Oh, long post and I forgot to mention. If it would be useful I can put the current game server and client back up so people can wander around and see what its currently like?
Kev
[quote]What about combat more similar to Final Fantasy Tactics instead of regular. I find it much more enthralling and it entails more strategy of sorts. Wouldnt be a whole lot harder to do either.
[/quote]
I’m not quite familiar w/ this style… I never played tatics but I thought it was a strategy style fighting. Can you explain further.
You Rock. 8) I feel that a polished site will draw non-developer users and hopefully artist types into the community and make for a better finished product.
I think this is good, but should classes still exist, as sort of a basis for skills…i.e. I am a Mage so I start my Game Life with this much of skill X already, but I can learn more as time goes on?
You really want to get written down what your actually aiming to do and in what order.
Its all very well coming up with tons of ideas (which is great btw Wink) but as a project you’ll need to be pretty focused on getting something playable (to get a user base) before worrying about feature rich worlds and redundant servers.
The best example of this I can think of is the client. There isn’t much point starting work on two new clients (say 3D and LWJGL) until you know what structure/features the game needs/wants to present.
I Agree very Strongly with this. Yesterday I sat down and started writing down a project roadmap/release plan… I set milestones/releases along with features for each to be implemented. I will post this here so people can help me finalize it. First we should just get the server back up and things working again.
- Improve Tool Support
This is extremely key. Until the tool support is good enough, even if its just the additional of web page manuals on how to use them, you can’t get arty folks to get to work.
* Tile Cutter - Integrate with IDE. Add the ability to specify properties on tiles.
* Mapper - Make this the central IDE. Add multilayer support (I believe its just two at the moment). Add a framework to support plugin editors.
* Script Editor - Probably best to assign someone just to rewrite this from scratch. Its uncomfortable and takes a lot of preknowledge to use.
* NPC Editor - Fresh build, maybe the first test of the IDE plugin architecture. This should support making templates of NPCs/Creatures and then deriving new versions (see Zelda games)
Again This is my main objective currently, otherwise nobody will develop content for the game.
[]Tile Cutter - What do you mean by properties
[]Mapper (Multilayer) - My old editor does 5 layers, I will add it.
[]Script Editor - Agreed
[] NPC Editor - similar to my old editor again.
Combat
Lets go with simple turn based style to start, (Players Speed affects time betweer turns). That way we at least have something.
I’d suggest before you ADD anything, you first resolve what you have. Its much easier to change something once its got people up and understanding than to attempt to add stuff fresh.
This is going to be key to this projects success. We have a great start thanks to Kevin, but we need to follow through with the basics before we worry about all the bells and whistles.
Oh, long post and I forgot to mention. If it would be useful I can put the current game server and client back up so people can wander around and see what its currently like? Very Helpful as I don’t have a machine suitable for hosting at the moment. Kevin…You are a great asset to the community. 
Re: Tile Properties
- Does is slow the player down?
- Does is damage the player?
- Does it animate?
- Does it move?
Kev
[quote]Re: Tile Properties
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Does is slow the player down?
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Does is damage the player?
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Does it animate?
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Does it move?
Kev
[/quote] -
I priviously handled this with a seperate layer on map for collision detection, but I think I like your way better. I will probobly just add a numeric value to the tile… 0 = no impedence, -1 slow a little, -2 slow a lot, ect.
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Is damage only occur on collision , i.e. what if I step on this tile and stand there?
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Do we want animated tiles, or seperatly placed “Sprites” that sit on top of a tile.
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I thought tiles had a set position in the world…Can you elaborate.
While we are discussing tiles I wanted to ask you a few things. One thing I noticed that is different about your mechanism of tiling is that tile sizes doesn’t need to be the same, i.e. all tiles are not 26 X 16 or 32 X 32 … At first I thought this was a pain., but now I’m starting to see its advantages. Do you think map designers will find it difficult to draw maps with different shaped tiles?
p.s. here is a link to my start at a Roadmap:
In theory laminos is playable again from:
http://laminos.newdawnsoftware.com/index.php?page=play
Server: bob.newdawnsoftware.com
I haven’t been able to try it from work tho :(. All old accounts still exist.
