| Author |
Message |
Fergus Duniho (Fduniho)
| | Posted on Thursday, November 28, 2002 - 3:49 pm: | |
I would like to suggest adding the option for different Players to be part of the same Team. In games played with Teams, it would be a Team that wins or loses instead of an individual Player. This would allow for the more faithful implementation of games played with Teams, such as Bughouse.
Here is how it could be done. Currently, the Player variable serves multiple functions. It determines which pieces a Player can move, it determines the perspective from which a position is evaluated, and it is used for evaluating win- and loss-conditions. I propose splitting the functions of the Player variable between two variables called Player and Team. For backwards compatibility, and for the easy implementation of non-Team games, each Player would be automatically assigned to a one-Player Team with the same name as the Player. But a Player's Team assignment could be changed within the ZRF.
As before, the Player variable would determine which pieces a Player can move. It would also continue to be used in specific win- or loss-conditions, such as checkmate. The Team variable would be used for evaluating the board position. It could also be used within win- and loss-conditions. Zillions would evaluate win, loss or draw in terms of the Team, not in terms of individual Players. When a win- or loss-condition was met for an individual Player, Zillions would give the win or loss to the Team. When a Player and Team had the same name, it would understand it as a goal for the individual Player, but it would still give the win or loss to the Player's Team.
A Team might be assigned like so:
(Team <Team-name> <Team-member> ...)
This would define a Team whose name is Team-name, and its members would be listed after the Team-name. The Team-members would all have to be names already assigned to individual Players. Zillions would complain if it got an invalid name for a Team-member. Whenever it got a member name already assigned to another Team, it would reassign the Player's membership to the new Team. It should do it this way, because every Player will initially be assigned to its own Team. Alternately, for better debugging, it could give a warning if the same Player was assigned to two different Teams with the (Team ) command. Although Players will automatically be assigned to Teams bearing the same name as a Player, the (Team ) command should not accept any Player name as a Team-name. This will prevent conflicts over win- and loss-conditions when a Team has the same name as a Player. |
Alfred Pfeiffer (Apf)
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 - 4:02 am: | |
Fergus,
teams are possible with Zillions. Three years ago I made some tests with Halma (Chinese Checkers), also for some team variants, and they worked fine.
Because there were an other problem with the win condition I did not sent it for publishing to the Zillions site, but perhaps I will make up for it now to give an example for a team game. |
|