Messages

76

Temple of the Roguelike / Have your own game's subforum

« on: March 12, 2013, 09:53:45 AM »

Santiago has generously offered to grant subforums for game developers. I think it is a great idea and would help to promote the Temple and help out roguelike authors who cannot afford web space with necessary infrastructure to support forums.

I have seen Z expressing interest in comments. This makes sense, finally there would be a designated place to discuss weapon setups for Hydra Slayer. Not yet major roguelike section is fine for this but then any such discussion would get lost among all the other posts. With dedicated subforum one may readily stumble on idea to search for such things. Who else would be interested? Speak your mind please!

I am thinking of asking for section for PRIME too. I have not decided yet because it is a fringe game barely noticed by the world and a forum simply appears not to be needed. ZapM had boards though and those were actually useful. Will discuss this with rest of dev team first. :-)

77

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Fame 0.8.4 Released

« on: March 12, 2013, 09:26:05 AM »

The biggest problem with Fame seems to be replayability. And I don't really have a good solution for that.

Flesh out all Fame skills to the point these have impact on gameplay. Also, start your characters who took certain skills with items needed for their trade to ensure the variety can be enjoyed from the start. Alchemist could start with small alchemy set for example. When you get those skills to top shape these will make characters differ enough in playstyle to invite replaying.

This goes for weapons too. Have axes be great against ents, polearms attack a monster and the one behind it (unless non-hostile, for sake of user friendliness), swords cause bleeding, etc. If weapons were to grant something special once 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% skill was reached that would make me consider with what kind of implements to fight most often.

Making monsters more interesting should be fairly easy. I didn't want to introduce any significant changes in behavior since the complete AI rewrite had been planned, but now I'm free to change anything... And I will . Be afraid of beholders from 0.8.5 .

I am glad to hear that! Beholders currently were among biggest letdowns. One just expects them to do something cool or dangerous. Mostly the latter.

Making monsters I'm wondering what to do to make traveling the wilderness more interesting. I guess that adding more encounters is not an option. More predefined or semi-random locations on the way? More terrain types? Some kind of obstacles like water or high mountains? I also have some exotic ideas never seen in any other games, yet it seems risky to devote time to implementing them not knowing if they would actually work.

- Implement roads and have them be adorned with readable milestones like ancient Romans used to place. Maybe have some devastated by goblin vandals.

- Perhaps allow to click on world map to have character automatically walk long distances? Not available in combat and while escorting a NPC. Could still get you into encounters you didn't foresee but at least there is no use in holding down arrow keys.

- Have creatures spawned by random encounters disappear if you return to the location more than X turns later. Fine tune the number so that hero can rest a bit and come back for more fighting.

78

Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Fame 0.8.4 Released

« on: March 10, 2013, 10:41:33 PM »

Fame is now reviewed. Since I promised this in February you may wonder what took me so long. Just have a look, this article is a real tapeworm: review.

79

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: A new face for temple of the roguelike

« on: March 06, 2013, 10:49:42 PM »

Kudos for the great work! In the end I need to trim all the black space from new screenshots but it is all for the better.

80

Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Penis hack

« on: March 05, 2013, 10:40:13 PM »

Was the Wordpress font change on main page a side casualty of all the reinstalls? The size is simply too big. I have a review written waiting to be posted but if the text size is going to change that may alter the layout and spacing too much. Is it going to stay like that?

81

Programming / Re: Replayability

« on: February 25, 2013, 08:53:08 PM »

UglyTroll has a point. The badges and medals of DoomRL shoehorn you into playing challenge games to prove yourself. The most fun is the standard game - where anything might happen and you are not artificially constrained in any way besides what you place yourself. If I have been playing pacifist and suddenly there is opportunity to score a quadruple kill why forbid me to drop the pacifist hat?

Checking for conducts is one thing. Kill list and other such statistics can be fun to track. However, in my opinion offering these as a separate game mode is going too far. The player is much better judge when it comes to predicting what will give him more fun. At the same time players are easily lured into "collect this shiny badge" mode. I dislike it because it artificially extends the game.

82

Programming / Re: Replayability

« on: February 24, 2013, 09:54:59 PM »

I like it if optional challenges can be combined like NetHack's conducts. Also, dropping them at will should be possible. I cringe when my shotgunner finds railgun in DoomRL.

