On-death bequest attacks, transmogrification, and poison

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Hedera
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On-death bequest attacks, transmogrification, and poison

Post by Hedera »

I've run into a possible bug in the battle system, involving on-death bequest attacks and the poison status. In brief, enemies turn into untargetable "dead" versions of themselves when killed, except if they die from the poison status effect, which just makes them untargetable and battles unwinnable.

The setup I have uses the following:

- An enemy, whom we'll call "Dummy". It's got an attack that doesn't do anything but demonstrate that it's not dead yet.
- Another enemy, whose sprite is a dead version of the above. This foe, "Dead Dummy", is untargetable, has no attacks, and has a token amount of health so it doesn't vanish as soon as it appears. The idea is that, as the party defeats enemies, the battlefield becomes littered with bodies, which Dead Dummies are meant to prototype.
- An attack, "Dummydeath", which transmogrifies the caster into a Dead Dummy, restoring health to the new maximum but keeping all other stats the same. Dummies use this as an on-death bequest attack.
- A fire spell, "Scorch", which after dealing damage directly can set the target on fire with the burn status (a renamed poison register, but whatevs). When this status is applied, it damages the target's poison register for 10% of the target's max health.

So, when testing Scorch on a pair of Dummies, if one survives the initial spell only to then succumb to burns, it doesn't fully transmogrify to a Dead Dummy. Rather, it keeps its sprite, but stops attacking and becomes untargetable by the heroes. This type of untargetability doesn't mean the battle ends when everyone's dead or a Dead Dummy, making battles unwinnable. What's going on, and is there a workaround?

(I'm using Gorgonzola for my game, not any of the nightly versions, fwiw)
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

This does sound like a bug. Maybe the on death bequest attack is not triggering properly when the enemy dies from poison?

There is a battle debug key that prints out the attack queue that might be informative, but probably you'll need to send me a copy of your rpg as a test case so I can try to reproduce the bug myself
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Post by TMC »

Last edited by TMC on Wed Mar 17, 2021 2:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Hedera
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Post by Hedera »

TMC wrote:This sounds like #1116 Enemies with on-death bequest attacks that die to poison delay attack for a turn. Are you using turn-based battles?
I am, yeah. And adding an "idling" action for heroes at least makes it so battles can end, since the enemies drop dead at the beginning of the next turn.
Bob the Hamster wrote:There is a battle debug key that prints out the attack queue that might be informative, but probably you'll need to send me a copy of your rpg as a test case so I can try to reproduce the bug myself
there's a test file in the bug report TMC linked, do you still need one from me
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Post by TMC »

OK, good, we can conclude it's the same bug then. So we don't need another testcase, as Feenick has already gone to the trouble.
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