[Hajo]

Thank you for the pointer, Verious :) That might be helpful if my other tries to make chess pieces fail.

Now some news: Sonnheim now got a simple in-game mail system!

http://sonnheim.wiki.sourceforge.net/Sonnheim+mail+system

Since Sonnheim 0.1.7.2 players can send other players short text messages, even if the other player is offline. Unlike /tell or /msg messages, the mail messages will be stored persistently until the receiver deletes them.

This should help to keep contact with players who are only infrequently logged in to Sonnheim - well, and it requires a server online, of course. Which I hope to have soon.

[Hajo]

Sonnheim isn't dead yet!

Admitted, there wasn't really that much going on, though. The games content and world design are stopped once again. I have an idea for a new and hopefully more interesting world and plot, but currently I am too lazy and I can't really get myself to work on new art and maps for the new idea.

If I can get myself to work on it, it will be a near-future sci-fi world, without space flight though, but options to travel to distant places. The style of the graphics will be more cartoony, a bit like the ones that I had presented for the LA-Crawl module.

Meanwhile I'm doing minor work on the engine, cleaning up code and adding minor features. One thing that I often missed in other games is a diary to take notes about your findings in the game:



Of course, one can always do this on paper, but I wanted the game engine to support it.

Diary entries can be formatted with html syntax - not sure if that is a a good idea, and I might disable it. The date and timestamps will be formatted in the players locale, the screenshots just shows my settings, which might be confusing.

[DeveloperX]

sounds good. :)
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[Hajo]

So far beings configuration and loot tables only existed as text files, and sometimes it was difficult to remember the meaning of all the values there - numbers are less comprehensive than labels.

Thus I decided to spend some time on creating a visual and hopefully more comprehensive editor for those:




The being editor part yet needs to be extended with the super-secret beings counter-attack configuration, and also cannot save the edited values yet. Until the next Sonnheim release I want to have it completed, though.

The drop table part is fully functional already, can read, edit and save values.

[DeveloperX]

that editor looks pretty handy :)
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[Hajo]

Yes, it was quite needed :)

Actually I have a need for more and better tools, to answer questions like "Is this item used on some map?", "Are there treasure chests that can contain this item?"

While all treasure chests are stored in the item catalog, and therefore can be checked without too much effort, the question for the maps means to scan all map files in the project directory ... even subdirectories.

Meanwhile I've been experimenting with a variant of my "random" level builder, to create something that could resemble a building with rooms - rooms it creates, but for a building the structures are way too convoluted.



Sorry for the blurry image, this is downscaled from a higher resolution.

Good is that the rooms can be designed by hand. I didn't do much design work for the test, but overall I hope that hand-designed rooms which are procedurally placed give a better quality that purely procedurally generated levels.

[Verious]

[Hajo]

Yes, I think Diablo II uses a very similar thing for some of the underground dungeons. Overall this method is simple to implement and gives fairly good results.

In H-World I had a number of lower level map generators, which needed quite a lot more programming effort than the one from Sonnheim. Still I'm trying to port one or maybe even more of these to Sonnheim to have a wider variety of dungeon styles available.

I hope the mix from handmade maps and procedurally genarated ones will suffice both goals, high quality content and a fairly large and expandable game world.

[Hajo]

Some news: Sonnheim now supports keys and locks, at least in the sense that portals can require the player to have a certain item in their inventory to pass the portal. This item can be a key, if the portal is shaped like a door, or can be a parchment or permit, if the portal is disguised as a guard.

Some more details about portal configuration can be found here:
http://sonnheim.wiki.sourceforge.net/Sonnheim+Items

This requires the designer to play tricks with the visual representation of portals, but I think this approach should be general enough to handle many of the "entrance control" situations.

From a small test scenario I can tell this indeed adds a new feeling to the game, in the sense of a feeling of achievement and progress once you have acquired the permit to enter a formerly unreachable area.

Edit: Container items like chests now may require keys/permits, too. Since traders are internally also containers, this means some traders will only trade with you if you have the proper permit.

