Lucky Luc
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1215
Registered: 08-19-2012
IP: Logged

So, suppose the following example scenario: You are an architect and design a room with citizens and tarstuff. The room requires you to drop a green door, then get rid of the rest of the tarstuff. You want to avoid, however, that the player leaves the room unconquered, and for that you think of a neat script where you put down yellow doors at the room exits that only open up when you have cleared all tarstuff *and* killed all monsters.

You first try to achieve this by using "Wait for clean room", but you discover that this always returns true once the room has been cleared temporarily. You find that strange but can accept it; after all, the green door has been dropped.

You then have another idea and try to use "Wait while entity monster at (0,0)-(37,31)". You test your room, but you just can't seem to open the yellow doors, even after killing all the monsters. Then you remember that you've used "Wait for monster" before to determine the position of the citizen, and you suddenly realize that's why your script fails.

You find a way to work around this problem, but you think about the way this command works and just can't find any sense in it. Citizens don't have to be killed to clear a room, and you can't even do it with your sword, so why would you consider them as monsters and not as some other entity, for example as an NPC?

You realize, however, that this behaviour is probably way too old to change it now. You think it wouldn't hurt though to leave this as a possibility, but add one or two new types of entities (citizen and real monster or something) so that you can actually determine whether or not a room has been thoroughly cleared. You decide to share this idea with the rest of the community

(Note that this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or holds I'm currently working on is purely coincidental.)