Messages

1

Programming / Re: Ideas About a Naturalist RL

« on: February 14, 2012, 03:14:36 AM »

I suppose that one could have a dungeon ecosystem macromanaged. Just decide starting populations for each monster species, and come up with some code for adjusting them over time. Of course, the player would need to be able to make their own adjustments to those populations someway (most likely by killing, but leaving food lying around might work too). You could then use those population numbers to decide the spawn rates of the various monsters.

The idea that I mentioned of being able to choose a specific monster and give it a name and/or change the char representing it could have some use in a more traditional roguelike. The player could just be going through the dungeon, when all of a sudden, an elf (represented by e) steals their hat and runs off. However, before then, the player is able to memorize it's features with some special command. The elf ceases to be just an elf. It becomes a unique creature and the player assigns it the name, "Blasted elf that took my hat!" The player even changes the character representing it to "ê". This unique creature will have a chance of spawning in the place of a regular elf and will keep the stats and inventory it had from previous times it has appeared, so that one turn, the player may finally defeat it and reclaim that hat!

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Programming / Re: Ideas About a Naturalist RL

« on: February 13, 2012, 03:25:31 AM »

Darn it, the moment I type something quote worthy, it turns out I used a "the" when I meant to use a "that".

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Programming / Re: Ideas About a Naturalist RL

« on: February 12, 2012, 11:52:49 PM »

I don't really care about being credited. I just had the idea on my mind, taking focus away from what I should really be doing. I figured that talking about it would help get it out of my head for awhile. I've had this mental image of Steve Irwin going through a RogueLike dungeon with a camera crew and poking dragons, slimes, orcs, and zombies with sticks for awhile now.

Might make for an interesting class choice. Just give some stealth and dodging abilities along with being able to receive more information about monsters and maybe identify different consumable plants while limiting combat ability. Maybe give the class some ability to examine monsters to get bonuses against all monsters of that type. Maybe have some limited ability to control monsters by increasing the odds of certain attacks being used instead of others. Maybe some ability to receive information about the current dungeon level from examining a monster.

Anyway... Sure, everyone has their own ideas, but they also tend to be biased about them. People tend to see their ideas as a part of themselves. A person that thinks of themself as great will tend to think of even their worst ideas as great. A person that thinks of themselves as terrible will tend to think that even their best ideas are terrible. It is easier to judge something that isn't yours.

If someone thinks that an idea I describe is good, I'd rather them choose not to credit me than them worry about potential harassment. If I'm going to be mentioned in the credits for a game, it's going to be because I wrote at least 10% of the code for that game, and not one line less.

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Programming / Ideas About a Naturalist RL

« on: February 12, 2012, 10:13:56 AM »

I've been thinking of things that I probably won't be able to do until I get a lot more experience (still slowly working my way through a tutorial). Right now, one of those things is the idea of a roguelike that puts the player into the role of a naturalist (those people that study nature). Just give the player a randomized world of random monsters and give them the goal of studying them, learning what they eat, observing their behavior while mating, and things like that. It seems like something that might be an interesting deviation from the usual RL.

It would need a larger focus on the AI though. In fact, the entire idea pretty much revolves around a complex AI. You wouldn't be able to just have everything that can move trying to kill the player. You would need to give them other things that they'll try to do. You'd need to have them look for food, find mates, and defend territory. Give them a hunger stat and have them look for something to eat when it reaches a certain amount. Give them an age stat and have them look for a mate when it reaches a certain amount and they aren't looking for food. Give ones that have a reason to have territory some ability to choose a room to defend when they aren't trying to find food or a mate. Have some monsters form groups while others don't. Have monsters pick and choose what to eat. Do everything you can to make them act like the complex creatures they are, whether they're rats, orcs, dragons, or moving plants.

Randomizing the monsters would also be a must for an idea like this, and I don't mean just choosing them from a list. I mean making it so that the dragons that you encounter in one playthrough will be entirely different from the dragons you encounter in another playthrough. Make it so that each type of creature that could show up would have a couple of things for it chosen at random, whether it be raw stats, special abilities, or some changes to the AI. http://roguetemple.com/forums/index.php?topic=1769.0 has some examples of the kind of stuff I'm trying to describe here.

Another important thing for this kind of RL would be to make it so that after the random choices, a stable ecosystem would come about. Have a way to make sure that every creature would have something that it can eat. Maybe you have a way for the diets of the creatures to be adjusted according to what can kill what. Maybe you have the creatures divided up into trophic levels and have a number of creatures from each level chosen at random. Maybe you just have one to three top predators chosen, and then have the random number god decide the rest of the monsters from the lists of what previously chosen monsters eat. And you would need a replenishing source of food for whatever monsters are at the bottom of the food chain, or take away their hunger stat with the explanation that they use photosynthesis or that they eat stuff that the player character ignores.

Those above three paragraphs contain the most important things for this idea, but a few other things should be mentioned as well. A naturalist RL would probably need stealth available in it unless the player is expected to use the Steve Irwin approach to naturalism. The look command might also be used for studying monsters, and may even have the descriptions given expanded on as the player advances, providing information about the monster's stats, abilities, and AI. The ability to choose a specific monster and give it a name and/or change the character that represents it so that you can identify it more easily would be a nice idea.

It is all just an an unrealistic goal that's been distracting me for awhile now, and maybe sharing it will get it off my mind, or better yet, convince someone more competent to try using it for their own RL.

