Hey all! Just popping in to say I haven’t done ****. I just finally got a new charger for my macbook after my previous one finally burned out completely.

I posed my idea for a generic roguelike scripting system on a roguelike development forum, and as I somewhat expected, the tone of the responses were at best cautionary. This one seems to sum it up:

Some guy Posted:

I’m pretty sure every RL developer has the mbumive-scripting-language-based-RL idea at some point. My plan for that particular white whale, when I had the bug for it, was very much the same as you describe there. I’m also pretty sure that just about everyone does what I did…starts a project that way, and comes to a realization a short way in that this really isn’t the way to go.

If your project uses this approach and works, mbumive kudos. But I suspect that you’ll end up in the same trap as most people who try it; you end up having sunk tons and tons of work into some portion of an engine, and you still have no game. The scripting engine is a black hole… it keeps growing and growing in scope and required power, until it has consumed all of your will to code.

That kind of thing worries me, because the way my motivation works, the moment my ‘will to code’ is consumed the project is ****ing done for. I haven’t given up on this idea at all, and will probably start coding it sometime this week, but it’s clear I have to think long and hard about the details, and what I can realistically include in the script and what would be better left hard-coded. As far as I can tell though, items, monsters, and other such things should still be fine. Effects will be harder, but may be possible, and hugely generalistic things like base item clbumes would be better left in the code itself.

Anyway, will update with progresssss

so! err, hey guys! been a while since i poasted here. I’ve been mad busy with clbum-related ****.

To be honest, I haven’t done that much. One thing I did is upgrade the message system. Before it was only capable of handling and displaying one message at a time, but now there’s a queue of messages. When the call is made to display them, it displays them on multiple lines if necessary, waiting for a keypress to go on to the next batch. Pretty standard stuff.

Another thing: On a whim, I tried to make my character’s vision range very high to see what would happen. Predictably, it ****ed everything up horrendously. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on there (with some help from sancdar, thanks!) and I finally got it patched up. There are still occasional bouts of weirdness if the range is very high in very specific situations with hallways and stuff, but I decided that the occurences of that happening were low enough and the problem was discrete enough that it’s not a priority issue anymore. Also I made the vision work on a radial basis rather than incremental basis, so the range of vision around a player is a more aesthetically pleasing rounded shape than the diamond it was before.

I’m still torn about whether or not to attempt the scripting system. It’s going to be very tough. I might still try to implement it in a limited way. Regardless, right now I’m brushing up on my I/O skills which are pretty rusty, because whether or not I make a script I still want to move all the basic data to external files. Also i’m going to be putting in a pre-set palette pretty soon so I don’t have to deal with the actual RGB values of color anymore.

To make up for my long silence, here are some tidbits:

Religion – In many roguelikes that feature a deity system, religion is simply a ‘get-out-of-tricky-situation-free’ card. You sacrifice enough to gain favor, and then call on your god to help you out if you’re in a fix.

I have in mind something a little more complex than that, which is fitting because overall plot I have in mind is very deity centric. I’m not going with the whole lawful vs. chaos thing, It’s going to be more of a POWDER type pantheon. One of the choices you’re going to make at the beginning will be which god (if applicable) you choose to align yourself with. Each one will have their own rules of conduct and advantages/disadvantages, and overall will have very different characters.

The way I envision things developing is that at the beginning it will be nigh impossible to get any bumistance from your god. After all, to him/her, you’re just one of millions of followers, why would they stir themselves to help you? As the character grows and becomes stronger and more reknown, your god will be more likely to notice you, and will have more of a reason to keep you alive. At the same time, opposing forces will be more likely to try to interfere. (Again though, things will be different depending on the character of the particular god. An extremely benign, merciful one may lend a hand even to a nobody.)

Of course, this model will only work well in a game that is not overly difficult at first, but considerably ramps up in difficulty as it progresses. More like DoomRL, and less like ADOM where the beginning of the game is very difficult for several clbumes.

Item tiers – I plan for items to be placed based on a tier system. I’ve chosen 7 tiers arbitrarily, but I think it works well. Basically, the more powerful the item is (not necessarily the more beneficial), the higher a tier it is placed on. Things like potions of healing and confusion will be tier 1 items, but those of polymorph will be much higher, say 5. Tiers 6 and 7 will be reserved for artifact items, that is, unique items that can only appear once in a game. 6 will be for less powerful artifacts, and 7 will be some of the most sought-after items in the game. Of course, there will have to be one additional tier for items that can never be placed randomly, such as a special quest reward.

