-cubeBrawl (Patreon)

Many of you are probably familiar with the recent Botcube Brawl event hosted by Plexion and organized via Discord. I summarized the info here on the forums.

(art by Plexion)

There you'll also find a link to a recording of the event, and the results, but what I wanted to write about here today was the mode used to facilitate that event.

Technically you can set up Botcube fights on your own in Wizard Mode, especially since I added the the new faction assignment feature, though in this case to spruce up the event I thought it would be fun to add a bunch of related features, and there is a way you can enable those as well. I actually spent more than a week putting all this together, so may as well let you know more of the details :P

To activate "Botcube Brawl mode" you have to run Cogmind with the command line switch "-cubeBrawl". Upon starting the game there must be a prepared save to load into (i.e. not starting a fresh run), and it will automatically search the entire map for any pre-existing Mutated Botcubes (does not currently check for Large) that have been assigned a unique name. So basically before using this command you want to have created a save file with some Botcubes already built, and have assigned each them some unique name (via the info window [N]ame option).

Each one of these will be assigned a unique "personality" (up to 32 different personalities supported in the same file), which will be used to determine their dialogue during the event, and also their color once activated.

To "activate" Botcubes, they need to be positioned in what were the defined Botcube Brawl starting positions, the coordinates (134,31) and (144,31). (So your map has to be at least that large, and use these precise coordinates.) Activation also changes their color, plays a sound effect, and briefly shows a popup containing basic info about the build.

You can then assign them to different factions which are hostile to one another (like MC and HD) and let them go at it.

Reloading the save (Ctrl-F9, or restarting Cogmind with that save present) will maintain the same personalities, and technically assign new personalities to uniquely-named Botcubes that were added to the save but do not yet have a personality since the last time it was loaded, if any.

I might do more with this in the future, maybe make it more flexible, who knows. This was quite specific to this event, though who knows maybe there could be more/similar/other types of events in future versions? I've actually had plans for various competitive player events for years now, but kept saving them for a special occasion when I get around to it, just haven't made the right opportunity yet, so I'm glad Plexion took the ball on this one!

I didn't get around to making this particular code more flexible since I had to both write the underlying dialogue system then also hundreds of lines of dialogue for 32 personalities :P

At one point I considered making it possible to load the dialogue dynamically, so everyone could write it on their own--that would've been pretty awesome, too, I'm sure, but that'd be a whole other level of organizing and I also wanted this to be a surprise the first time :D

For the curious, here are the personalities:

Attached to this post is the save Plexion created with everyone's Botcube Brawl builds all set up to go, the arena you can see in the video. You can mess around with that if you like, and thanks to Plexion for providing it. Note it is only compatible with Beta 14.

FCOL

While I'm at it I may as well let you know about another related Wizard Mode feature I added which ended up unused: the ability to change an entire faction's color.

This operates on whatever faction was last specified via the F command, so is limited to changing the colors of those supported by that feature, but you can assign that faction a different color via the debug command FACTION_COLOR or just FCOL for short, where the data is the desired R,G,B value, e.g. "FCOL 128,0,128". This will simply set all tiers for that faction to the specified color.

You'd never know it, but this is a fight to the death between some controllable allies and MC forces!