A sequence generator

[bayview]

Some time ago I wrote an animated spell which is similar to one I seen on Deathzot called The Circle of Healing.

This spell took me some time to make because I had to find the best possible way to create an animation of effects that surrounded the player in a circle.

This was my 1st attempt at the spell

And then this was my second attempt at the spell where i cleaned it up a bit and removed the inner animation and made some configuration adjustments.

I think normally most of us use spell creator to at least create the effects of a spell and then maybe even re-write everything in whatever distribution we are using.

The animation is really what takes up most of our time when making spells or special effects. So I made a sequence generator which is pretty primitive right now and is built on a completely different framework but its base language is lua.

The sequence generator allows a developer to make simple animation sequences. Here is a video of this in action.

That table can then be given to this script.

local grid =
{
    --   1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 1
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 2
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 3
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 4
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 5
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 6
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 7
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 8
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 9
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 10
        {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, -- 11
}

function deepcopy(orig)
    local orig_type = type(orig)
    local copy
    if orig_type == 'table' then
        copy = {}
        for orig_key, orig_value in next, orig, nil do
            copy[deepcopy(orig_key)] = deepcopy(orig_value)
        end
        setmetatable(copy, deepcopy(getmetatable(orig)))
    else -- number, string, boolean, etc
        copy = orig
    end
    return copy
end

function setSequence(t, d)
    local x = {}
    for n = 1, #d do
        x[n] = deepcopy(t)
    end
    for i = 1, #x do
        x[i][d[i][1]][d[i][2]] = 1
    end
    return x
end

Which can then be called by this script

local areaSequence = setSequence(grid, animation)
local combat = {}

for x = 1, #areaSequence do
    combat[x] = Combat()
    combat[x]:setParameter(COMBAT_PARAM_TYPE, COMBAT_NONE)
    combat[x]:setParameter(COMBAT_PARAM_EFFECT, CONST_ME_HOLYDAMAGE)
    combat[x]:setArea(createCombatArea(areaSequence[x]))
end

local int = 1000
local xcute, xtime = 10, 500

function onCastSpell(creature, variant, isHotkey)
    for f = 1, xcute do
        addEvent(function()
            for n = 1, #areaSequence do
                addEvent(function(cid, var, i)
                    local c = Creature(cid)
                    if c then
                        if combat[i] then
                            combat[i]:execute(c, var)
                        end
                    end
                end, n * int, creature:getId(), variant, n
                )
            end
        end, f * xtime)
    end
    return true
end

Which can produce a similar effect to the circle of healing.

I was thinking that this test code & its tool could very well be the grounds for a new type of spell animation creator.

Since the base language is lua integrating specific methods or writing a library which would be compatible with all versions of the TFS framework...

What are your thoughts?