To frob, however, is to interact with something precisely once. If I naively put an “if button is down, do thing” condition in, then a tap of a key that lasts barely half a second could still be detected as the button being down more than 30 times (or, ideally, even more often). What to the player is a simple tap of the keyboard is the key being held down for a period of time to the game.
Handling user input in video games is not trivial. The problem is that I did these mechanisms badly. I actually have two kinds of frobbing implemented already frobbing switches (activating the end-of-level lift), and frobbing items (to consume or equip them).
My game requires that many objects be frobbable. All these things, activated by the same mechanism but with different results depending on the context. If it’s a computer, you start reading it. If that thing is a person, you start talking to them. In Deus Ex, to frob something is (by default) to right-click on it. The great thing about “frobbing” is that it encapsulates multiple different activities under one convenient (and short) word. I believe it’s originally System Shock 2 or Thief parlance, but it pretty much means “to interact with”. If you edit anything inside Deus Ex, then you’ll soon discover the odd little word “frob”. When is an attack not an attack? When it’s a frob. Instead, it should trigger a friendly reaction. The key stumper at the moment is that clicking a neutral unit should not trigger the player to attack them. Needless to say, due to many holes I’ve dug myself over the last three years of developing this game, this is not so easy. As befits my tendancy to reimplement Warcraft III (to eventually allow for similarly structured RPG scenarios), I am now working on adding my own Neutral Passive characters. As the name suggests, units owned by Neutral Passive are neither allies nor enemies to any other player they offer their services equally to whomever happens to be nearby. The player Neutral Passive in Warcraft III is a special bonus player.
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