Messages

16

Other Announcements / Re: Roguelike Radio podcast

« on: January 17, 2013, 03:41:07 AM »

Hello Darren, first time responder, long time listener

I have no idea if you take "topic requests", but I'd love to hear the topic of overworlds in roguelikes discussed.  I think they add a lot to a game but I've only played a couple where any effort has been made to making them enjoyable.

17

Programming / Re: Which name is best?

« on: January 17, 2013, 03:26:53 AM »

Thanks for the feedback all.

I might go for "A Thrall Escaped". For those wondering where it's from, it's a phrase that stuck with me ever since I read at as a boy in the Silmarillion.

‘Who are you?’ said Túrin.

‘A wandering Elf, a thrall escaped, whom Beleg met and comforted,’ said Gwindor. ‘Yet once I was Gwindor son of Guilin, a lord of Nargothrond, until I went to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and was enslaved in Angband.’

Funnily enough it references Angband

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Other Announcements / Re: Which text roguelike has the best, most approachable UI?

« on: January 17, 2013, 03:10:51 AM »

Thanks for the suggestions. I've noticed some common themes

1. the less keybindings to remember, the better
2. Some people really, really like using the mouse.
3. An easily accessible help menu is a must.

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Other Announcements / Which text roguelike has the best, most approachable UI?

« on: January 14, 2013, 11:00:05 PM »

So I am looking for some *cough* inspiration. UI is likely hugely important in getting non roguelikers to play a game. However all the discussions I see about making UI nice and accessible presume some sort of more sophisticated graphical environment..

I am interested in what can be done on a console game, or pseudo console.

So please, suggest any ascii/unicode games that have a great UI. The game itself doesn't even have to be fun, just something that's easy to get started at.

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Programming / Which name is best?

« on: January 13, 2013, 02:33:33 AM »

I was browsing roguebasin, looking at recently released roguelikes the other day, and noticed not many names caught my attention at all. In fact I can only remember one name "Bronze and Faith" (I bookmarked for that reason alone).

Now I like to think myself as good at naming, but my taste in name is not everyones taste. So here's a list, please pick the best one. And feel free to hurl any naming criticisms my way, I'm not sensitive.

21

Programming / Re: When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 10, 2013, 04:42:05 AM »

My main motivation is I find programming java tedious. Not as tedious as most other C-likes but still painful a lot of the time. However, it's fast, portable, has excellent tooling, and great profilers.

I guess tbh compilation speed is not a huge issue with java, it's pretty good at compiling only part of a project.

Anyway, I tore my hair out trying to embed jruby. The documentation is really shoddy. I'll leave it for now until it comes time for quests and complex AI. Just java and yaml.

You may be interested in Lua Programming Language with LÖVE engine, allowing you to create any kind of 2D or 2.5D game and freely redistribute it, with great API documentation and very active and helpful community.

While I do like the lua language, I don't want to abandon the jvm, or the great IDE support for java. Netbeans is a boon for someone like me who constantly changes variable names lol

22

Programming / Re: When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 09, 2013, 12:43:42 AM »

Anyway, people love bullet points, and I'd really appreciate if you could tell me, for each item, what should be scripted, what should be in java, and what should be in data files?

- menus (start, inventory, etc)?
- procedural level generators?
- quests?
- npc dialogue?
- AI?

Do you have a specific motivation for having scripted content or are you just trying it out for sake of trying it out (which is as good reason as anything else really)? Because you could just take the easiest one from the list, or the item that you need first and try with that. Instant gratification and learning experience. After the first try, think again to which direction to continue. (yes, I don't like to make big and detailed plans up front).

My main motivation is I find programming java tedious. Not as tedious as most other C-likes but still painful a lot of the time. However, it's fast, portable, has excellent tooling, and great profilers.

I guess tbh compilation speed is not a huge issue with java, it's pretty good at compiling only part of a project.

Anyway, I tore my hair out trying to embed jruby. The documentation is really shoddy. I'll leave it for now until it comes time for quests and complex AI. Just java and yaml.

23

Programming / Re: When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 08, 2013, 12:29:12 PM »

Since your game is being done in Java or Ruby, both are interpreted languages. So I understand them as a bunch of script files. So your game is already a scripted engine without you to have to implement it and without the game player have to recompile everything.

And thus, why mess creating a custom scripting engine if your game is already implemented as an easy-to-modify game?
Why create a custom scripting engine if I can go to source code and modify whatever I need without having to recompile?

Because you can't with java. java is compiled to byte code which is run on the jvm.

