ARRP 2010: Traction Edge v0.1

[mongrol]

Hi folks,
This my first proper release of Traction Edge (ignoring my walking @
last year called EnemyX). It's a JaggedAlliance/XCom type game with RL
qualities and envisioned to be Steampunk. We have Victorian policemen
vs Clockwork Machinations. This is the only C++ program I've ever
written and has taken 18 months and some quality refactoring hell to
get to this point. The ARRP certainly gave me a boost over the last 2
weeks and I now have a fairly stable base for getting "more game" and
"less engine".

http://code.google.com/p/tractionedge/

What you get;

Source(linux) and OSX build.
Turn based gameplay with Action Points per turn (alah Time Units)
2-4 member squad teams
Destructable terrain
Victorian Steampunk setting
3 static maps with the first chapters of a planned story arc
Basic shoot and run AI (if you come back and say it beat you I will
laugh)
Practically no game balancing whatsoever
SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.

What you might get;

16-20 static levels with full story arc
Procedural maps and random encounters
Procedural tech tree
Better AI
Z-levels (dungeon diving)
Windows port
Replace MRPAS with something strict.

Known Bugs

Sometimes a shot will go wild and causing a segfault and instant
warming of refrigerated beer in a 100metre radius.
Asymmetric FOV.

[getter77]

Congrats on making it and I hope the dizzying high from ARRP 2010 lasts at least another 2 weeks or so after the fact!   

[Skeletor]

This looks cool, I loved the X-com serie and I'm sure a roguelike adaptation or something would be very very nice, with destroyable territory, inventory, stats, etc like in the original games.

Too bad I can't try your game it with WinXp.

[Ari Rahikkala]

SFML is a problematic choice for a turn-based game  . Not having expose events manifests as the graphics behaving as if the game was constantly in a crashed state, at least on X11. It made the game somewhat difficult for me to play because if I switched to another window, the game window would have that window's contents in it when I came back, and would only redraw once I pressed a key that the game actually handled.

You might end up having to either redraw the screen constantly as if this were a real-time game, or bundling a hacked SFML as the guy in the linked thread presumably did. (or, best of all, convince the author to add expose events, because they are essential for nicely behaving apps in windowed environments anyway)

[mongrol]

Hmm, thanks for the heads up. I had noticed it didn't play nice with switching but I've ignored it so far. So many things to do. TE is stuck on SFML1.6 until someone decides to assist Laurent with the SFML 2.0 port to OSX. 1.6 is frozen so any successful pleading will result in changes to 2.0 which is no use to me. I guess what will happen is I'll end up moving the whole thing to SDL instead and perhaps I'll do a constant draw until then.

[JLC]

If someone wants to play this with the git (development) version of SFML, I am attaching the patch to make traction edge work with it.

Mongrol, you may want to look at two of the changes (that do not seem SFML related):

AnimManager.h:
-#include <vector>
+#include <deque>

Utility.h
+#include <queue>

BTW, in case there are Arch Linux users in here, I created an AUR package
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=50575


Thanks for the game and keep the good work!