active walls

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@soda.berkeley.edu>]

bulletwalls, firewalls, lightningwalls.

  Those are the only three walls available right now.

I think we'd gain a lot in crossfire if we generalized the idea--
I call them 'active walls'.


  Sometime soon, I'd like to re-do this wall code so that you
could stick any 'game effect' (spell) in it that caught your 
fancy.  This would give some more flexibility to the map designer.

  You could have fireball wallls, cone of frost walls, small and
large lightning walls, walls of cancellation, whatever.

  The idea would be that you could use the map editor to make
them what you want.  It would be trivial to make a pick map of several
popular types of active walls.

  The walls would use the cast-spell set of routines to produce
their effects.  When I put in the level dependencies on spells,
this means you could make a mild wall of lighting or a very very deadly
wall of lightning, by changing the level of the wall!

  Other things about active walls should be made more flexible if they're
not already, such as frequency of fire, and whether or not they
can be torn down.  (This may have already been done.)

My proposal boils down to:

modify the archetypes so there is one active wall archetype.

modify the code to support this

make a pick map of popular active wall types

Problems:

  It becomes harder to have customized faces for each type
of active wall.  My plan is to store the various faces in the
anim fields--0 is a default, 1= lightnig, 2 = fire, 3 = speedball,
4=bullet.  doing the faces in the map editor would be a big mistake
under the current system.

Regards,

PeterM