Skip to main content

Researching Awl Pike

Last time...

In my previous commit, I had the pleasure of studying the guns and their ammo and how they are reflected in the world of Cataclysm-DDA. This time, the some members of the community were buzzing about a 3-meter-long pointy stick called awl pike.

Awl Pike

The awl pike is basically an extra-long spear designed specifically for use in a formation attack. A formation of 3+ ranks hold the longest possible stick at their disposal and poke the enemy that stands in front of them or charging at them. It is very powerful weapon against things that stands in front of them, but due to the need for formation and the shear unwieldiness of the weapon, it is not very versatile and adaptable to changing circumstances. In a one-on-one combat, the weapon would be very difficult to stay effective. How do I know all this? Well, there was the entire discussion about it in the issue page. Like I said, this kind of games brings out the geeks from their closets and provide the floor to spread their enthusiasm and knowledge.

Issue

The game apparently played with the game mechanics by setting the weight to an unreasonable amount to somehow simulate the inefficiency of this weapon. At some point in time, more comprehensive means of representing the weapon was introduced, but awl pike stayed the same.

Fix

This bugfix aims to set the awk pike characteristic to better reflect the real-life counterpart by decreasing the weight but also decreasing the to-hit chance. This fix also tinkered with the damage to keep it more consistent with other similar weapons.

Conclusion

This was also interesting. I got to watch a YouTube of a weapon specialist explaining the advantage and disadvantage of a pole-arm weapon and its demonstration. It was interesting to imagine how such a weapon can be used and how such characteristic can be represented in a numeric fashion to mimic its effectiveness in the world we are helping to shape.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a patch for GNU GCC using Git

Overview and Target Audience The GNU GCC project followed a blend of a traditional method with contemporary git tools when it comes to contributing code, making the experience unique from some other, git-based projects. This blog post will explore different aspects of the process, helpful commands, and various scripts that would make the experience more pleasent for new contributors. While this blog aims to help new contributors get acustomed to the GNU GCC code culture and make contributing easier, it must be stressed that this is not in any way in-depth exploration of the process. This should help you put your first foot forward; the community will help you take the rest of the steps from that point on. This post also assumes the user is in a POSIX environment (e.g. Linux, FreeBSD). Git and GNU As stated in this phoronix post , GNU GCC made a full transition to git early 2020. As of this writing, the community seems to be adjusting to the new tools. GNU GCC hosts its own git serve
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting up IRC

About IRC Internet Relay Chat was once the most popular real-time communication method that uses computer for a large spectrum of community groups. While it has largely been supplanted by more contemporarly methods for most people, IRC is still a prefered means of communication among older software projects like GCC. The Client As an old technology that is also very favored among programmers, IRC has many clients with different flavors, from GUI to CLI to headless. As a linux user with strong attraction to tmux, I chose weechat. Depending on your distro or OS, install your client first. Configuring Weechat I will be using GCC channel in OFTC server as the example. How are we configuring this? While Weechat has a configuration file, Weechat officially advises against using the file to configure the program behavior. Instead, it promotes `/set` dialog within the client to set the proper configuration. Connect to server Let's first connect to server. The `#gcc` channel is host
Post a Comment
Read more

Debugging with GCC: GIMPLE

GCC and GIMPLE One of the very first thing GCC asks the GSoC applicants to do, even before writing the application, is to try various different debugging techniques using GCC. I was personally familiar with the basic, compile-with-g-flag-and-use-gdb method. Turns out, there's more: GIMPLE. A Simple but Non-trivial Program Problem Description The instruction asks to compile a simple but non-trivial program with some flags that generates debugging information: -O3 -S -fdump-tree-all -fdump-ipa-all -fdump-rtl-all . Because I was keep reading on ways to debug GCC just prior to the statement, I immediately thought "GCC" and tried make -j8 CXXFLAGS="-O3 -S -fdump-tree-all -fdump-ipa-all -fdump-rtl-all" . This was a mistake: turns out, GCC can't be compiled with those flags. Thankfully, GCC developers have a very active IRC channel for me to signal SOS. Resolution jakub and segher were quick to respond to my call for help. jakub: it isn't meant that y
1 comment
Read more