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Messages - Darren Grey

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1051
Programming / Re: Roguelike Game Engines or Developer Wanted.
« on: March 03, 2009, 01:24:32 AM »
You're probably correct. However, learning to program with an end goal in mind is a bit different than having programming experience and moving on to an extensive project.

By that I mean that learning to program from scratch is one thing. Learning to program from scratch on a multi-thousand line programmed game is something else. At my current "Hello World" level of programming expertise, simply understanding the dungeon creation algorithms and how they are used is asking quite a bit.

It's not so hard.  I picked programming up from scratch last September, and got a basic game out in January, in spite of having very little time to learn or do work on it.  And I started from absolute scratch, inventing my own line-drawing algorithms and so on (because I was too dumb to read other peoples code).  Free Pascal helped a lot - it's very easy to learn if you have no coding history.  If you want to code purely for gaming then you really don't need to know much programming - just some basic display and math libraries and how to handle conditions and loops.  If you want a well-coded game you can learn pointers and OOP, but it's actually not necessary.  Another important thing to remember is to start out small - your ideas are big, and won't get anywhere unless you start out with an extremely stunted version of them.

For help on learning some basics it can do a lot of good to read some article on RogueBasin.  An excellent starting point is this one:
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=How_to_Write_a_Roguelike_in_15_Steps

1052
Programming / Re: Roguelike Game Engines or Developer Wanted.
« on: March 02, 2009, 04:37:07 PM »
There's no roguelike engine that really makes it easy, mostly because for any roguelike the core system still has to be freshly designed.  All roguelikes have different combat systems, magic systems, item types, etc.  The best an engine could hope to do without strangling the potential of any title would be to simply provide easy display abilities and some code for common functions like dungeon generation and FOV.  And that's exactly what libtcod does.  A library of common roguelike functions that makes some of the basics easier to start out (and makes everything look pretty).

As for D&D based roguelikes, check out Rogue itself, or Hack, ADOM, Incursion and several others.  Most roguelikes have heavy D&D influence on some level of detail, especially when it comes to monsters and items.  Only really the *bands are dominated by Tolkien (and even that can be seen as just a flavour thing).

1053
Early Dev / Re: New games?
« on: March 02, 2009, 04:23:39 PM »
Crawl is nowadays very regularly listed alongside the big guys, though most of it's content has been fairly recently developed.  I don't think there's anything blocking new games from getting due discussion, it's just a matter of gaining depth and being around a little while to build up a good player community.

Gearhead, Legerdemain, LamdaRogue and POWDER are all recent and currently active roguelikes that get plenty of merit too.

1054
Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Roguelike World Map: Request Edition
« on: February 25, 2009, 04:37:15 AM »
Slash, you've moved me from the middle of the Saharan desert to the middle of the southern Atlantic ocean!  Seems the E-W position is right, but on the other axis it should be about 53N on the northern hemisphere (full co-ords from Wikipedia: 53°28′0″N 2°14′0″W - pretty sure that's what I entered at the start!)

Y'know, not sure how feaible this would be, but perhaps a nice way of placing oneself on the map would be to have an image you can directly click on - would stop all these Brits swimming off the coast of France for instance  :)  A higher resolution map could also be nice for densely packed areas, but obviously would be harder to navigate overall.

1055
Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Roguelike World Map: Request Edition
« on: February 08, 2009, 12:38:41 PM »
I've somehow placed myself in the middle of the Sahara desert.  Should be in Manchester, England.  Got the co-ords from Wikipedia, but I guess I must have input them wrong somehow!

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