Messages

16

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: PRIME - Few questions, help needed.

« on: December 07, 2015, 02:21:07 AM »

That list above is incomplete, there is nineteen more implants. Once I finish the RogueBasin page on it I will link it. Otherwise it feels like a wasted effort. Ungooma is a parasite, a borderline useless implant.

'You're not wielding a ranged weapon' appears when you try to fire something that has no fire action defined. Is this the message you mean? I could not find anything in source code that would resemble what you quoted.

17

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: PRIME - Few questions, help needed.

« on: December 05, 2015, 11:29:55 PM »

Let's see. For mutations, in the use mutant power hit TAB and mutant power letter in order. This will give precise information along with formulas for damage, duration and range. Some even have tables.

For skills in skill screen press TAB and skill letter. You should receive brief skill description.

For attributes - the only in-game help you get is when you get to chose attribute increase. Hit TAB in that menu.

Damage: you cannot increase it except for getting bigger/better gun, more strength for melee and wearing targeter goggles. Weapon skill value counts only for hit chance.

Vats: modeled on NetHack sinks. Drink until dry if you can handle occasional nasty surprise, unless you got message about toxicity. That means you got radiated, and drinking more is gambling with radiation sickness as jackpot. You can try pouring canisters into it to modify its healthiness. Code is contain - it is currently ed in vat.cpp; routine quaff from vat is nicely commented.

For implants there is no good spoiler at the moment. In fact, there should be two kinds of descriptions - technical and game lore. The first is not very developed at the moment.

Let's start with attribute implants:
adrenaline generator - STR
myfilament hypertensor - CON
motoric coordinator - DEX
reflex coordinator - AGI
cerebral coprocessor - INT

There is no implant for modifying PSI attribute.
More later. I need to start extending roguebasin or find hosting that will let me put a wiki there.

18

Design / Re: Considering when to generate random map details, all at once or as needed?

« on: December 03, 2015, 08:14:26 AM »

Easy. Keep two RNG states: one for gameplay plus another for creating levels. SporkHack went as far as introduce RNG state for each monster to ensure it will not behave differently depending on whether you zigged or zagged when entering the room.

PRIME creates all levels up front. It has few of them. so this is quick. Furthermore, in generation I place constraints and features depending on vertical relation of levels near them. This is important for digging down.

19

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: PRIME - Few questions, help needed.

« on: December 03, 2015, 07:53:25 AM »

As an author and programmer of PRIME, I probably know enough on gameplay. I won many times, although never with the Xel'Naga. The unofficial wiki died half a year ago leaving only RogueBasin present. There you have a few spoilers.
http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=PRIME#Spoilers

20

Player's Plaza / Re: Stealth roguelikes?

« on: November 29, 2015, 08:59:58 PM »

Gruesome is another one worth recommending.

21

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Last console version of Angband?

« on: November 29, 2015, 01:52:33 PM »

Apologies for the savefile fail. You may create three directories under lib named 'save' 'scores' and 'info' or download the package again.

For SAngband please look here: http://code.google.com/p/skills-angband/

22

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Database & wiki corrections

« on: November 29, 2015, 08:53:32 AM »

I see gray in Opera. Freshly installed Fox displays gray too. Have you tried upgrading browsers?

edit: In the database community statistics for SLASH'EM, and Martin's Dungeon Bash are impossible to obtain. Perhaps the engine cannot deal with apostrophes?
See: http://forums.roguetemple.com/irldb/comment.php?id=SLASH'EM

23

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Last console version of Angband?

« on: November 28, 2015, 11:39:08 AM »

Gumband still survives in its original, console state here:
http://angband.oook.cz/variants.php?variant=gumband

Angband 4.0.3 for console:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7z947nnn0nigma3/angband-4.0.3_console.7z?dl=0

Next on list: Hellband.

Why cthangband 5.0.0 does not work on Win XP? Does the author know?

24

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Roguelike Archive

« on: November 27, 2015, 08:11:49 AM »

Avagart was faster with fetching the stuff and moreover you brought the latest Deep there. Thank you!

So I went rolling with the compiler and linker instead. CnS-002 for Windows: link (without sources)

25

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Rogue - let's beat it

« on: November 27, 2015, 12:49:45 AM »

Agreed that average score over all games kinda sucks enjoyment. I am sure you will find something better.

In my best game I found a two-handed sword on second floor and a scale mail not much later. Got nailed down when I met sleeping Ice Monster in a wide tunnel and typed too fast. It retaliated of course and that was it.

26

Classic Roguelikes / Re: Last console version of Angband?

« on: November 27, 2015, 12:45:27 AM »

I lost them when my old site expired and I migrated to Linux. Fear not, though! My skills have improved since so this time you may actually get fully working arrow keys. This might turn out to be for the better in the end. Starting with Angband 4.0.3.

