Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Morpheus Kitami]

Sorry to disappoint the diaper fetishists with the new and improved character creator.

I'm curious as to what's going with the face and bangs options. It just seems like they're differently colored beards and bangs, rather than a different face or bangs.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Sorry to disappoint the diaper fetishists with the new and improved character creator.

I'm curious as to what's going with the face and bangs options. It just seems like they're differently colored beards and bangs, rather than a different face or bangs.

Right now, there are two kinds of bangs in 10 colors, and the option of having no bangs. There are two kinds of beards in 10 colors, and the option of having no beard. Currently, women have no "face" options and men have no "bangs" options. The face itself never changes, but I do have some plans for additional options that can change with the face and bangs steppers: eyepatches, freckles, eye colors, scars, tattoos, sideburns, plus more actual bangs variations (The Sephiroth and The Aeris are two options I could add relatively easily).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

the option of having no bangs.

Why not? Tyranicon's game has them. Plenty of them actually.

 

[AdolfSatan]

Is that one of those cancerous menus where you advance through each numbered option (by clicking on the tiniest of arrows, naturally) , having to remember which ones you liked as you cycle through the rest?
Dunno how doable it is in your engine, but why not have it expand into a window that displays all overlays at once, for ease of choice? Ideally, they should show on the sprite on rollover.

A general design pet peeve: don't show the sprite creator on a black background if at no point in the game they'll be standing against one. Go for a neutral color.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Is that one of those cancerous menus where you advance through each numbered option (by clicking on the tiniest of arrows, naturally) , having to remember which ones you liked as you cycle through the rest?

Yes it is. I have very little experience with character creators apparently. I was going for the style I saw in Oblivion, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Mount & Blade, and presumably others, where in each case you cycle through the options using a clicker or slider with discrete stops. I hadn't really known there were other options.

Dunno how doable it is in your engine, but why not have it expand into a window that displays all overlays at once, for ease of choice? Ideally, they should show on the sprite on rollover.

Now that I can imagine it, I can do it. It would just be more work. Onto the backlog, I guess...

A general design pet peeve: don't show the sprite creator on a black background if at no point in the game they'll be standing against one. Go for a neutral color.

The dark gray background is because it matches the rest of the UI. In the pause menu specifically, you can see icons for each of your party members. I think I tried with a range of brightness, and lighter backgrounds just seemed out of place. I'm using the same combination-of-code-and-display-objects here as I use in the pause menu. I'll see if I can lighten it more without it standing out too much from the rest of the UI.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

[Bad Sector]

Here goes another quick video,



This is only for the software renderer, still trying to gain some performance. I made the triangle rasterizer keep track of the horizontal spans it draws for "blocker" triangles (currently just the walls and floor/ceiling) which are then used in the next frame to clip screen space rectangles used to figure out if portals and static meshes were actually visible (it is sort of a poor man's occlusion query :-P) before they are followed (for portals) or sent to the renderer (for meshes).

In the video the dark blue boxes are for occlusion checks that failed to pass (ie. the engine didn't bother to render something (or follow a portal) since it wouldn't be visible anyway) and the light blue boxes are for occlusion checks that passed (ie. the engine did bother to render that thing).

This is made for performance but one weird thing is that the benchmark mode (that runs a flyby over the first level's top area) doesn't make much of a difference with it - most likely due to the overhead of tracking the spans and clipping through them. However the benchmark only measures average FPS over the entire flyby, so it doesn't track worst and best case - i'll need to add those. However it does avoid some big FPS drops, especially in the second map where there are some occluded high (for a SW rendered DOS game :-P) poly models. I'll also need to tweak things a bit, right now it checks all meshes but it might not be necessary to check small meshes with low polycounts like the switches and light fixtures.

FWIW even before this change the game was fully playable (though at a choppy framerate) on my 133MHz Pentium laptop (which i connected to an external CRT for a better experience :-P).

I have very little experience with character creators apparently. I was going for the style I saw in Oblivion, Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Mount & Blade, and presumably others, where in each case you cycle through the options using a clicker or slider with discrete stops. I hadn't really known there were other options.

It doesn't fit all games, but i always found it interesting how much stuff Interplay shoved in the F3: Van Buren character creator tech demo. The bottom part is all about your appearance (though one thing i'd do myself would be to temporarily change the appearance when your mouse hovers over an option there so you can browse them faster without clicking).

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Steel Breeze Empire on itch.io status report

After one week I have 73 views and 5 downloads. 55 of that 73 views is from rpgcodex.net. Thank you very much!

