Game Objects

Avatars

The avatar is an interface between the worker and the managers in the simulation. It also provides a nice abstraction for what the simulation perceives as a 'user'. The avatar related functionality is grouped inside the avatar folder.

The avatar functionality is separated in several classes:

• avatar wrapper - the central avatar functionality, including the communication with the worker and the simulation properties such as health, score and so on
• avatar view - a personalized view of the worlds for each avatar
• avatar appearance - fields used only by the Raphael JS client
• the avatar manager - a structure that keeps a list of avatars. It is used by the Turn Manager to update the environment
• fog of war

The Avatar Wrapper

The avatar wrapper represents the application's view of a character, together with an API that communicates to the worker via HTTP GETs.

The main functionality is:

• decide action - fetches an action from the worker and updates the current action to be executed
• clear action
• update effects - apply effects that come from getting a pickup
• add event - attaches an event to the event setting -- not yet used

Deciding an action is done by making a GET request to the Game API and processing the received JSON. If an error occurs during the process, a wait action is emitted.

There is also some functionality not fully used/implemented:

• die - dies and respawns at new location
• damage - take damage

Actions

An action is a pair (avatar, location). The action is register onto the WorldMap by being appended to a cell.

The action is processed by calling the apply function.

• if the action is legal it is applied
• if not it is rejected

The exposed interface is:

• apply
  • has to return true if application succeeded
  • attaches an event to the avatar
• is_legal
  • returns if an action is legal from the point of view of the map
  • the action gets applied or rejected accordingly
• reject
  • attaches a (failed) event to the avatar The general processing of an actions is done by applying the action if it is legal and rejecting it if is not.

Each of the 3 elements of the interface are implemented differently by different types of actions.

The current types of actions as:

• WaitAction
  • wait is always legal
  • no actions get attached to the avatar
• MoveAction
  • is_legal
    • the responsibility is passed to world_map
  • apply
    • adds a move event to the avatar
    • change the avatar's world view
    • updates the map accordingly
  • reject
    • the failed event is added to the avatar
  • overrides the processing of the action
    • the action is chained in the action list of a cell
    • see World Map and Turn Manager for details

Pickups and Effects