Encounters (WIP)
Encounters
As you travel through the world of Betrayal at Krondor at times the party will experiences encounters. These might be things like a combat, a dialog with an NPC, or being able to access a city or town. I call these events encounters. BaK has a relatively sophisticated encounter system that places these events in the game world and decides when to trigger them for players.
There are nine types of encounter in the game, below I have enumerated their type, the number used to refer to them in the game code, the file the definitions can be found in, and their purpose.
| Type | Number | File | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Background | 0 | DEF_BKGR.DAT | An adventure game screen, e.g. the waterfall near Cavall Keep, or the Oracle of Aal |
| Combat | 1 | DEF_COMB.DAT | Enters combat |
| Comment | 2 | no file (would be DEF_COMM.DAT) | Mentioned in code, but no comment files exist |
| Dialog | 3 | DEF_DIAL | Begins a dialog, this could be with an NPC (Squire Phillip), or just a short flavour dialog |
| Health | 4 | no file (would be DEF_HEAL.DAT) | Mentioned in code, but no health files exist |
| Sound | 5 | no file (would be DEF_SOUN.DAT) | mentioned in code, but no sound files exist |
| Town | 6 | DEF_TOWN.DAT | Adventure game screen, but always towns or cities, e.g. Lamut, or Krondor |
| Trap | 7 | DEF_TRAP.DAT | Almost identical to combat, but includes trap elements |
| Zone | 8 | DEF_ZONE.DAT | Transitions between zones |
| Disable | 9 | DEF_DISA.DAT | Disables a game state flag |
| Enable | 10 | DEF_ENAB.DAT | Enables a game state flag |
| Block | 11 | DEF_BLOC.DAT | A dialog encounter that blocks further progress, e.g. dialog with Finn in Chapter 1 when trying to enter Northlands from Tyr Sog |
Encounter definitions
Encounters are defined on a per tile basis. Please refer to the coordinate system for more information on tiles.
Each tile may have a file named TXXYY.DAT; I will refer to this as the tile encounter file. This contains a list of encounters that may be present in that tile. These are defined on a per chapter basis, so some encounters might be present on that tile only in chapter 1, but not in chapter 3. (e.g. Squire Phillip NPC location changes between chapters). Given that there are ten chapters in the game, there is space to store ten chapters’ worth of encounters in the tile encounter file. Each chapter may have up to ten encounters