Messages

1

Programming / Space in a roguelike

« on: August 20, 2013, 09:16:46 PM »

Hello rogues,

the last time I started a new topic was in April 2012: Cars in a roguelike Where I tried to make controlling cars in a roguelike feel right.

I didn't succeed, so now I started over and put the whole game into the future where no cars will be used. For faster prototyping I am also using a different programming language now, although the final game will still be realised in C++!

Here's a really early prototype made in Stencyl (so it needs Flash): http://brightbit.square7.ch/

Controls:

arrow keys	- walking (you might need to click into the window first)
space	- skip turn
a	- shooting mode (incomplete)
i	- open inventory (incomplete)

I would like to get some feedback on this already, although I am not interested in bugs:

* What do you think of the look and feel?
* How do the general mechanics work for you?
* What do you expect from the game while playing it?

I know it's early but I think criticism can't be gathered soon enough!


Greetings
BrightBit

2

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: June 02, 2012, 11:10:10 AM »

Thank you very much Game Hunter. I can't put in words how valuable your help, your input and your patience is to me.

The RenderSystem_GL error took me by surprise. I didn't expect OpenGL to cause errors and I am still not sure why it can't load the lib on your system. Right now I just can make some guesses. Maybe some OpenGL libs are missing on your system, so the RenderSystem_GL can't be loaded properly. I also checked how Ogre is loading Plugins and it seems that the LoadLibraryEx function is called with the parameter LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH whos behaviour is undefined if the filename contains a relative path (which is strange because it's Ogre's default).

I again changed the way how the plugin is loaded, so here's another try to fix this error:

fixing approach #2

If the error still isn't gone and you still want to help me, you could download the dependency walker for windows and open the RenderSystem_GL.dll with this program to see missing dependencies/libs. (Note: As far as I know you'll need the x86 version even if you got a 64 bit system.)

As for your movement suggestions, for the speed X=3 these would be the possible options and their corresponding orientations:



Actually this looks really good. The amount of options seems straightforward and manageable. I will definitely give this a try.


Thanks again Game Hunter. I really appreciate your help.

3

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 31, 2012, 07:44:28 PM »

Thank you for your comments.

First things first: There are some *.log files within the bin directoy of my game. You just can attach these to your post and I should be able to see what went wrong. BTW: A friend told me that my app crashes if no DirectX is installed, so I tried to fix it:

fixed BNB 0.0.1 [Rev. 61] version

The car movement isn't final. I agree that the amount of movement options is way too high. Right now all these options are calculated and therefore there are some inaccuracies. For the final draft I probably will create the options by hand and of course I will add the ability to select an option with the keyboard, too.

I was expecting seven distinct motions per velocity: forward, lean left/right, soft-turn left/right, and hard-turn left/right

Sounds reasonable. I will try this. By "lean left" you mean keeping the orientation but still putting the car a bit to the left?

(where soft-turn is the full motion and soft-turn is for roads)

I guess here's a typo? What degree/angle should a hard turn have in your opinion?


I really appreciate your help! Thanks in heaps!

4

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 30, 2012, 03:12:50 PM »

I created a small video of my game for all the people who don't want to invest their time in downloading and testing the game I supplied in my previous post for whatever reason:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgYs6yBMZM

I know that this isn't much but I want to get feedback as early as possible in my development process.

EDIT: The video was done with software I didn't really know how to handle or they were crappy (or both), so the video runs a bit faster than the real recording was.

5

Programming / Re: Does nCurses Honor the /n?

« on: May 30, 2012, 08:22:05 AM »

Actually, some languages even use '~' fyi.

Interesting. I really didn't know that. Thanks.

But it is a moot point because he is talking about the newline "character", not the "\n" string itself.

Yeah, you're right. I was a bit too tired when I wrote this but at least I did no harm by pointing that out.

6

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 30, 2012, 01:19:08 AM »

Here's a small update:

[link removed, see below for updated version]

I made the walls look better and added doors. It's still very rough and still a very, very, very early version.

Since noone replied I have to ask you:

Are you afraid of me uploading malicious software? Should I move this topic to the thread "Early Development Feedback"? Can't you "play" it because you are using a different OS? Did you have problems running this app? A friend of mine said he couldn't run it because of a missing DirectX DLL. I now changed my app to use OpenGL by default instead. So this problem shouldn't happen anymore.

7

Programming / Re: Does nCurses Honor the /n?

« on: May 29, 2012, 10:36:54 PM »

I don't know nCurses, so please ignore me if I'm wrong but are you sure that it is /n? All languages I know use the backslash to indicate an escape sequence, i.e. \n instead of /n. I guess you just made a typo in your post but I just wanted to be sure.

8

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 25, 2012, 04:05:06 PM »

Here you can download a very, very, very, VERY early version of my game:

[link removed]

Right now it's only purpose is to test the car movement ideas we were discussing in this thread.

You can move by using the W, A, S, D keys and enter the vehicle by pressing E. I don't want to tell you more about the contols because I would like to see if you can find it out on your own, i.e. if it's somewhat intuitive.

It requires Windows and the movement isn't ready yet but I thought getting critiques as soon as possible is a good thing.

BTW: Which operating systems are you using? I might be able to create a Linux version, too.

9

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 06, 2012, 11:57:16 AM »

Regarding driving cars in reverse: They will definitely need to hit zero before moving into negative speeds.

