The Veins of the Earth development feedback BETA 13

[Zireael]

Untrusted, thanks for the kind words!

In other news, I finally sat down and made a zone exclusively for testing traps. Turns out there was a TON of stupid goofs there - no wonder since those files date back to the very beginning of Veins development, when I was a complete noob in terms of programming.


The lower level of thieves guild is a maze full of easy traps. This one is under the beer

[Tzan]

You made the beer a trap???
Oh that's so unfair, turning beer against us. 

[Zireael]

You made the beer a trap???
Oh that's so unfair, turning beer against us. 

The beer and the trap just happened to share (a space)

[Zireael]

Another beta is out! Any feedback is welcome!

However, the upload/download size has made me think of some other display library that'd be smaller. I don't want to deal with the hassle of changing the language. I'm torn between BearLibTerminal and libtcod. Which would be easier to set up and get rolling?

[getter77]

Given the latter has been dead for years, I can't imagine going with something else would ultimately be a better idea if a change was absolutely necessary.

[Zireael]

I don't think a change is "absolutely necessary", but I see it as both a chance to decrease upload/download size as well as learn something new.

Since dependencies hell struck again (I say again because I've had it when setting up a Lua linter) with BearLib (I got it to work, but making any sort of releases would be very difficult), I kept looking and found LOVE 2D. It's a 2D Lua engine which is not tailored for any game genre, just takes care of input and output. There's a ton of LOVE-specific libraries for a lot of stuff (A*, FOV, there's even a roguelike-specific one called ROTLove).

I picked it up on Thursday and it's now Sunday.

Day 1 (Thu): lots of grabbing of libraries as well as other love games. Made a start screen in under 30 minutes as well as the game closing on ALT+F4 and reacting to ENTER key by changing the message on screen
Day 2 (Fri): got a basic display working and a barebones 20x20 floor map for testing, as well as player input. The player tile however overwrote the terrain tile. Accidentally find out the engine can recolor anything
Day 3 (Sat): figure out how to draw in layers, so that the player doesn't overwrite terrain. Write a basic "spawn monster at x,y" function. Laugh a bit when the player winds up looking like the orc because of wonky inheritance, and laugh even more as the player can move to the square the orc is in, causing it to disappear forever. Fix said inheritance. Write a function to stop movement if there's an actor in the square. Prototype a player HUD showing the player's hitpoints and wounds as numbers.
Day 4 (Sun): Move the map so that the player HUD is on black background and not the map. Integrate the action schedulerfrom ROTLove as well as a debug display for it. Keep poking at the game until it becomes turn-based instead of realtime (with a hilarious bug in between where you could move multiple times in a round because I forgot to make the movePlayer() function call EndTurn())

Note: The action scheduler is a big thing. It allows me to make the game closer to Incursion - which had something called segments and I think 6 segments equalled a turn? most actions took 10 segments but some took less and some took more - looking at you, taking stuff in/out of backpack, 200 segments! Also it means I don't have to futz around with speed leading to sudden double moves, Angband-style. Win-win! And the debug display (it's my turn now) was very easy, so I'm hoping to expand it soon to something like
> Player
Orc #1
Orc #2

which would let you tell which of the monsters moves first, which second etc. and I would probably highlight the player and the last monster (at which point it wraps back to the player) in a different color as soon as I figure out how to do it.

[getter77]

Learning and the latter-most part on the action scheduler to hew closer to Incursion to solve deep (potential) problems are definitely worthy pursuits to keep in your back pocket---but I wouldn't be especially concerned with upload/download size outside of actual difficulties on your end due to internet connection as the filesize is pretty much right in line with other projects across the modern spectrum given this isn't a terminal project of old.   

LOVE 2D is pretty much the big name for Lua, such as that is given the momentum/spotlight is sporadic at best, so it stands to reason there may at least be some nuggets to glean and beat out of it----heh, want to say it was one of those things way back in the dustier times on the ToME 4 forums that got mentioned to DarkGod as a thing to at least keep tabs on.

[Zireael]

outside of actual difficulties on your end due to internet connection

That's the crux of the problem, I'm afraid. It loves to go down at most inopportune times

Day 5 (Mon): Integrated a nice LOVE-specific pathfinding library called Jumper. Pathing (A*) was fairly easy (apart from the readme on the library being a bit outdated), getting the actors to move along was not. I had to do some passing around of stuff to get it working. Then discovered I forgot to check canMove(), so the orcs were cheerfully lumbering into the player's space Fixed now and I can watch the two orcs follow the player around.

The library also has Dijkstra, so I can't wait to play with it. Given that LOVE allows easily writing stuff to screen, I could have a tiny number in a tile's corner being it's cost

I guess the next hurdle to overcome is having actual GUI (panels, dialogs, whatever). After that, the only thing left is porting actual content

[Zireael]

The LOVE port now has a basic working FOV. I've been eyeing Adam Milazzo's algorithm, to add to the list of things I can do now I'm not limited by what T-Engine offers. I have also picked a GUI library from several that can work with LOVE.

Also the basic inventory code has been ported from T-Engine so the player can pick up items, but the inventory screen hasn't been made yet

Brainstorming various stuff (dungeon map scale, FOV, geometry (Chebyshev vs. Manhattan vs. something else?)... eats up quite a lot of time. I initially estimated two months for porting, but I think it'll take longer as I keep tinkering with the basic assumptions the game has.

Also Paralympics and real life are stealing some of my time. Not complaining - seeing a friend's brother get a team bronze and team silver medal was AWESOME!

[getter77]

Awesome on all fronts---the time to port pales in comparison to the value of the port from the sound of things in the long haul...just attack each task in turn as you can to build that momentum~   

[Zireael]

WIP inventory screen - you can drag items into slots to equip but you can unequip or drop yet

I believe this is a massive improvement over this:

 
See the teeny-tiny tiles on the right hand side? No way to increase their size, as far as I could tell

Also I legitimately went "eep!" when I saw what came out. I guess the first and biggest RPG I ever played is getting imprinted on my subconscious somehow - see this

[getter77]

If not already, you might stand to gain quite a boon from following Zomia as of this latest ARRP season---project is heavily leveraging both Lua and LOVE in all sorts of ways.

[Zireael]

I am following Zomia from the very moment it sprang up in LOVE forums In fact, seeing their implementation helped me bring about the log messages and the dialogs on top of map.

More things that I couldn't do in T-Engine (at least not easily)


By dev demand in /r/roguelikes Discord channel, a visible grid AND toggleable labels (inspired by Cogmind)

Next: I seriously need to work on making the map scrollable (probably some sort of a LOVE camera module - I know at least two).

[getter77]

Nice!

[Zireael]

The port will definitely take longer than I originally thought because I've decided to leave the d20 roots behind me.

The d20 ruleset is notoriously difficult to get right in a computer adaptation, and there are already four roguelike d20-based games out there (Incursion, Javelin, Knights of the Chalice, Temple of Torment). Every one is basically the "roll d20 for most stuff" core with house rules tacked on.

As the game grew, there was less d20 and more house rules in Veins, though.

I've decided to make it more similar to the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darklands_(video_game) - this was based on Runequest 2nd edition. Runequest has had several editions since and TWO under OGL. Best thing about it is that it's very simple to adapt - everything, skills, combat, whatever is "roll under d%" and changing the rules is as easy as adding or removing a skill. I could even use some other dice, not d%, and still keep the core rules. Skills are advanced by usage and there is no concept of multiclass as in d20. Runequest has fairly weak magic, but it's really easy to plug in d20-style magic instead.