 

[vdweller]

Any codexian who speaks chinese? I need some lines translated for an expansion for Gleaner Heights

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Any codexian who speaks chinese? I need some lines translated for an expansion for Gleaner Heights

Cael

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Any codexian who speaks chinese? I need some lines translated for an expansion for Gleaner Heights

I learned to speak Chinese from playing MMOs with Chinese gold farmers. I know dozens of ways to tell them to go somewhere else and various slurs. Does that help?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I can't remember where I heard it now, but someone told me that he had a hotkey to paste "天安门大屠杀" into chat. That's Chinese for "Tiananmen Square massacre." Whenever a Chinese scammer contacted him, he would respond with that hotkey, and the scammer would get disconnected from the game.

 

[Ninjerk]

I can't remember where I heard it now, but someone told me that he had a hotkey to paste "天安门大屠杀" into chat. That's Chinese for "Tiananmen Square massacre." Whenever a Chinese scammer contacted him, he would respond with that hotkey, and the scammer would get disconnected from the game.

And re-educated

 

[EugeneG]

A few years after the game i mention above (~2006 according to timestamps... time sure flies fast) i made an attempt for an FPS on mobiles (where the S would stand for stabber :-P although you'd also cast fireballs).

Hello! I know it's been a while since you wrote this comment, but I wonder if there are any files left from this experiment (both high-end and low-end)?

 

[Bad Sector]

Hello! I know it's been a while since you wrote this comment, but I wonder if there are any files left from this experiment (both high-end and low-end)?

I don't know what works but these files might help: http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/nyan/gimme/mobstuff.zip

I haven't tested them though.

 

[EugeneG]

Hello! I know it's been a while since you wrote this comment, but I wonder if there are any files left from this experiment (both high-end and low-end)?

I don't know what works but these files might help: http://runtimeterror.com/pages/badsector/nyan/gimme/mobstuff.zip

I haven't tested them though.

Сool, NokiaUI .jar works good, though it is probably better to use some older SDK so all textures look normal. BTW, is this just a test case, or you thought about making a full Java RPG game?

 

[Bad Sector]

Сool, NokiaUI .jar works good, though it is probably better to use some older SDK so all textures look normal. BTW, is this just a test case, or you thought about making a full Java RPG game?

I was working on a full Java game - it was going to be an FPS (S=Stabber :-P), not RPG though. The main reason i stopped was that this was before the days of iOS and Android (notice that most dates are from 2006) and J2ME fragmentation was severe - phones not only had different OSes, but even different implementations of the Java virtual machine (each with its own bugs) with many needing phone-specific patches and tweaks even for individual models. As i wrote in the 2019 post, i basically lost interest due to that.

Nowadays Android is in a much better situation (in that you don't need a warehouse full of phones to test it in various models) though it has other issues, like pretty much all phones not having physical controls. Not that you can't make some nice games on a touch screen (e.g. turn based dungeon crawlers work fine), but personally i prefer having real buttons to press.

 

[EugeneG]

Сool, NokiaUI .jar works good, though it is probably better to use some older SDK so all textures look normal. BTW, is this just a test case, or you thought about making a full Java RPG game?

I was working on a full Java game - it was going to be an FPS (S=Stabber :-P), not RPG though. The main reason i stopped was that this was before the days of iOS and Android (notice that most dates are from 2006) and J2ME fragmentation was severe - phones not only had different OSes, but even different implementations of the Java virtual machine (each with its own bugs) with many needing phone-specific patches and tweaks even for individual models. As i wrote in the 2019 post, i basically lost interest due to that.

Nowadays Android is in a much better situation (in that you don't need a warehouse full of phones to test it in various models) though it has other issues, like pretty much all phones not having physical controls. Not that you can't make some nice games on a touch screen (e.g. turn based dungeon crawlers work fine), but personally i prefer having real buttons to press.

Uh, that's a pity, but it is true. Though, I wouldn't mind at all trying this game when 100% complete (if anyday), since there were not that many neat FPS games for buttons-like mobile phones. Nevertheless, thanks for the reply and sharing of your works, I really appreciate it!

 

[Noddy]

Project Grimoire Killer
Seventeen yottaissues remain

 

[dippy]

Another update from a nerd trying to get over traumatising Fallout 1/2 experiences as a child. Now the prototype supports:

- basic exploration
- turn-based combat
- NPC dialogue system
- real-time switching of the languages during dialogues
- inventory, looting and barter modes

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I finally won my game after 500 battles. That is why making statistics in game is a good idea.

