The easiest way for developers to give feedback on your changes, would be uploading your changes to a fork of

https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine or https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game

Hi Ryan,

I've unpack your flareproject.exe in my flare folder(0.17.1 installed on windowsXP).

But when i lauch it, nothing append expect a black screen during 1second.

Is there any files to add ?

Is there the source for this? Remember that the source should be made available for this build (for the GPL, but I also imagine it's of more use for the developers, and also would allow testing on other platforms...)

ryan : ok, so on wich version can we try ?

This enhancement is really fun to play.Great enhancement of the engine :)

For the record: the spawn powers are 133, 134, 137

However I'd like to start a discussion on a few things: (I'll defend the way zangband implements pets, as it is a really enjoyable game, despite lacking graphics)

• Should the hero receive exp for minions killing enemies? Would it make sense to have it configurable?
  I'd disable that on default, as the minions are only helpers to get your way through the lands, not your exp source.
• Spawning multiple minions, these stand on each other, as there is no collision detection for other minions,
  Should the minions have collision?
  I'd do so as minions just come not only with advantages, but also disadvantages, hence operating in small caves may be hard.
• Currently the pets seem to "stay close / follow the hero" Other possible options(copied from zangband) may be:
   a) Stay close                                                                                                                
  *b) Follow me                                                                  
   c) Seek and destroy                                                                                                            
   d) Give me space                                                               
   e) Stay away                                                                   
   f) pets may not open doors                                                                                                    
   g) pets may not pick up items                                                                                                 
   h) Display current pets                                                                                                       
      Dismiss pets
• Combining the minions in the current implementation with stealth gives fun effects. The enemies seem to detect only the hero as an aggressor, but not the minions, so the minions could stand on an enemy without action to be seen.
• Another point to consider: will the minions stay minions forever? If I hurt them by accident such as with fireball, freeze or by a bow, they may turn into enemies as well?

You can always use stuff like "reserve mana" (aka when you summon you reserve X% mana) or simply have the minion "drain" your  mana (as long as he is summoned you louse like 2MP per 3 seconds).

This way you ensure that non-spellcasters can't abouse this and summoning more then 1 minion might not be the best Idea.

Minion stats shoud be equal to the summoning skills (the better the skill the better the minion) or a sytem equal to this

Lvl 1: 50% change to summon (the other 50% you get a hostile minion) a lvl 1 minion

Lvl2: 55% chance to summon a lvl 1 minon

Lvl3: 55% chance to summon a lvl 1 minion while 5% resulting in a lvl 2 minion

etc.

so at higher skill mastery the minimul level of your minion is guarantied (or hell you cen even incrise the nr. minions).

So I was looking through the code.

It turns out as of now it is only actual code, so part of the engine and not a game itself.
So if you plan to do a pullrequest sooner or later, you should rather put it on a fork of
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine instead of
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game

The -engine repository contains actually only code, whereas the -game repository contains all the graphics, maps, quests (and also the code)

The -engine repo is intended to be used by more games than just flare-game, such as
https://github.com/makrohn/polymorphable or
https://github.com/makrohn/concordia

And having minions might come handy in different games apart from flare-game as well :)

I like it, and it feels great.  It also has a LOT of code, and I wonder about the overhead that entails (for CPU and for maintainence).  Also, it seems like there's an arbitrary limit of Two Per Summon Type - it should probably either be 1, or configurable.  The only other thing I'd really like to see is being able to hover over your summons to see the current HP.

Yeah code wise, there were some copy/paste things from enemy classes. Maybe it would be worth checking if some of these methods could be moved to the common entitiy thing.

If this gets accepted, you can bet it'll end up in Concordia somehow.  My Ranger tree would love some summons.

So if I understood Clint correctly, this is going to be in mainline after 0.18 is out (end of this month, http://www.flarerpg.org/blog/20130306)

Large changes/extensions are better pulled at the beginning of a development period, so lots of testing can be done.

Another thought which came up during discussion on irc:
(Feel free to join #flarerpg at freenode :)

Maybe we could implement the minion system by just exchanging/adding the EnemyBehaviour class.
So we would not need a MinionBehavior and MinionManager, which currently has copied lots of the respective EnemyManager and Behavior class. Instead the minion is technically an enemy, just with a different behavior.

This would bring some advantages:

• Maybe less duplicate code (Manager class, behavior class, enemy/minion class itself)
• Easy switching during runtime: Consider a Ranger taming animals. Or if you are dealing damage to your minion, it turns against you. This would be probably be easier to do, as only the enemybehavior class would need to be changed.

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=flarerpg for those who are unfamiliar with irc

Another advantage to the idea: We already have lots of enemy code there, like showing a HP bar.