Churning onward…
As part of my work coding up traps for the encounter module, I realized I had to make my damage approach consistent. There’s effectively two kinds of damage reduction, one for wounding effects and one for every other kind of effect such as poison, charm, and so forth. So I centralized damage determination in the various modules to make it so the same rules apply everywhere.
I also realized my statistic screens for players need some serious revisions. To make it similar to the monster stat screens, I’m restructuring one so you are told explicitly your stats for melee, ranged, and defense. I won’t throw away the work I did designing the item stat generation with the little blocks indicating special qualities and such. Instead I’ll move it into the examine option for inventory.
I also need to write up trading code for the encounter module. Items in combat are randomly determined and can’t be recovered later if you turn them down. So I need to make sure you can trade off items to different players and, if need be, discard an item from your backpack to make room. (No, I can’t have chests of items generate in travel mode where the combat occurred. There’s a multitude of technical reasons why that’s impossible.)
I may need to go back to the travel module and make some changes there too. My original design was built around the idea of an “active” player. Whoever was active would be the one who picked up items, used his skills for trap detection, locks, and other things. But I’m wondering if this is going to cause trouble and confusion later. I originally extended it into the manager module but I’m going to change that so it prompts you to select a player for given operations instead.