24

Programming / Re: When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 08, 2013, 09:52:03 AM »

Of course, you can always translate a script into the compiled language if need be

You can, but it's sometimes very painful.

Consider the following task "Load a csv file as a matrix and for every value, print it and its position"

in ruby

Code: [Select]

   
mat = Matrix[*File.open(filename).map do |l| CSV.parse_line(l) end]
mat.each_with_index{|element, y, x| puts "#{element} at #{x}, #{y}"}

in java (with a third party lib)

Code: [Select]

InputStream input = LevelReader.class.getResourceAsStream(fileName);
CSVReader reader = new CSVReader(new InputStreamReader(input));
List<String[]> mat = reader.readAll();

for (int x = 0; x < mat.get(0).length; x++) {       
    for (int y = 0; y < mat.size(); y++) {
        String  s = mat.get(y)[x];               
        System.out.println(s + " at " + x + ", " + y);
    }
}


25

Programming / When to use scripting languages?

« on: January 08, 2013, 12:16:18 AM »

I'm in the early stages of a roguelike on the jvm, and progress has stalled a bit. At first I was writing a little "engine" in java, then calling it from jruby, but a number of issues cropped up (weirdly bad performance that I couldn't really profile from jruby).

so am now doing a re-write of the jruby stuff in java - I just added a "gamespecific" package to my engine and off I went. Stuff like colors, tile definitions, hardcoded overworld, items etc are already in data files. I feel like I might embed a scripting language at some stage - it's trivial to do in java - but I don't know what stage.

Anyway, people love bullet points, and I'd really appreciate if you could tell me, for each item, what should be scripted, what should be in java, and what should be in data files?

- menus (start, inventory, etc)?
- procedural level generators?
- quests?
- npc dialogue?
- AI?

26

Programming / Re: Why Auto-Explore is Missing the Point

« on: January 02, 2013, 02:12:31 PM »

I think many of you are missing the point of auto-explore. While exploring a dungeon might not be that interesting and can be done semi-automatically, the layout of a dungeon becomes *very* interesting when you have to flee from a monster or multiple monsters.

Cramped roguelikes with population density problems ruins this tactical aspect entirely.

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Other Announcements / Re: Women & Roguelikes

« on: December 27, 2012, 04:04:43 AM »

Yeah I dunno what specifically could be done except "not treating women different". Which I don't. I would imagine that there are a fair few women who don't make it public. And I can't blame them.

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Other Announcements / Re: Women & Roguelikes

« on: December 27, 2012, 01:05:52 AM »

I can tell you're one of the people I talk about.

No you can't. You don't know me.

Just a hunch.

More on topic, I dislike it when there's a huge gender disparity in things. A bit of balance is always good.

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Other Announcements / Re: Women & Roguelikes

« on: December 23, 2012, 11:07:15 PM »

There reason there are no women in computer science is because of the men of computer science. In no other classes did I encounter such overwhelming social ineptitude as in my compsci classes. No sane woman - hell no sane man - would want to spend time among them.

There are exceptions, generalisations, blah blah

Though anecdotal, I have to agree. The breaking point for me came during an engineering class where the teacher had us break up into groups but my classmates could not communicate effectively enough to split into groups. It was truly amazing. There were a couple of ladies in the class, but they all had the same socially inept brains.

I knew I'd rather kill myself than work with these people for the rest of my days. When people are that bad at communicating I actually get very anxious and become a bit of a boob myself. It's torture for me. Maybe you'd have to meet me to understand, I'm incredibly social. That annoying butterfly guy that wants to be everyone's friend.

So I dropped out of engineering and reset my minor as my major. My professors in History had been asking me for over a year to come over and run their archeology club programs as well as join the graduate level classes. So I did. This led to a doctorate later. Good move for me.

Different brains are good at different things. Hormones in the womb control a large amount of brain structure. With social norms playing such a huge role, it's hard to tell how much chemistry controls aptitude.

EDIT: It should be noted that though I did have some engineering aptitude, I did not have much. Does aptitude for this cancel out the social aptitude? That's a great question, I don't think there's an answer. Individually obviously it's not true (no generalization is true individually) but at the society level it might be interesting to study.

Congratulations on realising what I did, and doing what I *should* have done.

Oh well

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Other Announcements / Re: Women & Roguelikes

« on: December 23, 2012, 11:01:54 PM »

In no other classes did I encounter such overwhelming social ineptitude as in my compsci classes.

There are some things that require less social abilities. But why anyone would have to care about that? (women do I guess..)

I can tell you're one of the people I talk about.