Messages

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Design / Re: Roguelikes with infrequent, dangerous and interesting combat

« on: January 15, 2014, 04:56:57 AM »

I'm looking to mine ideas for good combat. I guess it doesn't have to be infrequent, but i find most roguelike melees boring. Even something that relies on stealth a lot in an interesting way.

Forays Into Norrendrin is something like that. It's not that difficult at least in first levels (might be later?) but each combat is interesting and you can't just walk around bashing monsters.

Forays great, already going to steal some ideas from that

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Design / Roguelikes with infrequent, dangerous and interesting combat

« on: January 14, 2014, 08:35:10 AM »

Are there any good roguelikes out there where combat doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's dangerous? I am not a big fan of the whole "lots of easy/meaningless monsters" style of game, so I'm looking for something different.

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Programming / Re: How are huge game worlds stored in memory?

« on: January 14, 2014, 08:03:49 AM »

Are you wanting to be going up and down levels? Or straight dive down? You probably wouldn't be asking this if you didn't want to figure out how to go back up and have your levels still be there.

Go up and down, so persistent levels.

It works, but I'm doing a lot of things that are expensive in terms of memory.

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Programming / Re: How are huge game worlds stored in memory?

« on: January 14, 2014, 01:24:18 AM »

Alright, I've figured out my level switching code. It's pretty modular, so if I need to read/write from hard disk at a later date I can. It's all in memory at the moment now, until it gets obnoxious I'll leave it like that.

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Programming / How are huge game worlds stored in memory?

« on: January 12, 2014, 04:55:17 AM »

Take ADOM as an example, which has an overworld, several different towns, dungeons, and persistent NPCs associated with certain locations...

How are these stored in memory? Is each town serialized, then deserialized when you enter into it? Or they all actually loaded into memory at any one given time?

I am really confused about how to model linked levels in general, actually. Obviously only one is usually "active" at any one time - the one the player is on. But then there are edge cases, like in ADOM where a nearby monster will follow you down some stairs.

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Programming / Re: I have 4.5k lines of code and no clue

« on: January 31, 2013, 09:15:00 AM »

I tend to make mistakes when it comes to this kind of thing as well. Start by commenting your code, possibly renaming functions and arguments so that they self-document. Consider autogenerating HTML documentation with some system or other.

I do all of the above, though I should possibly do it even more.

The other advice I would give is: If you're writing a game, write a game. Not an engine.

Guilty as charged.

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Challenges / Re: Early 7DRL Declaration

« on: January 31, 2013, 09:12:52 AM »

I am going to start one tonight at midnight (1st of february).

It will be called "Wildehond". It will be written in Scala, using SquidLib is a library.

A few people in #rgrd have suggested I need to do a 7DRL to focus on quick and dirty results. Also going to take the chance to try a more component based approach.

This idea will likely fail, in which case I will attempt another 7DRL when the rest of you do, with this fool notion of components purged from my head

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Programming / I have 4.5k lines of code and no clue

« on: January 31, 2013, 07:39:21 AM »

I have a "roguelike". it's 4.5k lines of code. It's data driven, favours composition over inheritance, is very encapsulated, and it barely does anything. It hurts my head even thinking about it. Considering a re-write - this has happened to me multiple times, I get this far, get confused, and start again (usually in a different language).

My problem is not with individual algorithms. I either get them from a library or code them up myself.

My problem is about structuring game. What does this class/module/method/object/function/whatever do? What's it responsible for? How do I group them? What knows about what? Where does this information go? It turns into a huge spider web of confusion for me.

I know some people can just hack a game together and not care about how stuff looks or modularity or anything else. Those people presumably have much larger brains than i do, because even though my code is clean by most standards I still have no clue what's going on.

Are there any good resources on this higher level stuff? The interconnection between different parts? Because it's biting me in the ass again and again.

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: January 28, 2013, 06:31:40 AM »

I listened to half. I am surprised by your love of determinism darren! In combat and stealth. The "gambling" aspect of roguelikes is is a huge part of the fun for me.

10

Programming / Re: Game Mechanics

« on: January 26, 2013, 11:05:57 PM »

So it seems like my timing system strategy is sound and you can largely make up stats as you go along. Good to hear.

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Programming / Re: Game Mechanics

« on: January 26, 2013, 11:01:00 AM »

The system I am crafting now involves "fatigure points". So essentially actions cost different number of fatigure points, when you perform the action it gets added to your total, and every gametick your total is decremented. when it reaches 0 you can act again. works well so far.

But I guess I more mean stuff like stats. Do I just copy D&D like everyone else? I mean I've played it like twice. Right now I have some weird mixture of Warhammer and Morrowind...

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Programming / Game Mechanics

« on: January 25, 2013, 01:17:22 PM »

So right now I am working on my timing system. I am going about it in a really, really ad-hoc way.

Is this going to bite me in the ass? Are there any decent guides out there to a good roguelike mechanic system? I am not just talking about a time system, but stuff that ties into it like combat.

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: January 22, 2013, 01:44:33 AM »

We're going to try and do a bit more of that this year    It can be hard to represent a game in depth though.  A lot of our eps about specific games ended up focusing too much on interface niggles.

Your interface niggle things are important issues - it got me thinking. I persevered with ADOM, my first roguelike, but threw my hands in the air when trying dwarf fortress. However, I seem to have higher tolerance than most (I do use vim after all). I showed a "newbie" ADOM, and when I told him the keys to do stuff he was like "yeah...maybe I'll place this later " but he jumped right into TOME4.

People want as few buttons as possible, and they want to be able to optionally click (it seems).

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: January 19, 2013, 06:28:13 AM »

  I do prefer the fantasy as well. I am comfortable with religion, politics and sex but I understand how it can get dicey.

Well there's a time and a place for it. That place is #rgrd-ot on quakenet, and that time is "whenever".

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Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: January 18, 2013, 06:35:24 AM »

We certainly do take topic requests!  Overworlds I'm not sure we'd have much to say much about though.  I haven't seen *any* where they do more than add a little flavour and sense of breadth to the game.  And there are no good examples of procedurally generated overworlds (I'm not even sure they're a good idea).  If you have some specific games you think are worth mentioning let me know.

Fair enough. I suppose the games I like with big overworlds are large and static. Tome4, Legerdemain (hugely, hugely underrated game) and ADOM. It's just a soft spot of mine. Probably not much to discuss from a mechanics point of view, but I just can't enjoy a game that takes place entirely in a dungeon that much. I need to feel the ascii suns rays on my face.

Whatever you do, please don't start talking about violence, sexual harassment, and rape like you guys did in episode 57. That was horrible to listen to, it felt like an after school special. I had to stop listening it was so uncomfortable. You might as well have started the whole thing off with "tonight, on a very special episode of roguelike radio". I really, really, really think the show should stay well away from srs real world topics.

(apologies if that criticism seemed over harsh, but i hope you'll take it as intended - something constructive from a person who very much enjoys listening to the show).