Automatically Adding Picks to Actors

Context: HL Kit … Advanced Authoring Concepts 

Overview

When a new actor is created, it is a virtually empty container. Exactly one thing is automatically added to each actor. It's the "actor" thing that is automatically created for you by the Kit. Other than that, an actor is empty.

So what about all of the various details that are a fundamental part of every actor? Every actor clearly needs to possess all of the basic attributes for the game system (e.g. strength, intelligence, etc.). In most games, the set of skills is pre-set, so those should be part of each actor, too. Every game system has its own unique set of things that should be a basic part of each actor. However, the Kit has no way of knowing what those particular things are for each game system.

To deal with this, the Kit provides three separate mechanisms for specifying which things should be automatically added to every actor. Each mechanism works slightly differently and is intended for use with different types of things. Together, they should make it easy for you to pre-configure every actor with all of the picks that is needs. The topics below describe each of these mechanisms.

Adding Groups of Related Things

As mentioned above, each game has groups of things that should all be added to each actor. Attributes, skills, saving throws, and other traits are perfect examples. Adding these things individually would be both tedious and error prone. It would also make it more difficult for others to extend the data files by adding their own custom traits, because they would have to manually add any new things they defined.

As long as a group of things can be readily identified by tags they share in common, you have them all automatically added via a single operation. Since all related traits typically derive from the same component, and since every thing possesses a tag for each component it derives from, this requirement is usually a non-issue.

To specify a group of related tags that should be added to every actor, use the "enmasse" element within a structural file.

• • Enmasse

Adding Individual Things

• • Bootstrap

Pre-Selecting Things Within Choosers

• • Auto-add