When a new level is randomly populated with items, It will do so according to a set of probabilities. Beginner levels will have the probabilities heavily weighted towards the lower tiers – something like

[80%, 60%, 30%, 20%, 5%, 1%, 0%]

When an item is placed, first it will check the first tier. If that 80% chance doesn’t work, it’ll next try the second one. If that one fails, it’ll try the third, etc. etc. If it reaches the end no item will be placed.

Further on in the game, the probabilities will be weighted differently. It’ll be lower the start, higher in the middle, and then lower again at the end (but perhaps not as low).

This system allows for very good luck in the beginning, since it is remotely possible (though very unlikely) for a new character to get a great item at the beginning, and in the middle of the game it will still be very possible to get hit with low-level items, though mid-range and higher ones will be much more accessible.

Hey dudes! It’s been a ridiculously long time since I updated this thread, and I think it’s only fair to let you know how things are standing right now.

Since this is a long bum post, I’m gonna break it up into two parts – some major design changes I’ve made, and then some more conventional updates telling you guys how the coding is going.

DESIGN

So, about a month ago, I finally admitted to myself that attempting to create a sprawling, ADOM-scale project isn’t fair to either me or you guys. Mainly because it would literally take years to finish. As such, I’ve decided to narrow down the scale to that of a normal Roguelike: one quest and one main dungeon.

I’ve got the basics of the plot and the general theme and content worked out. I think I might keep that to myself though for now, (I want to leave some mystery in this project >Log in to see images! ) I’ll reveal certain things as they become relevant to the coding process, of course.

The general setting is still going to be mostly fantasy, but I’m trying to stay as far away from mindless fantasy stereotypes as possible. One of my goals in this project is to create a coherent and interesting world, as I may use the same setting for other Roguelikes or my big-scale one somewhere down the road.

Don’t get me wrong though – even though I’ve severely scaled down the scope of the game, it’s still going to take a very long time to complete. With school and work going on, I can only spend 1-2 hours on it every day, though I am getting pretty good at working on it regularly. The change doesn’t mean it’ll be playable in a few weeks, it means it’ll be some months instead of some years.

CODING

Things I’ve changed since last time:

– I’ve actually undone some of my work on menus, and re-simplified it to make it less of a hbumle and more intuitive. For now, it’s back to single-choice menus, but if I think it’s necessary later on it won’t be difficult to re-implement multiple choice menus.

– The player isn’t lonely anymore! I created the game time & timer system, and there are now other creatures running around the dungeon, taking turns with the player. It’s a little too early to call them enemies yet, since I’m still in the process of coding the ATTACK action and the only AI they have is a function that chooses a random direction for them to walk in.

Most recently, I’ve just about finished fixing a major structural/organizational problem in the code relating to in-game actions. There’s no need to go into the fine details, but the gist of the issue was there was no real differentiation between actions and meta-actions. Actions being clearly defined actions that an actor carries out in the game that has an actual bearing on the game world, and meta-actions are either actions that have no effect on the game world, or ambiguous actions that need clarification before they can be applied. For example, viewing your inventory is a meta-action since it has no effect on the game world itself. From the inventory menu however, there may be context-sensitive uses for items, in which case the meta-action of viewing your inventory could be turned into a tangible game action.

The result was functional, but messy, problematical code that would have proved to be a huge headache later on. Hell, I only have 5/6 functional actions right now and I’ve been fixing it up for almost 4 hours now and I’m still not quite done (i will be soon though). Even though it’s taken me so long to do something that has no visible effect on game, it still feels like a big accomplishment, mainly because the revised code is now probably the most stable code I have in the game right now. A lot of the code I have right now is going to have to be changed a fair amount before the final release, but the way I have actions right now, I can’t see any reason I would have to change it besides some very minor tweaks and additions.

Up next:

– Finish cleaning up that organizational problem mentioned above, and make sure things are working smoothly

– Work out exactly how I want combat to be implemented and finish the attack action

– Create a status area in the bottom of the screen for important player stats such as HP, etc.

– Implement a very basic monster AI – just monsters wandering around until they see you, at which point they’ll move in to attack you

So that’s that for now. I’ll try to update this thread a little more often, so I don’t have to write essays every time. Log in to see images!

this thread is so awesome, thanks for the bump kj. Please see this BoP Log in to see images!

Sancdar Posted:

So I talked to BoP today and this project is still going great!

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ok, whoever had sanc in the “which oldfabulous person comes back next” pool wins…