[Hajo]

I want to try an make a near-future sci-fi based module for Sonnheim. The game will revolve around two aspects, exploration of alien (space) stations which are linked by interspace portals, and to research and retrieve alien gadgets.

A first sketch/preview of a alien station map:



One of the core parts of the game will be to disassemble alien artifacts, for the purpose of research and to to get access to their components. I have started to make a prototype for artifact disassembling minigame. The UI shown in the screenshots is only for testing. In the game it will look and work differently. Purpose of this prototype is to see if such a research/disassembling minigame actually works, before creating a full interface and graphics for it:





Basically the player has a list of actions which depends on what is already known about the alien artifact, and the available tools. The player can select actions, which might reveal more details about the object. Currently the goal is to get access to the internal components of the object and disassemble them safely.

Each step can be rather dangerous - a try to dismantle an object that is filled with acidic fluids, or high pressure gas can be rather dangerous. In some cases even touching the artifact can be dangerous.

Right now it seems there will always be dangers, but the players can control a bit how much risk they want to take.

[Hajo]

I've been working on a design for player-driven shops.

That'd be booths or kiosks, which the player can place and fill with items. They can set the places for each item that is on sale and then walk away. The shops will work automatically, a bit like vending machines, and offer the content for the set prices.

First bits of code have been written, to place such shops. Next will be to create an user interface to fill them with items and set prices. This will work much like the current trading interface, I suppose I can use big parts of that for this task, too.

I already have images for booths, contributed by MHz some month ago. They are not quite in the right scale, unfortunately. I must see if I can rescale them without loosing too much quality, and use them in Sonnheim.

[Hajo]

A preview of the player driven shops. I think I could preserve a good amount of the image quality.




Original posting: http://www.simugraph.com/smf/index.php?topic=32.msg87#msg87

[Verious]

What will the interface look like when a player clicks on a player driven shop?

[Hajo]

The UI isn't final yet. But I think it will much look like the interface that you get if you interact with a container or trader.

[Ack, misread the question. This description is what shop owners get - other players just get the same as for NPC shops. Which doesn't look that much different. Sorry for the confusion]

- Your items in a list to the left
- The items already in the shop in a list to the right

These lists are single-select, i.e. one item can be "marked" as active item in the list. The buttons described below will work on the "marked" item of each list.

- A button "Move to shop": This will trigger a dialog to enter the items price, and then will move the item from your inventory into the shop.

- A butten "Move to inventory": This will move the item from the shop back into your inventory.

Some day I'll have drag&drop operations which will spare the user from the "select and click action button" sequence.

Missing in the current implementation is the handling of the "price" attribute - formerly the (NPC) shops used the "value" attribute of items, and now I must adapt the code to use "price" instead, to handle items that are priced independently from their real value.

Also missing is the shops money balance - shops work like vending machines, and keep the money until you fetch it.

Once that is done, the shops should be completely functional.

The money balance is also important for the second step in the shop implementation: Allow other players to sell items to your shop. In this case you must be able to deposit some money in your shop to pay them. Also to define a list of items that your shops will accept, how many of them at most and for what price.

Players who visit your shop will get the same interface that they'd get for an NPC driven shop.

Below is a preview,showing the current state of the implementation. You see it still lists "value" instead of price. And it looks very plain as most dialogs in Sonnheim. I'm trying to get the functionality done first, then prettify the UI.

[Hajo]

Having a new release on my mind, I'm trying to showcase all the features that the engine gained since the last release. One of the features were locked containers - so the catacombs dungeon now got locked treasure chests and hidden keys for those chests.

There still is a showcase missing for locked portals, which need a key or permit to be passed.

Also there are new decoration elements, giant snail shell. They come in copper-gold and umber-black variations. I've added a few to the northern desert map, they fit quite well there.

Black giant snail shell


Copper-gold giant snail shell



Original posting: http://www.simugraph.com/smf/index.php?topic=32.msg91#msg91