The Veins of the Earth development feedback BETA 13

[Zireael]

I ported the dialogue system from the T-Engine version so you can now chat to non-hostile NPCs.

***
I got a ton of stuff done in the last couple of days even though I am a slow coder and an even slower spriter.

The character dialogue now handles the situation where you don't speak the NPC's language better. Your answers don't get scrambled in any case. You just don't get any of the normal answers, just a [Leave] option which closes the dialog screen. If you do speak the language, the answers now feature a small note telling you which skill they test for (i.e. [Bluff], [Diplomacy]).


Beginnings of a character creation screen

I was inspired by ToEE's character creation I saw in a gameplay vid on YT. I think this is the only cRPG game with randomly rolled stats where you first roll and then assign every one of the results to one of the stats. All the other games I can recall (BG1-2, IWDII, PS:T, NWN1-2, Angband, Incursion) didn't allow you to reassign the rolls. If you got a high roll but it got assigned to a less-than-useful stat, time to reroll. Oh, the number of times I rolled to get a 18/100 STR in BG1...

The HUD now features a body picture - I used a screenshot of Deus Ex 1 as a reference. The picture is grayscale and colored by LOVE's color functions, so I'll be able to recolor it on the fly once I hook up some more code to it. The new ruleset features HP per body part (head, torso, 2 arms, 2 legs) so the color of your torso in the pic will tell you how damaged your torso is.

[Aukustus]

You should definitely try The The Temple of Elemental Evil too. It's fairly interesting as it's really turn-based (combatants are queued) compared to BG's and such.

[Zireael]

You should definitely try The The Temple of Elemental Evil too. It's fairly interesting as it's really turn-based (combatants are queued) compared to BG's and such.

I wanted to, but it's very hard to get hold of here and now (I somehow missed it when it was released ), plus it's buggy. The only way to fix some of the bugs is to hunt down a mod... which changes some of the gameplay in a way many people don't like.
So I just stick to watching YT gameplay videos

[Aukustus]

You should definitely try The The Temple of Elemental Evil too. It's fairly interesting as it's really turn-based (combatants are queued) compared to BG's and such.

I wanted to, but it's very hard to get hold of here and now (I somehow missed it when it was released ), plus it's buggy. The only way to fix some of the bugs is to hunt down a mod... which changes some of the gameplay in a way many people don't like.
So I just stick to watching YT gameplay videos

You can get it from GOG for 5 euros and there's circle of 8 mod that's the only thing necessary. You can toggle stuff you don't want off.

[getter77]

There is also this which undertakes some fundamental overhauls from the lowest possible levels previously impossible and aims to carry the game forward in a big way:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/temple1/

Somehow missed about the big change to step back from d20 and into dVarious---makes sense with how you are going about it/ease of momentum though and easily a prime choice given how little is out there.   

[Zireael]

Since I last posted, I have nearly finished the game's UI. The lower bar (menu bar/hotbar) currently allows you to make a ranged attack, with the usual caveats (need a bow and arrows). I renamed hp/wounds to Endurance and Health, to be clearer for players. There is now a working viewport, which means our dungeons can be bigger than one screen, and the map GUI elements draw properly on it without weird offsets.

Monster turns are more performant and synced with the debug text in upper right, and there is a player-oriented turn order display in upper left of the map.

***

The big news is: I heard back from Shockbolt regarding his 64x64 Angband tileset. His reply was positive, so I sat down and implemented something that's been tickling the back of my brain ever since I saw the capabilities of LOVE2D.

http://i.imgur.com/I0kvAWy.gifv
Zooming in (64x64) or out (32x32) at will - an animated GIF

You press Shift + to zoom in and Shift - to zoom out. For those who don't know, + and - are the keys right next to numbers, above the letter keys. The map UI scales to fit (the grid, the border around moused-over tile, the ellipses indicating the actor's attitude, the damage splashes).

