[Done for V0.39] Ammo feed

[Lunever]

If you swap a projectile shooting weapon like a crossbow into a characters action hand (with the left hand free after the swap) and then choose the "shoot" action" he can't shoot of course at first, but he will draw an arrow from the quiver after the "no ammo" message, which is as expected and fine.

1) The addition of a "reload" action might be useful to reload manually when the engine for whatever reason does not reload.

2) In the situation described above, if you have 3 arrows and a sword in the quiver spaces the character will automatically draw the sword into the left hand. I think drawing ammo first before close combat weapons would be smarter engine behaviour, especially when drawing into the left hand, where a close combat weapon doesn't make much sense.

[George Gilbert]

Done both for V0.39.

[Lunever]

Cool, thanks! Will the latter be only true for left-hand-reload, or will projectiles generally be drawn first (i.e. throwing 4 darts and then have a ninja blade drawn would be quite useful for ninja-style combat).

BTW: Having ammo automatically placed into the quiver when clicked on the status bars is a real improvement of handling ninjas imho. Thank you for that too. I'm not yet familar with the new item quivers yet, but, if you used one or more of them, would the automatical placing be able to assign ammo to such an quiver item too, or just to the quiver inventory slots?

[George Gilbert]

Cool, thanks! Will the latter be only true for left-hand-reload, or will projectiles generally be drawn first (i.e. throwing 4 darts and then have a ninja blade drawn would be quite useful for ninja-style combat).

Only true for left-hand reloading. The only way to determine what the "best" thing is (given that the standard missiles might have been cloned to be a better weapon than a blade), is to look at what the right hand uses.

Specifically, when a reload is triggered for the left hand, the engine looks at the attack methods available to the weapon in the right hand and reloads something suitable for that (so a weapon with an attack method with an action of SHOOT_ARROW will draw arrows in preference to anything else).

BTW: Having ammo automatically placed into the quiver when clicked on the status bars is a real improvement of handling ninjas imho. Thank you for that too. I'm not yet familar with the new item quivers yet, but, if you used one or more of them, would the automatical placing be able to assign ammo to such an quiver item too, or just to the quiver inventory slots?

Just slots - although the example you give make sense, the general case (remember that stuff can be cloned and adjusted, so the engine doesn't really know what "makes sense") is not so obvious what to do...

[Lunever]

Ok, how about rather simple criteria:

1) If you have a container - no matter what container - in the hand or in a quiver slot, the engine will put the ammo in that container, with the usual order of slots in case of multiple containers.

2) While it is true, that, as you said, missiles might be cloned into something better than a blade, currently this would be rather the exception. So imho it would make sense to have as a default behaviour something well suited to default DM/CSB equipment, and for this more common case having shuriken & knives before sabre or diamond edge would be a smarter behaviour. However, this issue might become entirely obsolete if the player would be allowed to set the order himself - so you can put the blade into any quiver slot, you just can't put more than 1 blade into them (blade, that is in this instance just any weapon that is not a missile).

[Lunever]

PS: On a second thought - if you had indeed a missile cloned into something more powerful than a true blade that would be all the more a reason to NOT have a true blade drawn first.

[mikko]

Yes.. I think that all ranged weapons should be drawn before any melee weapons. So if you have a bow, draw all suitable ammo for that first. Then all thrown weapons (shurikens, daggers, rocks, etc..) in some specific order. Then draw a melee weapon.

[Lunever]

1) RELOAD It's good to have that now. Yet as often as I want to load a swapped-in crossbow I would like to have an unarmed character draw a dart after warcrying, so the addition of a reload action would be a very good feature for an unarmed character too. Yet this would mean that you needed more than 3 actions of you don't kick "punch". As far as I understand this could be done by changing unarmed actions in a custom dungeon. That way you could even add a submenu, but that would make unarmed actions very unhandy, which they shouldn't be. Would it be possible to have a submenu not as a line in the action menu, but maybe as a small icon between character name and "pass"? (Sorry me if such should be alredy implemented, I know at least that Beo suggested something similar ages ago).

2) I tried to play a game ninja-style recently, now that picking up ammo has become more handy, and I feel that the one thing that still keeps the ninja from being a useful character class is the reload order. I hope very much we can agree on some solution there.

[George Gilbert]

The algorithm for the left hand is:

- First pick anything that is ammo for the weapon in the right hand
- Then pick anything that has an action of throw
- Then pick anything else

The algorithm for the right hand is:

- First pick anything that has an action of throw
- Then pick anything else

I think that covers everything already doesn't it?

[Lunever]

Sounds god imho!

[Lunever]

Ah, one more addition: Let the right hand pick first anything that has an action SHOOT, for you can have a crossbow in the big quiver slot and 3 arrows in the small ones. After that as you said, then throw, then anything else.

[Lunever]

PS: I assume the reload action will be free of recovery time since reloading by the engine also doesn't have recovery time?

Err, and it would be cool to have another action for projectile shooting weapons beside "shoot" and "reload", a "sheath" action that would put the weapon back into the quiver main space so you can initiate unarmed close combat once out of ammo.

What I would like to be able to do is having a solo Kazai wield a slayer in the left hand and a dagger in the right hand, a speedbow in the main quiver slot and 3 slayers in the other quiver slots. Then you could ambush a monster coming around a corner, stab it quickly several times, retreat, throw the dagger, have the engine draw the crossbow. click the reload action, shoot your slayers, sheathe the crossbow, warcry, and kick what's left of the monster. This would be on equal height with berserking or fireballing monsters to death.

[Lunever]

I only have begun a game of O-DM 39 so far, but I noticed that the first projectile firing weapon I got my hands on does not have the reload action. Shouldn't they all have it now?

In a single instance it happened that a character who was throwing a shuriken and then an auto-drawn knife next drew an arrow into the left hand. I wasn't able though to deliberately reproduce that behaviour, so I've no idea why the engine did this in this single instance, it hasn't happened again so far.

[George Gilbert]

I only have begun a game of O-DM 39 so far, but I noticed that the first projectile firing weapon I got my hands on does not have the reload action. Shouldn't they all have it now?

No - none should, but there's an action that you can use for custom weapons to have it.

In a single instance it happened that a character who was throwing a shuriken and then an auto-drawn knife next drew an arrow into the left hand. I wasn't able though to deliberately reproduce that behaviour, so I've no idea why the engine did this in this single instance, it hasn't happened again so far.

I can't reproduce it either - if you can again though, let me know what the exact combination of things you have in hands / quiver slots.

[Lunever]

Ok, although most similar suggestions from me haven't been implemented, nonetheless - can you please add the reload action to the RTC-DM-dungeon? This is really just an interface thing and is not un-DM by any means.

[Lunever]

Doh, while all of this generally seem to be good improvements, there is one important thing broken now - the "no ammo" message doesn't trigger a reload anymore, as it used to in th earlier version.
George, please make that work again for V0.40!