At the moment I'm not programming any RL because of lack of time, but I think I will go on with a 1 or 2 years old project.
What I've found annoying in the RL I've played, is the interface: I know most of the RL player love to see ASCII game and read 4 or 5 times the manual to understand the most common commands and associated keys, but I'd like a RL with nice tiles and an intuitive – all actions possible with max a few mouse clicks, shortcuts, a bar for the most used spells or objects... – interface.
I've started to build such an interface, I had time to implement the following features:
- a dungeon generator (room, corridors, doors), Nethack inspired,
- LOS and light,
- a dynamic minimap,
- a console and message manager, IVAN inspired,
- player movement (adjacent tile, or A*),
- basic monsters (walking randomly, no stats so can't die),
- graphical inventory displaying the equipment and the backpack. It is possible to equip armor parts or weapon with a click'n'slide (during the slide, authorized equipment zone become green to see what can be equipped where),
- a "goal" movement system: sliding an item somewhere on the map will cause the player moving to the target and dropping the item, attacking a remote monster with a melee weapon will cause the player follow the monster and attack it when in an adjacent tile (and the path will be re-calculated as the monster move),
- a sort of status bar, displaying what is under the mouse cursor, and what are the associated actions (eventually something like "left click to open the door, [ctrl] + left click to kick the door"),
- displaying the stats or the inventory just make the main screen smaller, so it's possible to play with the inventory screen open,
- XML-files for items and monsters (no need to compile the project again to add an item).
I hope I will have time someday to continue this project, and I will post it if I can find it again (I've changed my computer, and I can't find the CD with all my dev work
).
