I'm just curious what the point of all this posting is. Are you asking for help with your (godawful spaghetti) code, or what? The running commentary here just seems sort of bizarre, and probably more suited for a journal or blog of some sort than the Game Programming forum.

i've often found that when looking at threads to learn things, the threads usually don't tell you how things finally tuned out, which is often where the real lessons to be learned are.

so those last couple of posting were postmortem / "for posterity" so to speak.

i was about to close the thread with a final posting of how the fixing of the 50 check loops went. and the fact that many of the loop bodies had different parameters, which would have required many function prototypes. and how i therefore ended up using the first_alive / next_alive routines for all of them. also, after all that, when changing kill_bandmember, i realized that i couldn't use the "swap and decrement count" trick, as some game objects have an "owner" which is simply the index of the PC struct. swapping would mean fixing up owner references. both considerations that anyone else dealing with this type of thing might be interested in.

and that's about it. i'm about to finish modding kill_bandmember, then compile and go look at my new dead bandmembers in the game! <g>.

still have to make it deactivate them at some point. such as when the remaining players move far away, or after some period of time, etc.

i'd like to thank all for the ideas and suggestions.

until next time,

hailing frequencies closed