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If anyone is interested I've been working on a formula to find the nearest player to a monster on a square grid (Basically a 2d array). I though I'd share it. It's not exactly code so I thought I'd put it in the newcomers forum incase it helps anyone else.

Basically you get the difference between the monsters X coordinate and the characters X coordinate and call it xDiff, do the same with the y coordinates and call it yDiff, then work out the difference between xDiff and yDiff call that zDiff. Then add xDiff, yDiff and zDiff and that will give the character a score. If you do this to all the characters then the nearest one is the one with the lowest score.

so for example



The above grid shows the following:

x,y
5,4 - Monster
1,2 - Character 1
1,4 - Character 2
2,5 - Character 3
3,6 - Character 4

So using the above formula.

The Difference between Monster X and Character 1 X is 4 so xDiff=4
The Difference between Monster Y and Character 1 Y is 2 so yDiff=2
The Difference between xDiff and yDiff is 2 so zDiff=2
So the score for Character 1 is xDiff+yDiff+zDiff which =8

Using the same methods the others have been calculated below

Character 1 Score=(4+2+2)=8
Character 2 Score=(4+0+4)=8
Character 3 Score=(3+1+2)=6
Character 4 Score=(2+2+0)=4

This shows that Character 4 is the nearest character. If you then divide the score by 2 then that is the number of moves that monster will need to be on the same square as the character as long as diagonal moves are allowed.

Jas

You're making it way to complicated. Since you're only comparing distances, and you don't need the actual distance really, then that'll save you from using sqrt().

distance = (characterX - monsterX)^2 + (characterY - monsterY)^2

So lets assume that you've found all the distances of each character and put them in an array.

The closest character to the monster is "closest_character", and it's "sqrt(current_closest)" units away.