Best way to do random encounter

[sethmachine]

Hi,

In many games with overworlds, there is a random encounter mechanic where every so often enemies will suddenly attack the player. I am not going to move the player to a separate area to do the battle--instead the enemies will just appear in some range around the player.

I think the catalyst should be whenever the player moves, so I am assuming there is TriggerRegisterPlayerUnitEvent(..., PLAYER_UNIT_MOVE_EVENT) that detects whenever one of the players units moves or is ordered to move.

The next issues are handling running away--what do I do with those creeps? Or do I make them follow the player forever? Or disappear after an amount of time.

And then also making sure I don't spawn more creeps if the player is moving around in a battle--it would quick snowball. But I do not, REPEAT, do not want to make use of a battle detection system (e.g. tell whether a player is under attack or in battle).

I need to also control the frequency of encounters to make sure they happen often enough, but not too frequent to tire the player.

Also, for spawning the creeps, I guess I can just pick a random point that is within some distance of the player?

For different regions (and different creeps) I suppose I can use flags that tell me what "region" a player is in, so I know what creep tables to use.

Any suggestions?

 

[Adiktuz]

You can always use timed events, then simply check if the current unit order is the order for move... then have some kinda counter and reduce/increase it if unit is moving and when it reaches a certain number, spawn a creep...

 

[sethmachine]

How do I do timed events?

 

[Adiktuz]

Different ways... In GUI you use the periodic timer events...

in JASS, it might be better to just create a timer that runs periodically to run a specific function

 

[sethmachine]

Can these timers be turned on and off?

 

[Adiktuz]

You can easily pause them when needed... this is how most over-time spell are made to work...

 

[Cokemonkey11]

CreateTimer(), TimerStart(), PauseTimer(), DestroyTimer(), GetExpiredTimer()

If you use Vexorian's Table you can easily

global HandleTable x -> HandleTable.create()

set x[any handle including timer] = <any integer including struct instance>

Bribe's Table obviously would have a similar method for storing data in a timer instance

 

[edo494]

Bribe's Table has the disadvantage of only allowing integer in [], so you basically have to manually inline HandleTable's [] call, because that also calls GetHandleId()

also, if you start timer as periodic(TimerStart(..., true, ..., ...)), and you PauseTimer(), you better just call TimerStart again, because if you ResumeTimer() the periodicity of timer is lost, sad bug