[READY] Starting location

[kevingranade]

Basic support for selecting character spawn location.

Punting these to a future PR, this is a nice incremental improvement, and I don't have enough time to try and fully flesh out everything like I want.

TODO:

• Add some parameters for specifying location beyond a building type. (distance from city center?)
• Go through buildings and close the windows.
• Add a parameter and method for fortifying the building the player spawns in.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Awesome!

[Lap]

Great job as this opens up a lot of new possibilities. Will we be trying to balance these start locations against each other, have them use different amounts of character points, or just ignore balancing them altogether?

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

All this balance talk is silly. Why can't we just choose one from a list and be happy with that?

[KA101]

Unless we plan on making/encouraging leaderboards--I hope we aren't--I'd go with no-balance.

And since any given start location can luck out and have worse/better surroundings than average, I'd hesitate to put a point cost on 'em.

Example: I might pay to start at a sewage plant, definitely at a mansion. (More if it's pre-cleared.) Put it in the swamp, though, and I'd take it for free. Add a fungal bloom or triffid grove nearby, and I'd ask to be paid points for taking that start.

[dwarfkoala]

Hellyes. I've been wanting to start in the middle of a city for ages!

[kevingranade]

Yea, I think of this as more a difficulty setting than a character creation thing, but character creation seems like the best place for the menu. KA is totally right about spawn locations having wildly different difficulty from one game to the next.

[KA101]

UI looks great, Kevin. Looking forward to an expanded list in future.

That said, I can't endorse this PR as it is. You be bugged.

CTD when I "<" to leave the Description tab (go back to skills).
Reproduce:

1. Build/run.
2. New game, custom/preset/random character, doesn't matter. Play Now! works.
3. Either build your char or don't, doesn't really matter. Get to the Description tab.
4. Go back. BAM "Cata has encountered an error and needs to close."

OR
1-3 as before BUT spawn in a world/location wherein you've spawned already. House/Shelter matters; the first spawn to each, in a fresh-built world, apparently works fine.
4) Spawn. BAM CTD.

WinXP, presumably the Curses build as I've not mucked around with SDL-compatibility, this PR as of 3:15 AM US Eastern, 03 Dec 2013.

Confounding factor: the build that I git pulled from your repo came with "start_locaton.cpp" called for in the C::B project file. Manually added the correctly-titled file from the menu and removed the typo'd one. Find-in-files indicated that "locaton" happens precisely once in all the code: a comment in newcharacter.cpp.

Wondering if something else got borked in transit. Sorry, Kevin.

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

Still watching this and hoping to see it come to pass.

Add some parameters for specifying location beyond a building type. (distance from city center?)

Size of starting town? Start in wilderness, X distance from nearest town? Start in the bottom of a lab?

Add a parameter and method for fortifying the building the player spawns in.

Checkbox-style? Like, as in an option that you can select that boards up (some? all? tape instead? closed curtains too? partially or fully deconstructed furniture?) the external windows and throws down extra random building materials and tools on the floor when enabled.

off topic: Come to think of it, having something that could randomly make a building pre-fortified or pre-damaged would be awesome for normal mapgen too.

[dwarfkoala]

Yeah. It's part of fulfilling the kickstarter goals anyways, since one of
the dev goals was the scenario system, which this will go a LONG way
towards fulfilling.

[kevingranade]

acrew more menu entries, I'll just add the options to the locations themselves, so House vs House (fortified) vs House (suburbs) etc... No probably need checkboxes, damnit. I hate menus.

[dwarfkoala]

I sincerely hope this hasn't died...

[kevingranade]

Nah, I'm just busy, and the hard part is figuring out WHAT to do, not so much how to do it, so even if it bitrots I should be able to ressurect it fairly easily.

[atomicdryad]

I'm gonna want to take this and weld it to mapgen_function_* to make it a start scenario system..sometime.

The start of one at least. For a complete scenario system, the startup menus would need a bit of work (in theory it would be good for scenario addon mods to at least pre-select certian stuff like profession/merits/etc, depending on how involved or generic it is)

[Rivet-the-Zombie]

I'd still love to see this happen. I keep waiting and watching and hoping.

[kevingranade]

Yea sorry, I hardly have any dev time right now, should be able to tackle this next week.

[Zireael07]

*pokes @kevingranade *
This is too brilliant to be abandoned!

[Chase-san]

This really should be worked on some more. I would really want this for 0.A.

[KA101]

It's major enough that it can wait for new-experimental, I think? Shouldn't be a Blocker.

[dwarfkoala]

Blockers are generally for major, major bugfixes. I've also seen major features that are very close to completion stalling the release, but this is far enough that I don't think it's right to delay the release for it.

[KA101]

Further, that's major features that are reasonably stable. I could've started work on making downstair-tiles (with corresponding upstair-tiles on Z-1) player-constructable a few weeks ago. Have been holding off as I'm sure it'd break something, so wanted to NOT mess up the stable.

[Chase-san]

By "really want" I mean I want it, not that is should block 0.A. :)

[kevingranade]

bump.

[Zireael07]

Great!

[KA101]

Will take a look later tonight when I have the time to give it a hard going-over. Glad to see it, though. :-)

[KA101]

Code::Blocks: unused variable alert! >_<

[KA101]

Never mind, was part of the Husband of the Teenage Psycho-Cyber-Mutant Offspring's Vengeful Plot. Fixing the typo cleared it right up.

[KA101]

Revenge of the Husband of the Teenage Psycho-Cyber-Mutant Offspring Of "start_locaton.cpp"

PART N+1!

[KA101]

Dammit. Hitting / to change spawn location is instantly crashing to desktop (after I fix the typo'd .cbp). Using a random character, both on an old and fresh-gen'd world.

[kevingranade]

gah, I've tried everything I can think of to make it misbehave, nothing is happening. If someone can reproduce on windows and get me a backtrace that'd be super helpful, but as it is I'm stuck.