...
Bob the Hamster (talk): I don't remember exactly, but I kinda think that I already fixed 0 delay chained attacks to actually be seamless in the last round of chaining cleanup when I added queued attacks. I would have to do some testing to know for sure.