Yikes! I wish I'd seen this thread sooner. I found nothing offensive about the OP, and I
strongly encourage people to be less hostile toward posters on this forum. I know, Toady knows, and anyone who has looked at the source code should know that the LCS source code is a poorly documented mess of spaghetti code and copy and paste. And the user interface is just bad -- literally straight out of the 1980s. It wasn't made to be good, it was made to be reminiscent of Oubliette. I've put a lot of love and care into working on LCS, but I've no illusions about what it is. And even if that weren't the case -- even if LCS was the best damn game on the planet, and it was perfect and beautiful -- that still doesn't mean there's reason to dogpile someone for having a different opinion about it and asking for help making their own game. Hell, Toady could have worked on open source games instead of making his own stuff, but he didn't. I'm sure you're all very glad about that.
I say, go for it. Some of the best games come from some guy or girl deciding to
make their own toys instead of being contented with playing with the ones everyone else is using. It's certainly a lot of work to make or even just work on a game, even a console game, but I'd be a hypocrite if I said it couldn't be done. My best advice would be to start by
getting something up on the screen, and then build on that and add to it. Get your game playable ASAP -- don't worry about complex stuff early on, just get a game going. Once you can walk around, add enemies, or whatever. Once you have enemies, make some fun combat. That's just an example, but you get what I'm saying. There's one big reason above all else that I advise this kind of walking before you run: In my experience, the ability to start playing your own game is a big motivation to add features and keep making it great. Having your game unplayable for an extended period of time is very demoralizing.
You've already been referred for help with pdcurses, and that was going to be my main piece of advice, is to learn how to use that. If you DO want to go source diving to check out how LCS does things, you might start with
commondisplay.cpp -- it has a lot of the boilerplate character sheets, stats, inventory, etc.; seeing how those screens are done might help you to get a grasp on using pdcurses. Note that set_color is not pdcurses, it is defined in
consolesupport.cpp. I would suggest using similar wrapper functions to simplify common actions that otherwise end up taking more than one line of code.
Good luck, and pay no mind to people trying to discourage you from making your own game. If everybody who wanted to make a video game listened when somebody tried to tell them it's not a good idea, or there are more useful things to do, or they should do a mod instead of making their own game, there would be a lot more bored gamers in the world. Just make sure you have fun, and it's all worth it -- even if doesn't work out, it'll have been fun, and you'll have learned and grown from the experience.
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Topic: Programming Help Wanted (Read 1979 times)