[Hajo]

[Mandrake]

Sorry about that rant there, but it irks me when people attack my credentials. I have about as much experience here as anyone else.

Actually H-World was part of my insparation for starting this. Even though I am heavily influenced by the console RPG genre, I still love the depth and immersion of PC RPG's. I think want to strike a balance between the two with this. I think what I might end up doing is working on the engine myself (and if others want to help- that would be nice), and leaving it open in such a way that people can add content to it easily, recode parts of it easily, and do other things like that.

I'm certain now I want to use Freya for the engine. The idea I have is to first build a character generator, where people can name their character, choose a class, a race, a gender, a zodiac sign and what their character looks like, as well as assign attributes. I also want to create a race generator and a character template editor. The race generator will let you add new races to the world (and create a new character template for the race). The character template generator will allow you to add different hair styles, clothing styles and etc for the player to choose from when deciding what his character looks like.

These two things are very hard for me to explain properly, and I have a feeling it's one of those ideas you have to see to get a grasp on how it will work.

I plan from, at the start, making a very tight and very easy to use structure for the Lua code as well as how the game engine works. One of the ideas I have is a music directory and a playlist file. The playlist will be an xml file with a listing of what songs will be played when. This way you can specifiy a song for a specific town, or a song for all town to be played at random, or a song for a specific dungean...etc, etc. People can then create song packs other people can download, or if you want, you can rip from your favorites CD's, compress to Ogg Vorbis format and use that.

It's stuff like that- I want to keep it as open and easy to use as possible.
_________________
"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Hajo]

[Mandrake]

"his seems to be a difficult trick. There are a rather large number of game makers, world construction sets, engines and whatever they are called. Only a few of them could start a community. Competition is hard in this area, and it's difficult to show the users why ones engine is better than the rest."

Ahh- but that's just it- it's not a game maker. Not per se. It won't allow someone to make a game with it. It will allow someone to extend the current game. It's much more of a collabrative world building project. By making it easy to add, I don't mean dead-easy. I mean I don't want to over-complicate things, which is different. I want to keep it simple, and simple to manipulate.

So, if, say someone is playing the game and their half elved ranger gets attacked by a bunch of psychics, and he kills them. Then he realizes- wait, if their are psychics in this world, why can't I play one? He can then open up the script with the character classes and add in a psychic class. Then, he can just commit it to the SVN and *anyone* that downloads the current build can play a psychic. Think of this as game development with a wiki feeling to it.
_________________
"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Hajo]

[Mandrake]

Well, teh way SVN works is much in the same way CVS works. It allows people to edit content on a single file, and resolves conflicts any changes might make. So if person A downloads from the SVN the latest version of the game, adds an extra village, all he needs to do is add the files to the SVN and then commit it. It's hard to explain if you haven't used it. But then, everyone who downloads the game will get the changes that are made. So, if you want all the latest goodies people have added, then you need to download the latest copy. Much Open Source software works in this way. Then, once a month or so we will test every change to make sure it doesn't break anything and then put it up as an official release.

The MUD example- that was exactly what I was thinking about. But instead of high level characters- anyone can edit and change stuff. The other nice thing about SVN is you can revert it back to an older version, if someone adds something you don't like or makes changes that breaks the game.

Coming up with the file formats and structures will be tricky. That's what I meant by I wanted it to be tight and easy to modify- I meant that I didn't want to make this sloppy and second handed. I want to make it very solid and very easy to see and consistent. Probably use a lot of XML.
_________________
"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Mandrake]

[Hajo]

[Mandrake]

Thta's a very good point. An excellent one at that. I'll need to ponder it to find the best way to solve it.
_________________
"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[Nephilim]

I might be interested in helping out. I've had thoughts along the lines of this project in the past, too, but didn't think I'd be able to do it alone, so a communal project sounds like it could work. When you get this project started and Freya ported to Mac, let me know.

I do have a couple of questions. Apologies if you've addressed these before - I've been popping in on this thread sporadically.

* If anyone can add anything, how do you plan to maintain things like game balance, look and feel, tone, etc.? What do you do if someone starts adding crap-looking graphics, or starts pushing in items that unbalance the game? How do you reconcile the two people who want to add "Happy Happy Lollipop Forest" and "Death Goth Cathedral of Sorrow"? And what sort of tone are you wanting to go for?

* As you envision it, what is the nature of the world from a generative sense? Is it 100% randomly generated from pieces we provide (a'la Rogue), is it 100% scripted out (like most Console games), or are scripted areas splatted onto a randomly generated world (like Diablo), or randomized areas dropped into a mainly prescripted world, or what?

* If you make character graphics reflect the items that are equipped, how will you deal with graphics of equipment for diminutive halflings, short, squat dwarves, normal humans, tall, skinny elves, and hulking half-ogres? If people can add races on the fly, how does that affect existing graphics? (Or are all character classes limited to a basic humanoid template, or a handful of templates?)

* Graphics: hand-drawn 2D? 3D rendered? Anime? Realistic?

* Gameplay: gamepad or keyboard? Console games, of course, have interfaces easily navigable by gamepad, but that can get onerous if you have a lot of commands, as you tend to see in Roguelikes. But the point might be to bring the depth of a Roguelike to a gamepad-navigable interface...

* Rules system. Might I suggest a skills-based rules system? If everything a player can do is measured on a common scale (say, 1-100), that would be pretty extensible. You could add a new skill without having to worry much about the interface for advancing it, and you could have a generic way of testing the results of what a player tries to do. It would also provide a generic way for things like magic items to add bonuses.

Anyway, those are the sorts of things I'm interested in hearing about for your game.

[Mandrake]

[Nephilim]

[Mandrake]

[Nephilim]

[Mandrake]