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Programming / Re: Spell casting types of costs

« on: December 24, 2011, 12:30:34 AM »

May I suggest having whatever resource used for spell casting being split into more than one resource? It could be as simple as having multiple types of MP that were used for different spells. Maybe spell 1 uses type A MP and type B MP, while spell 2 uses type C and D, spell 3 uses type B and C, and spell 4 uses type A and E. With such a set up, you could cast spell 1 without it affecting how often you can cast spell 2, but casting spell 3 would lower the number of times you can cast spells 1 and 2, while casting spell 4 lowers the number of times you can cast spell 1 without affecting how many times you can cast spell 2 or spell 3. Basically, the kind of thing you see in a multicolored Magic the Gathering deck.

One game that I remember from my childhood that I think made this interesting was Secret of Evermore, which relied on an ingredient-based system for its spell costs. I'm sure that there has probably been a roguelike or two that did something similar. It DOES allow a possibility of setting up a system for assigning random spells to the various pairs of ingredients, which allows the player to try combining random ingredients to see what happens. This brings up another potential type of spell casting cost, risk.

Having risk as a cost means having the spell have a chance of not working how the player expects it to. Maybe it fizzles out and wastes a turn, maybe some of the parameters change unexpectedly so that you get caught in the blast radius, Maybe the target is changed, or maybe the spell just flat out blows up in your face.

If you want to go with a Lovecraftian horror theme, there's always the possibility of having magic cost you sanity. Just have the player experience various effects like seeing stuff that isn't there or having the names of their items change (maybe change "green potion" to "green poison") or having one monster appear to be another if they've been using magic a bit too much. While you're at it, change the descriptions to be more terrifying. And if you really want to scare the player, have the game not react to any key presses for a few seconds.

Rather similar to the sanity cost, but you could also try having a spell leave its caster with a status effect of some sort.

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Programming / Re: Another "help the newbie get started" topic

« on: December 23, 2011, 06:00:39 AM »

I found a tutorial for making a roguelike in C++, and I've just completed the moving @ part, and I even got it to stop at the edges. I am so excited! I may even be able to make a turn-based version of Pacman before the year ends. And then I could start to slowly make it into some kind of Pacman roguelike by adding in randomized mazes, an inventory to allow you to save power pellets for later use, alternatives to the power pellet (they may even start out unidentified), and a leveling system that allows Pacman to become faster if the score gets high enough. But before I do all of that, I'm going to have to create a copy of the classic Pacman maze and get the @ to move around in it without going through the walls.

I will make sure to read up on memory leaks when I understand enough about C++ to understand the results that I get when I Google "c++" and "memory leak". Any other advice on what to look out for would be nice. For now though, I'm going to act as though any use of a goto command will result in a velociraptor attack.

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Programming / Re: Another "help the newbie get started" topic

« on: December 22, 2011, 03:44:01 AM »

I am interested in learning to do this stuff in C++ because it seems to have a good reputation, and I noticed that it was mentioned in http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/Roguelike_Dev_FAQ#Which_programming_language_are_roguelikes_generally_made_in.3F. If you guys think that C++ would be too hardcore for someone who only has experience with visual basic.net, and whatever language a TI-83 graphing calculator uses, then I guess I could try learning something else first like FreeBasic.

As for roguelikes being harder to program than I think, I thought a realistic goal would be something without a magic system, without any stats other than HP, without equipment, with attacks that do only 1 HP of damage, with floors that have only one randomly generated room, without an inventory, without a save/load function, and with the intention to never show it to anyone other than close family and friends, and hope to manage it within a month. Sure, it would be much less than a roguelike, but it seemed like something that I could make and gradually modify into something that could be called a roguelike. If I am underestimating how hard it is to make a roguelike, then I am rather curious as to just how much lower I should set my sights.

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Programming / Another "help the newbie get started" topic

« on: December 21, 2011, 11:37:50 PM »

I'm interested in learning C++ and programming games, and I think that roguelike seems like a fun genre to program for. However, I have had some difficulty in finding a good tutorial for the C++ programming language.

My accomplishments in programming so far include making a rock paper scissors game for a graphing calculator that would change the odds of each choice depending on the results of previous games (so it would catch on if you just used the same thing repeatedly), a minesweeper clone done in visual basic, and a turn-based strategy game (also in visual basic) that I had stopped working on when the teacher for the business computer programming class I was in noticed that I was behind on the work he was giving out due to me goofing off so much by working on that game. I have had plenty of time to forget much of that.

My first attempt at finding a good C++ tutorial online had brought me to http://www.cprogramming.com/, which seems to have quizzes testing knowledge that their lessons don't contain, with question 6 on their first lesson's quiz being a good example of this problem. I got a bit fed up with the tutorial and its lesson quizzes expecting me to know stuff that it hasn't told me, and went back to Google to look for another tutorial.
My second attempt brought me to http://www.cppgameprogramming.com/, which is when I learned that their code didn't work with the compiler that I had (CodeBlocks). They pointed me towards a website to get a copy of the compiler that they used. I decided to try to download their most recent version that wasn't a beta, only to encounter a 404 error... so not much luck there either.
My third attempt was searching the forum topics here for "c++ tutorial", only to find out that the search function doesn't seem to recognize "c++" as anything more than the letter c and that it doesn't matter if that c is by itself or part of a word.

And so now, I'm on my fourth attempt, asking people on a forum. I'm looking for a tutorial that I won't have to pay for and was made by someone who actually kept track of what information it gave out (this is where my first attempt failed) and will either work with CodeBlocks or link me to a compiler that isn't in beta and is able to be downloaded. If any of you can point me towards a tutorial like that, I will be thankful and get back to learning programming. If you know of a tutorial that has a focus on games, that would be even better.

So can any of you guys help me?