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Programming / Re: Multiplayer in Roguelikes

« on: August 06, 2012, 04:25:59 AM »

Cool-- is it real-time? How are you handling it?

It is real-time, and I'm handling the limitation of player movement based on a "Stamina" system, where certain actions may require more stamina points to to use than others. Of course a skilled player may require less stamina to perform an action in their skill tree than a player who is skilled in something else.

For instance, if you want to be a woodcutter, your woodcutting skill is of course going to increase and you'll produce more from your cutting and you'll be able to do it faster.

Same thing with combat, if you are skilled at fighting with a certain weapon type, you're going to be faster and better at using it.

Which somewhat leads into the skill system I'm putting together. Where you can start off as a generic player with equally leveled skills across the board or you can choose a specialized class where your starting skills may be higher in certain areas than others.

The idea being that your player's only limitations in the world are what you spend time skilling them up for. It becomes harder to be a "jack of all trades" player, because higher levels in specific skill trees may take longer to level up. Also permadeath means that players are likely to specialize their characters for certain tasks rather than attempt to be great at all of them, and perhaps even have multiple characters on their account that are specialized for building, combat, diplomacy, trade, etc.

There will of course be implications of carrying heavy items, such that your movement costs more stamina to perform. The exact mechanics of how combat will work are still being worked out though, as I haven't gotten that far in my list of things to program :p Suggestions are welcome

It seems very interesting to me. I'll play it once I have some time.

Thanks! One of these days soon (likely this week) I'll put together a windows executable and a statically compiled binary for Linux / OSX up so that people don't have to compile it by hand :p

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Programming / Re: Multiplayer in Roguelikes

« on: August 05, 2012, 09:25:03 PM »

My current (possibly lifelong) project is a text-based multiplayer roguelike:

The ASCII Project
www.theasciiproject.com

It's 100% open source, and I commit code updates at least once a day. Currently I have asynchronous networking working with a client and server (after only 30 days of coding) which allow you to move around the map with other players, and this week I'm going to be putting in a database backend to handle the accounting/login/registration services. I envisage a text-based minecraft-esque game when I move the release up to 0.0.1, but I have very distant ai/scripting/networking/etc features I would like to put in once I get things stable and rolling.

I doubt anyone will ever actually play it, but I enjoy writing it, and I'd be happy if even one person ever logs in haha. I'm sure I'll get much criticism for attempting such a project, but suggestions are always welcome :-) I wouldn't mind having a programmer to help out to speed things along, but most requests for features and ideas make it into my scratchpad where I have a list a of goals branched out into their prerequisite functions.

I'm also trying to keep the API text-based, and I'll get around to sending out map updates optionally as plaintext or xml data feeds, so that people could potentially write their own clients (or web front-ends) based on the open API services. People can also download and run their own servers, but I doubt many people will choose that over just connecting to the main server I'm hosting.

The main reason I'm doing all of this is because I wanted a multiplayer dwarf fortress type game, but after years of waiting and searching for game with the kind of features I've always wanted, I just gave up and started writing one on my own. Now that I've made the jump from C to C++, Boost and the C++11 stdlib give me just enough features and flexibility to clearly sculpt code into my ideas and put them into practice fairly quickly. I spend probably 95% of my time coding or working on the project, and I can honestly say it's very satisfying knowing that for any feature I want to put it, I'm limited only by time and computing power.