[Adonthell-devel] On Item Combinations

[Kai Sterker]

Instead of making item combinations as efficient as possible (which I
might still do later on), I went for a generic solution that can handle
any type of combinations. Or at least many.

I guess I'll have to write a little guide for item designers that covers
the restrictions and requirements of the current implementation. But
before I do so, I wanted to make sure that things are okay the way they
are. So a brief summary of item combinations follows:

Combine always involves two items: the "target" and the "agent". If
successful, the combination will transform the target. Either its
attributes will be changed, or it will be converted to a completely
different item. In any case, the original target will cease to exist and
exactly one replacement item will come into being. The agent can be
changed in the process (if it is mutable) or destroyed completely. It
may never be transformed into a different item.

This covers combining exactly one agent with one target item. But often,
you'll have a stack of targets and/or a stack of agents. To allow
combining those, the items involved must meet the following
requirements:

When the target is stackable, the resulting item(s) must be stackable
too and their maximum stack size must not be smaller than that of the
original item.

When combining stacks, either the targets or the agent(s) should be used
up completely. Otherwise, the resulting items may no longer fit into the
inventory (in which case they would be dropped to the ground).


That about is it. Please tell me if you see any problems with those
restrictions. In the meantime, I'll go about creating those combine
actions I described earlier in order to test the code. 

Kai