Aww... player cant flip a 180 and switch to reverse?

Hmmm... interesting point. I didn't think of that. Maybe there will be some exceptions (this could be some skill you need to unlock first or something like that).

10

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 06, 2012, 10:17:36 AM »

@Game Hunter:
Sorry for the tardiness of my reply. You're right. The mockup doesn't show all possibilities and it's not very acurate. I focused on the left side and therefore I simply forgot the right one. The main purpose for me doing this mockup was to check how the visual style of the indicators would fit to the rest of the graphics, to get a feeling for how many indicators would be visible and how I might be able to implement them (creatures will be shown on top of the indicators, so I can't just use my GUI library to do the job). This way I also noticed that it would help to see a preview of the car's position and orientation. BTW: You're idea of only showing indicators for a certain speed sounds reasonable.

Regarding driving cars in reverse: They will definitely need to hit zero before moving into negative speeds.
Regarding sub-turn rendering: I'm not sure about this one. I don't want to avoid it just because of its complexity but it needs to pay off so I will only go for it if the other approaches don't work.


Thanks again for your feedback. I wish several other forums I am using would be so energetic.

11

Programming / Re: Moving the @

« on: May 05, 2012, 03:09:08 PM »

Hi,

maybe I am missing the point but why do you need to >find< the @? You should always know its position.

x/y 01234

0   #####
1   ###@#
2   #####

If the "array" above is your current situation you already should know that the @ is at (3, 1). If the player now presses up you immediately know the new position (3,0) without 'finding' the @.


Greetings
BrightBit

12

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 04, 2012, 01:09:18 PM »

@requerent:
Sounds interesting but I really start to be unable of deciding whether it will be better or not. I guess I really need to implement a small prototype to test all or at least some of the ideas now.

Here's just a small update/mockup for the "show all available states" idea:



Red state indicators mean that there will be a crash. Black indicators present safe targets. A transparent version of the current car will show its new orientation after selecting the corresponding target/state.

13

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 03, 2012, 01:30:29 PM »

Wow, thank you guys for all your feedback.

So it's time for some answers I guess.

@requerent:
I am using Ogre and I am programming in C++. You might think that Ogre is overhead but it has certain advantages that I am interested in (mature community, CEGUI compatibility, shader support, etc.). Here's a small video showing my first steps. I initially wanted to create a minecraft clone, so it doesn't really show the actual state of my game: Infinite Terrain Video

@Game Hunter and requerent:
I like the idea of showing all available states for possible car movements but I also think it might feel slow (in comparison to the movement of a player) if the player has to click the desired state. Maybe those available states should only be shown if the player changes direction. If he keeps moving into the direction of the previous step he just needs to press a "skip turn/step" key. If he wants to increase the speed while keeping the direction he needs to press the corresponding key for this direction and the key for the opposite direction to decrease speed.
This way moving horizontally or vertically can feel fast while turns (changes in direction) will feel a bit slower because of the 'state selection' but that's okay. I mean, making turns with a real car also feels slow, doesn't it?

However, there's still a small problem. The roads I am using won't support smooth curves, i.e. only manhattan like layouts. So turns like these:

# = Road
C = Car
/ = Possible Collision
. = Not Road

#####     ##/CC
#....     #//..
#.... --> //...
C....     #....
C....     #....

...would cross nonroad terrain and therefore result in the car driving against pedestrians. You might say that the player needs to slow down before turning but I am asking myself how this would feel and if the mentioned approach is precisely and easy enough to do it. I guess this discussion would highly benefit from some kind of prototype.

Is the player the driver or is the player tactically commanding the driver?

I'm not sure if I really understand this question but I tend to say: The player is the driver. Does it help if I say that I am aiming at making the game feel like a turn-based GTA 1 (at least in regard to car controls)?

@Jim:
I tried to play Gearhead and it looks really interesting but I don't understand the control mechanism, so I sadly wasn't able to see the "inertia and controlled velocity".


Again, thanks in heaps for your feedback. Your thoughts helped me a lot.

14

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 02, 2012, 08:56:51 AM »

Hi kraflab and thank you, too.

The player won't be omniscient but I actually thought about using a tile revealing system as in Jagged Alliance 2 where you can see everything except the interiour of buildings and npcs but I am not sure on this one. This definitely will need some experiments to test it first. However, my reasoning for this decision so far is that I would like to keep the game visually appealing (for a roguelike). Too much black would make the overall game look darker which at least in theory is something I want to avoid.

15

Programming / Re: Cars in a roguelike

« on: May 02, 2012, 12:59:05 AM »

Thank you Skeletor. I didn't know Roadwar before although as far as I could see, it doesn't have pedestrians, does it? In Roadwar the cars seem to move just one tile each turn. A combination with pedestrians wouldn't feel right in this case I think. Those humans would either be as fast as the cars or even slower (e.g. one tile every two turns). The acceleration idea seems interesting, though.

My main problem with the integration of cars is that I want to make them feel faster. The player will be a human that is allowed to enter several vehicles and he should feel a difference between walking and driving. If the player wants to reach a certain goal I want him to know that driving will be faster in both terms: real world time and tiles per turn.

Still, I will need to find some time to play and investigate that game a little bit further.

BTW: Did you look for the mockups I made? The guys on Pixeljoint.com don't know much about roguelikes so I was hoping to get some feedback from real experts.