83

Programming / Re: Single item per tile?

« on: February 19, 2013, 05:22:27 PM »

Or just don't let items be put on floor tiles that contain significant terrain features.

But if they're hidden traps... the most roundabout way of detecting booby-traps?

Allow floor cells with hidden traps to have an item, but disallow it on cells with known traps. If a trap with an item on it is discovered, the item moves to the nearest free cell.

Could I trap a square to remove items from it? To me not allowing items to slide over a known trap or not is too much effort because of the special cases. I prefer old good predictable behavior.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Fame 0.8.3 Released

« on: February 19, 2013, 05:14:51 PM »

- Thunderstorm extinguishes your torch even if you hide inside houses.

Yes, I'm aware of that. At the moment I just don't have any solution. Perhaps in future versions there will be a way to mark interiors in the editor and treat them differently in the game. I will need to think seriously about this problem since I plan to add more effects related to the weather.

Would checking the tile under player's feet suffice? If it is house floor the torch does not get snuffed out. While is going to be weird if you stand in the doorway the suggestion seems enough to alleviate ~80% of the problem. Decreasing bug severity is not as good as getting rid of it outright but still very much appreciated.

Found a way to have unlimited healing. :-p First, get a cursed potion of healing. Next put it in your off hand. Voila! You can now drink it without making it disappear. Be warned though: you lose a point of carrying capacity every time you do it. Some kind of shield is much better deal.

Battle hatchet does not show up in my hero's portrait. It looks as if he is wielding nothing but Fame correctly uses axe skill for fighting.

Also, I'd suggest checking monster generation rates in village dungeon. The critters multiplied so fast I kept breaking weapons on their heads faster than stuff was being found. I was not picky, mind you. Any melee weapon was used and yet there was need to resort for hand-to-hand combat some of the time. It is nice that breaking war implements force me to fight with a weapon other than of my preferred type but current situation appears to be over the top.

edit

Yes, send me this file, please. I think you already have my e-mail somewhere in the private messages .

I can't find it. I think that one listed in your profile will have to suffice. :-D

85

Programming / Re: Single item per tile?

« on: February 18, 2013, 10:28:59 PM »

Inventory exploding out of dead monster looks fun but it has the potential to clutter the screen with needless information. During combat this may obscure traps and make tactical decisions harder.

Items spreading to other tiles may become problematic if your game has object-terrain interactions. In DoomRL you need to watch where you kill some formers or else their ammo may end up incinerated in a lava pool. If your monsters may carry a lot of stuff single item per tile is not very feasible. It mostly works when there are few items in whole game.

If you go item stacks implement some kind of logic deciding what item to show on top. The newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack knows stories about players losing the Amulet of Yendor in a stack of goodies and looking for it quite a time. The story short what is most interesting to player should be on top of pile. Also consider issuing a warning when player is going to enter square with a trap obscured by items.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: Fame 0.8.3 Released

« on: February 18, 2013, 10:21:14 PM »

Weekend was brimming with free time so I had a go at Fame. The gameplay resulted in a nice amount of screenshots. You may expect a review of Fame 0.8.3 to hit front gates of our Temple this month. Also you are right. In wilderness encounters monsters actually care to swarm me. Combat became so much better.

Here goes detailed stuff that is not going to be featured in upcoming review:
- Tutorial has a wording problem: "of its not already open". This was in inventory lesson.
- Keyboard commands screen states right side of list is L-Z commands while it is M-Z.
- Use prepared tool command says "you extinguish a torch". It would sound better if it read "you extinguish your torch" because you act on your property, not on some random torch.
- I can't light a torch in my off hand? This may be intentional but I expected it to work.
- "Slayed" creatures in post mortem message seem a bit off. I suggest using "slain" in its stead.
- Sometimes items refuse to stack for unknown reasons. Happened to me with two stacks of bread having three and two units each. Both were identified and had same durability status but refused to merge.
- When you meet travelling family talk does not seem to work. Also, if you revisit that location and cerberi or other such menace spawn the citizens are not attacked. May be intentional but is weird.
- Jail owner says the bandit camp is to the west. He is wrong.
- Typo in the bandit camp jail guard dialog: "wstay here".
- Bandits challenged to a fight by talking with them do not fight back. They just get slaughtered. A pity. :-(
- Water tiles obstruct sight.
- Thunderstorm extinguishes your torch even if you hide inside houses.
- Temple Guard person who gives you trials says after you bring the black stone "I didn't think you'll". Shouldn't it be "I didn't think you'd"?
- Akeram buys all corpses including the inedible cerberi. Isn't he supposed to run a food store? Yes, this is a nitpick.

