Question Customized Mob Movement

I wanted to make mob movements a little more unique - after all, we can select their attack text so why not their movements in and out of a room? Join me on a clumsy journey through C and make your mud a little cooler with customized mob movement.

All of this is AFTER I added my "minimum level to kill" snippet (good luck finding it in the forums, I added it in a trigger request) so some of the integers/variables (especially loading/saving for mobs) might have more functions/variables than stock TBA.

Let's begin.

In structs.h add
This is where you can add more/change the type of movement....

AND added in /** Special data used by NPCs, not PCs */



In utils.h add:



In oasis.h add:
this number might be different for you, just do the next avail number.


In  act.movement.c add (I added this above the functions):

Since we're here I decided to change the arrival messages as well:

Change    /* Generate the leave message and display to others in the was_in room. */ to give a movement message w a direction if it's a character OR our modified message if it's a NPC:


under Local variable definitions add:
then change the if in  /* Display arrival information to anyone in the destination room... */ to:
(cleaned this up to be a fancy conditional operator I found in a snippet way after I wrote this and it has 3 variables? that even legal? I don't care, it works)


In act.h under /* Global variables from act.movement.c */ add:



Over to medit.c so we can select the movement for each mob:

add in to the includes:
in local functions add:

then add the movement text menu option:


Then in case MEDIT_MAIN_MENU add:

And in the cases under /* Numerical responses. */ add:


under "Display attack types menu" add:



Now we turn to saving and loading for the mobs

In genmob.c replaced this in write_mobile_record - please note I'm using my minimum attack level snippet as well which is why I'm writing a little extra in the second line of integers.


in db.c (loading mob) in parse_simple_mob increase the array to the appropriate size (I'm up to 11) at the start of the function. It looks like:


then change this line read to:

That SHOULD be it. Now when my cyborg mob enters the room the character sees "A Level 2 Training Cyborg rolls in from the west." and when it leaves they see "A Level 2 Training Cyborg rolls east." My mud is far more descriptive than that... this is for a training area so relax. 

BIG NOTE: You will have to go back and add a number (just do 1) to each mob, so if you have a fully developed mud or are using TBA stock you're in for wrist-breaking trouble. For me it was adding a number to each mob in the x.mob file:  # # # #d#+# #d#+# # # <

---

this is what I added. The # before our added number is for my minimum attack level (another snippet).

PLEASE let me know if you run into any problems implementing, or if there's a more efficient way to do this. With the effort added to make our mob attacks personalized, this felt like a natural progression. I'd love to see it added to a release, but it would mean changing mob files and who wants to do that?



EDIT: Added a little logic to handle characters arriving from above and below (directions 4 & 5). Now that I'm thinking about it one would have to extrapolate that out if your mud handles all 10 directions...

Great idea    You could have an override if a mob had class = zombie, for example, and just have it set shuffle (if they don't have the default value), in addition to what you have - if you don't feel like going through every mob to edit it.

If someone was implementing it in their mud that didn't have the variable, they could just set it to a default by looking at how many fields were in their files.

At that line if 11 arguments 
  then set GET_MOBMOVE() = <default number>
if 12 arguments then 
  just read in the variable and set MOBMOVE
else throw error

There are some examples of this in db.c I think, with some of the other sscanf parse/load functions, but I don't remember off the top of my head.

Then where you save, just save whatever is in memory (which you are already doing) and write out 12 fields, so you don't really have to hand edit

Edit: 

You also need to do an action that invokes save_mobiles in genmob.c either by editing and saving in medit with one change per zone or making a loop after the zones are loaded in db.c
I think that'll work, not sure without testing, but that is essentially where I put a function to save all the files to mysql.  The old files already loaded in memory, then you can just write out to whatever thing you want - in this case back to the old files (just backup everything)

I'm pretty sure that I've seen (somewhere, not necessarily on TBA) movement messages coded to terrain types, such as underwater defaulting to swim, and mob types, such as snakes defaulting to slither. I've also seen (again, somewhere) movement message as an option in the mob menu. Actually, these wouldn't have been in TBA since my park cheats by having the mobs move silently with triggers to imitate movement messages. Of course, the whole park cheats all over the place anyway so what else is new?

Curious as I’m working on an undead NPC

Which of these types would be an undead:
  "walks",  "skips",  "staggers",  "swims",  "slinks",  "saunters",  "struts",  "limps",  "meanders",  "shuffles",  "skips",  "runs",  "rolls",  "marches"

?

I would say a combination of Stagger, Limp, Shuffle and walk.

All I can picture is the scenes at the end of Yellowbeard.

While I have been perusing through the code for awhile, I finally started to look at Spec_proc

Have you looked at the SPECIAL (mayor) yet?