Combat Extensions in Inform 10?

[Jim_Aikin]

In editing the Handbook, I’ve reached the page in Chapter 5 that discusses combat (as in, stats for damage, health, etc.). The Handbook recommends Armed by David Ratliff, but that seems not to exist among the Inform 10 extensions.

Can anyone recommend an extension that is current and does this sort of thing? It seems a popular enough idea, one would imagine there would be something available.

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

@Jim_Aikin

Can anyone recommend an extension that is current and does this sort of thing? It seems a popular enough idea, one would imagine there would be something available.

Lots of people are interested in having combat systems in games… but it’s not clear to me that there will ever be enough in common between what two authors want for any attempted generic combat extension to be that useful. Has there been more than one game using Armed? (I commented on this before…)

Writing a basic combat extension for inform 7

I knew there was one I was forgetting: Armed by David Ratliff (written for a previous version of Inform 7; it wouldn’t compile with the modern version without changes). I think this hasn’t happened 'cause what you’re abstracting how and at what level of granularity stands to be so wildly different between any two conceptions (he says someone who has learned a bazillion RPG combat systems). Also, once you know Inform, it’s fairly straightforward to write such a thing – the harder part is design…

There haven’t been a lot of published combat extensions besides Armed.

Inform Attack which lives on as Kerkerkruip Attack, but I don’t know how plausible it would be to use it outside of Kerkerkruip.

Qualitative Combat, posted here a couple years ago, has a very different approach.

I’m pretty sure it’d be trivial to update Armed, possibly just changing [scream out] to [scream] out in one place, per one of the undocumented changes to verbs in 10.1.

[VictorGijsbers]

I don’t know whether Kerkerkruip ATTACK compiles under Inform 10. It’s certainly useable outside of Kerkerkruip, but of course it comes with a lot of specific design choices. Whether those are the right design choices for any given game will depend. So while you certainly don’t need to add all the other things Kerkerkruip has, you will end up with something that feels a bit Kerkerkruip-like.

[inventor200 (Joey "Jess" Tanden)]

@Zed

but it’s not clear to me that there will ever be enough in common between what two authors want for any attempted generic combat extension to be that useful.

These are kinda my thoughts, too.

@Zed

Inform Attack which lives on as Kerkerkruip Attack, but I don’t know how plausible it would be to use it outside of Kerkerkruip.

This entire time I thought Kerkerkruip was a TADS game… Huh. Wonder how I got that misunderstanding.

[Jim_Aikin]

Thanks, everyone. I’ve edited the Handbook to reflect this emerging consensus.