More serious bugs:
- If you lead Tokfor to temple district game crashes.
- If you lead the orphan from Elunny he sometimes may step off the current map which triggers a crash.
- Fame locks up generating random dungeon level 2. I entered first level, killed everything and went away. Later I returned to visit level 2 but game hangs up. Save file is available if you would like to have it. Just tell me.
- After you kill Egifito you cannot talk to jailer anymore.
Details: NPC not found: Egifito, #1
Source file: Gameplay.cpp
Function: CGameplayInterface::FindNPC
Line: 815
Well, he's dead so no wonder.
- Occasionally a random crash will happen. No error message of any kind, the game just closes with system's default program crash message.
- This happens rarely and out of the blue. I am not aware of anything to do to make it happen and was struck down only two times by this but always in wilderness.

87

Other Announcements / Re: Let's Play... a Bunch of Roguelikes!

« on: February 10, 2013, 10:06:39 PM »

Ah, Rogue! This is still one of the great roguelikes to this day despite it cannot compete with numerous features put forth by modern RL games. Definitely going to watch your LP. Shall comment when I have finished.

88

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

« on: February 10, 2013, 10:04:39 PM »

This is always the problem, the best/quickest developed roguelikes are "bad" code, cobbled together at light speed. My "quick-hack" code is full of singletons, static variables, and if I want to do something I just do it and I dont really care where it goes - that way you can get the job done.e a game.

This is what I do too. I wonder: is this a common trait for people who learn how to program by making games?

The code for @Star Wars is quite messy and poorly documented. I'm wary of going open source for those reasons, but it still works, which, at the end of the day, is all I can really ask for. I contemplated the idea of giving up @Star Wars or restarting from scratch numerous times, but eventually I was able to work out most of the major kinks and got everything in place that I needed to really start working on the game.

Grepping my source directory for "goto" returns 66 matches. That might be a signal my code is sloppy. Never stopped me from publishing the sources.

Yes, I put a lot of hacky and decidedly "evil" solutions into the program. The high rate of bugs in PRIME is partially a reflection of this. The code is full of unneeded globals, too many statics and whatnot. Well, except singletons but that is mostly stems from my commitment to data driven paradigm over OOP.

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Temple of the Roguelike / Re: Welcome to Temple of the Roguelike Forums! (a.k.a. Introduce Yourself Thread)

« on: February 10, 2013, 09:53:52 PM »

Welcome!

I am glad to hear another supporter of portable software wishes to spend some time with us. There are a couple of great roguelikes that are limited to a single platform. Few aspire to the grail of being as portable as POWDER or NetHack but releasing for major platforms is a nice thing.

Once in a while someone who places smilies a lot appears. Not a bad thing; done well it makes the post radiate cheerfulness. May you enjoy your stay in the RogueTemple forums.

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Traditional Roguelikes (Turn Based) / Re: PRIME 2.1d (9th January 2013)

« on: February 09, 2013, 06:41:20 PM »

Name: Pesky Reticulans, Improvements, Moar Everything
Synopsis: Hacklike roguelike game with all kinds of aliens.
Version 2.1d (release #19) published 9th February 2013

I am ashamed of letting such a bug in. Trivial to check for and horrible for players at the same time. This release fixes the problem.

DOWNLOAD: Windows --- Linux 32 bit --- Source code
Website: http://arcywidmo.republika.pl/prime/

Only problem so far, is a seg-fault when exiting the help page. PM me if you want the core dump, I'll throw it on dropbox in that case.

Thank you for the offer. It was easy to reproduce myself. Moreover the core dump was useless - I have smashed whole stack depriving execution trace of all information. Go me. :-/ Fortunately location to check was obvious.

I will ask Zeno about scrolling back. Might be cool. My mouse does not feature a scroll wheel so I usually forget there is such a feature in NotEye.