Two questions about style and some simple math

[Rhodri James]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:15:47 -0000, Spoofy <spoofy1 at gmx.net> wrote:

> Hello everybody!
>
> Though I'm a hobby programmer for years now (mainly small hackery  
> things) I still have big problems getting "real" things to work.
>
> I'm currently trying to write a simple RPG and have problems with the  
> following:
>
> 1.
>
> Characters have a "courage" attribute that basically determins who has  
> the first attack in a fight. After some trying, I came up with this  
> (sorry, not really working code, but what I made from interactive  
> experimentation):
>
> def first_attack(player1,  player2):
>      diff = player1.attributes.courage - player2.attributes.courage
>      players = (player,  player2)
>      return players[diff + random.randint(-diff,  diff) < 0]
>
> To make it more realistic, I randomized it a little bit and this seems  
> to work for low courage values. But when the courage values are high  
> (100 and such) it fails (the chance to have the first attack drops the  
> higher the values are). My math is really bad and I have problems to  
> understand what's happenning here. I suspect the greater range for  
> randint() is the problem, but I don't really get why.
>
> Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

This is always going to select player1 (assuming you fix the typo of
"player" for "player1"!).  The most negative number that the call to
randint can produce is "-diff", so "diff + randint()" is at least
"diff + -diff", which is zero and hence never less than zero.

Surely in any case you don't want an expression based on the difference,
since that would give you the same chance of having the first attack no
matter what the levels of courage actually were, which can't be right.


> 2.
>
> For maintaining the character attributes I creates a seperate class. I  
> wonder weather this is an "overuse" of OO (instead of just making the  
> attributes plain variables of the Char class) and if the way I wrote  
> this is OK (somehow this looks cool to me but maybe too "showy"?)
>
> class Attributes(object):
>      ATTRIBUTES = {"attack": 0, "defence": 0, "ability": 0, "courage":  
> 0, "condition": 0}
>      def __init__(self, **kwargs):
>          self.__dict__.update(self.ATTRIBUTES)
>          for arg in kwargs:
>              if arg not in self.ATTRIBUTES:
>                  raise ValueError("Unkown character attribute '%s'" %  
> arg)
>              self.__dict__[arg] = kwargs[arg]

It's not necessarily a bad idea to have your character attributes in a
separate class, but do you really need to prevent use of other class
attribute names (sorry, the terminology crossover is inherently
confusing) so much?  Unless you think there's a serious danger of
trying to add new character attributes on the fly, I think it's
overkill.

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeeste Herder to the Masses