Kev
[quote]In theory laminos is playable again from:
http://laminos.newdawnsoftware.com/index.php?page=play
Server: bob.newdawnsoftware.com
I haven’t been able to try it from work tho :(. All old accounts still exist.
Kev
[/quote]
Thanks Kev… As I’ve said before, You have been very helpful. Temporary site is up at
http://www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/
Hopefully sputter will have access to the cvs soon so he can build a newer and more up to date one. ;D
Task list looks good. Good idea to make the first step a small(ish) one.
A very good question ;D I was thinking lava squares in Zelda, stand there and slowly get burnt to death…
Flowing rivers was the use case I had in mind. I don’t see it as much fun putting down a sprite for every bit of river flow. Though I suppose you could do some palette cycling. Essentially large areas of animation would be a pain a simple sprites.
More for effect… jiggling treetops, tiles that move down one pixels as you walk on them (rope bridge?). That sort of thing.
In Mini Adventure the large tiles are simply reduced to smaller tiles for collision and stuff but it makes building the world much easier. When I want a standard edge to a cliff I just dump one… I don’t have to build one out of smaller tiles every time. Maybe it would be just as good to have a “brush” palette in the map designer. I used it more for handling large map design rather than anything else.
Kev
JoC, who just connected… and to the rest of you. You need to register a user first.
Kev
Me Too…
This makes sense, how hard do you feel this would be to add w/ current architecture of tiles/ Client?
This Sounds Hard
I think we’ll leave it as it is then , no since making things to hard on ourselves.
Oh Yeah… Heres the somewhat improved screenshot for the tile editor.
Yeah, I checked it out earlier… looks v. v. nice. I can’t wait to see where you guys go with this…
Damn project still isn’t approved! 
Kev
It should be approved any Day, minute,second Now.
I’m anxious too. I hope you realize Kevin that you are welcome to dabble in the code on the occasion that you have time to code but not enough to code an entire game… How long is that anyways. ??? About 20 minutes or So.
20 minutes! Thats two games!
Seriously tho, I hope as a community project everyone gets a chance to have a play and build something really great. That of course includes me 
At the moment tho I’m more than happy just to focus on what I’m doing and offer as much support as I can.
Kev
And your support is greatly appreciated. Now that I think about it, how do you get time to code when your always answering my questions.?
2 computers - 2 hands ;D
Kev
Kevin’s commments on the Tools earlier spawned some thoughts. I have included screenshots of an editor from my last project. Some of the features kevin wanted existed in those.
Map Editor:
www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/kme1.png
NPC Editor:
www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/kme2.png
Item Editor:
www.frontiernet.net/~krypto/kme3.png
Ah ha, items… now that makes me think. Allowing items to be dropped is an interesting issue network wise. You get into all sorts of handshakes about who managed to pick up the object first etc…
One solution is to support only
- Recieving objects from NPCs
- Static containers that contain objects
- Passing objects between players
- Destroying objects in your backpack.
This should support everything but prevents you having to deal with the irritating bits.
Kev
[quote]Ah ha, items… now that makes me think. Allowing items to be dropped is an interesting issue network wise. You get into all sorts of handshakes about who managed to pick up the object first etc…
One solution is to support only
- Recieving objects from NPCs
- Static containers that contain objects
- Passing objects between players
- Destroying objects in your backpack.
This should support everything but prevents you having to deal with the irritating bits.
Kev
[/quote]
So, My Editor that allows for item placement should be paired down to allow only item “Template” Creation for instances to be used in Scripts???
BTW … do the screenshots I posted inspire any ideas?
dropped items is easy - do like GuildWars, the server assigns the item to a specific user. The problem is to decide who gets it if you’re not in an instanced zone (propably the best thing to do is to select a random member of the party that slayed the monster). Problem is sniper parties…