27

Temple of the Roguelike / Captcha impossible to pass for blind people

« on: November 25, 2015, 01:13:16 AM »

There has been one person who found it impossible to beat captcha without outside help. (link, see the note at the bottom of post)

It seems roguebasin has better solution for preventing spambot access, because while there is dozens of bots registered daily none seem to vandalize pages. On the contrary, for this forum I have reported a few spam posts last week in the off topic area.

28

Programming / Re: Creating an interface for blind players to play rogue like games

« on: November 25, 2015, 01:06:06 AM »

Greetings Vojtěch. Welcome to the Temple of the Roguelike.

First, I view you making the statement blind people find roguelikes hard to play after trying only two yourself (ZAngband is almost identical to old Angband on terms of user interface) as a very unfair generalization. That said, I think only classical games of this genre can be effectively played using screen reader and these are in decline recently.

Here are a few games that do feature useful support for screen readers.

ADOM: Regarded as quite accessible, due to verbose descriptions, excellent look command and many status changes being also reflected in log. There has been interesting discussion on rgrd about that.

DoomRL: Features specific enhancements for the blind. Besides ADOM-style looking it has two commands - examine monsters and examine items, which report information by giving relative locations. I heard there is also a mode which can disable the map and give more info by text, but I do not know how to activate it. Furthermore, DoomRL has meaningful in-game sound which is rare thing for classic roguelike.

Warp Rogue: Now defunct, but features the most enhancements for screen readers. Copx is truly the champion here, see the rgrd post for all the things he did.

I know of only one game that can do kind of state dumps, and it is ADOM again. There is a command to save verbose log file of character. The file contains all kinds of data, but only a screenshot for the map.

I doubt there is anything in existence that exposes the data structures in readable way. There is just no reason for game developers to do so, because it would mean maintaining another data output for zero gain. When anyone thinks of blind players they implement convenience features right into the game. Your best bet to get state information about a game is to modify the source code to add this. But then, if you can program well, you can improve the interface directly which is more effective option. Also, I think reading game's interface is not as bad option as you make it sound. Roguelike library Necklace of the Eye does just that and is very successful at providing alternate presentations for many games.

I am going to post about captcha in website related subforum shortly. Maybe Slash can do something about it.

29

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) / Re: Roguelike Archive

« on: November 24, 2015, 05:37:56 AM »

Artisan - Had one tech-demo'y release and perished. One of those release early, fail early. Had a page but someone removed it instead of replacing with archive. The game shipped as Windows binary with some Python libs. I have the thing available on my HDD.

Berserk! - Website has some kind of a problem. I will be overhauling RogueBasin article. See: http://forum.chaosforge.org/index.php/topic,7334.0.html and when it is fixed http://berserk.chaosforge.org. However, nothing prevents you from pulling the code from repository and compiling it. Use: https://svn.code.sf.net/p/berserkrl/code/ as SVN repository address.

Beyond - As far as I remember this was never released, although it had quite some discussion devoted to it on rgrd. The engine it was running on (H-World) is more of interest, as it featured working demo.

Deep - Fully playable roguelike, alhough bit buggy and ridiculously easy due to broken balance. I once reviewed it but Slash seems to have taken the review down. Got Deep 1.8 on disk, which is not very much different from latest release. Mignt work on 32 bit Windows.

Claw and Sword - Source only distribution. Although makefile is prepared for some kind of Linux it should compile for Windows without problems. Unfortunately this was the case ten years ago. Today you wil have to alter the source to make modern compiler take it up. I have those changes applied if you wish (for GCC 5.2.0).

30

Programming / Re: Beginner Question: How should maps relate to objects?

« on: November 22, 2015, 11:08:53 PM »

If I have understood the code of the tutorial correctly, when going to the next map the new map is written over the old map. What if I want to keep the old maps and their contents?

Copy the global map somewhere, for example into an array. You can then let current map be overwritten with new level.

I think maps should have their own class, but what I'm wondering is how the maps should relate to objects within them. Should maps have a 'list of objects' attribute that keeps track of what objects are inside it? Should the objects have an attribute or a function that identifies the map that they are inside of? Both?

Depends on your needs really. Bear has written a very valuable post on this.

Short version:
(location -> item) mapping is needed for finding an item when you have only map square. For example checking what is on given tile. When that blind gelatinous cube wanders aimlessly and happens to stumble on something soluble you go through map to access items.

(item -> item) is needed for containers. If you do not plan on them there is no need to worry about items "owning" other items.

(item -> location) is needed when your items can act by themselves. For example a dragon egg hatching needs to know where it is on the map to place the hatchling. Otherwise you would be searching whole map for this item or possibly several, since you asked for a way to store more of those.

You can read Bear's archived post on data design requirements here: rgrd newsgroup archive.