 

[Bad Sector]

Haven't worked on Little Immersive Engine recently, so i decided to add some quality of life improvements. Using Free Pascal's RTTI system (as well as some of utilities i built on top of it) it is trivial to figure out which objects reference which other objects, so i added a menu in the world editor to show the assets that the selected objects reference, either directly (like the mesh in the example in the video above) or indirectly (like the textures being referenced by the material which in turn is referenced by the mesh). Then clicking on the asset, it selects the asset file that was used to create it.

On the same note, also added an option to create new entities based on the currently selected asset file - if that is possible. Currently there are only two "asset entity creators", one for mesh assets that create an entity with a single mesh element that uses the mesh asset and another for material assets that create an entity with a single brush element whose faces use the material asset. In theory it is possible for the asset entity creator to create multiple assets and the selection to be able to have multiple creators match for it, but currently the engine doesn't really have that many types of assets and element types to do that. However in the future when i add support for decals it should be possible that when having a material selected to be able to create a decal instead of a brush, for example.

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

Been working on a game for the past month and a half. Core concept is you are a dungeon master creating and running adventures for an AI controlled party/group of players. So you put together maps, run encounters, and play the monsters in combat while the AI players make decisions about what to do in response. Obviously you're not trying to kill the party, but instead trying to feed them appropriate enemies, loot and situations that can prepare them for later, harder challenges.

Right now, I've got the party auto-exploring a map, triggering events, and some basic combat. Also sort of have chests implemented, where you select the type of trap and lock, along with templates for several event types (basic text, list of selectable options, random event selected from a list).

Not sure how meta I want to go. I do want to give the characters some type of personality, which dictates the types of situations they prefer, which in turn affects their happiness and mood. Kind of like Rimworld, I guess. But should there be "real world" players controlling these characters, who might have a different personality? Maybe they drop out/come less frequently as they lose interest, or real world problems crop up. Should the DM player have some sort of budget, and need to deal with money for new rulebooks, snacks (which affect mood), and various other random expenses?

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Man, why is programming so difficult? I had a great idea, like in Medieval Total War, there would be barbarian invasions randomly. It seemed so simple, create a new empire, create an army and attack some land on the border of the map. Instead of it I have been programming for hours.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Man, why is programming so difficult? I had a great idea, like in Medieval Total War, there would be barbarian invasions randomly. It seemed so simple, create a new empire, create an army and attack some land on the border of the map. Instead of it I have been programming for hours.

Easier to just spawn armies out of nowhere?

Not sure how meta I want to go. I do want to give the characters some type of personality, which dictates the types of situations they prefer, which in turn affects their happiness and mood. Kind of like Rimworld, I guess. But should there be "real world" players controlling these characters, who might have a different personality? Maybe they drop out/come less frequently as they lose interest, or real world problems crop up. Should the DM player have some sort of budget, and need to deal with money for new rulebooks, snacks (which affect mood), and various other random expenses?

This sounds like a more automated version of Galaxy of Pen and Paper and Knights of Pen and Paper- the characters playable were a composite of player, race and class- with each playertype and race having a specific stat distribution and a passive bonus while the class filled out the rest. Pf course in those games you were effectively dm and player so.

 

[Arbaces]

Been working on a game for the past month and a half. Core concept is you are a dungeon master creating and running adventures for an AI controlled party/group of players. So you put together maps, run encounters, and play the monsters in combat while the AI players make decisions about what to do in response. Obviously you're not trying to kill the party, but instead trying to feed them appropriate enemies, loot and situations that can prepare them for later, harder challenges.

Funny, I had the idea for a "reverse roguelike" just the other day. I decided that the most interesting option would be populating the dungeon with dangers randomly and letting the player place helpful things. Someone has to be leaving those wands of disintegration lying around after all. That keeps the traditional progression of the genre instead of making it about killing off the @ which would probably be too easy on any dlevel unless you were extremely resource limited. My conclusion after some thought was that it's tricky rewarding the player for "challenging" the AI without defeating it, and trying to simulate a party of tabletop players with personalities was well beyond the scope I considered.

Maybe you could take some inspiration from the Rune tabletop game. It's a unique dungeon crawler with a points system. Everyone takes turns running encounters, and it has more rigid rules for how the GM can act than most games. Whoever runs the encounter gets more points for injuring and otherwise setting back the players but loses points for outright killing them.