You can see the tiles for the actors change, but not for items, which are offset a bit compared to 32x32, and terrain is simply scaled up for now (however I plan to find some good-looking walls in the bigger size). So it's not simply "scale up stuff" or "change the whole tileset" (as in T-Engine).

I am thinking on what to name the two modes - "zoomed in" and "zoomed out" sounds silly. I plan to implement some indicators that would be visible only in the "zoomed in" mode (because of the larger amount of space per tile, simply), such as a number telling you how many items are there in a tile or a small icon indicator (8x8?) for monsters which have special abilities/templates/whatever of some kind. (Said special abilities/templates aren't implemented yet)

Link to a post to which a .love file is attached for those who want to goof around: https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=204900#p204900. You'll need LOVE2D installed to run it. Sorry, I can make a standalone build only for Windows, and as usual, I plan for the game to be available for all platforms. Besides it's WIP, so going to the trouble of making a standalone right now is... well.

[getter77]

There's always good old Tactical Zoom or Focus for a name.

[getter77]

Even if you shift away from OGL as it does, the sheer amazement and shock value of this latest OGL happening out of nowhere is sure to amuse~   

http://store.steampowered.com/app/576770/

[Zireael]

Thanks getter! It looks amazing but all the screens/vids on the page are in Chinese and I can barely read around 50 characters

Haven't been here in ages since there isn't much to report, I was experimenting with Unreal Engine 4 and c++. To be frank, I am still much better in Lua and I have taken a look at Veins code yesterday as I was making a little one-day experiment in Lua again. The experiment succeeded

As for Veins, I seriously need to sit down and work out a good level generator since the libraries I included are giving me the 'narrow 1 tile wide corridor' kind of a dungeon, often ending in a dead-end. Also there is a bug that I need to figure out, the map doesn't redraw properly when changing dungeon level, so the first turn on a new level is made completely blindly.

But well, if I could make a road generator, first in blueprints then in c++ in ue4, I should be able to generate a good dungeon, eh? Tile-based stuff is SO much easier than vectors.....

[Zireael]

Good news, I fixed the 'blind on turn 1 of new level' bug. Turns out the FOV wasn't getting regenerated properly...

[Samildanach]

Is Veins of the Earth still alive? I've been playing it the last couple of days and it has a lot going for it, but it crashes constantly. I mean sometimes every keypress causes a flurry of errors. If it was more stable I could see myself sinking a lot of time into it. 

[Zireael]

Is Veins of the Earth still alive? I've been playing it the last couple of days and it has a lot going for it, but it crashes constantly. I mean sometimes every keypress causes a flurry of errors. If it was more stable I could see myself sinking a lot of time into it. 

T-Engine has been updated a couple of times since I last worked on the ToME version of Veins (in August 2016). This is a likely cause of the errors.

Since then, I've set to making Veins from scratch without the reliance on T-Engine.

Currently I'm going with Python + libtcod + bearlibterminal. I'm sorry but the T-Engine version won't be continued (but the code is still available for anyone who wishes to do so)

PS. Your post made my day - it's awesome to see that people still play my little hobby game.

PPS. The Python version is fairly barebones now and I have a day job so I have less time to devote to it.

[Samildanach]

Is Veins of the Earth still alive? I've been playing it the last couple of days and it has a lot going for it, but it crashes constantly. I mean sometimes every keypress causes a flurry of errors. If it was more stable I could see myself sinking a lot of time into it. 

T-Engine has been updated a couple of times since I last worked on the ToME version of Veins (in August 2016). This is a likely cause of the errors.

Since then, I've set to making Veins from scratch without the reliance on T-Engine.

Currently I'm going with Python + libtcod + bearlibterminal. I'm sorry but the T-Engine version won't be continued (but the code is still available for anyone who wishes to do so)

PS. Your post made my day - it's awesome to see that people still play my little hobby game.

PPS. The Python version is fairly barebones now and I have a day job so I have less time to devote to it.

Thanks for the reply. I can completely understand not continuing work on the T-Engine version if you're rebuilding the whole thing in Python. I'll look forward to playing the Python version when it gets to that point.