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[yamamushi]

You may want to see http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php/The_ASCII_Project for a (hopefully kept) up-to-date summary of the project.

08/25/2012

As promised, for those of you keeping up with the project homepage, I have released a binary for Linux and OSX of the latest stable release of my Roguelike MMORPG project. The files can be found on our homepage.


Out of Date Information

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hi Everyone,

I had started a project last year, along with a few others, with the intention of developing a Multiplayer/MMO roguelike. It never really went anywhere other than a website and a lot of ideas being thrown around.

So I decided to resurrect the project on my own, complete with source code this time . As it was, the project never really had any code put into it. We had a client that only rendered a single ASCII character on the screen. It wasn't movable (afaik) and nobody really committed any time to writing anything. So I threw everything out last week and started from scratch using the fantastic libtcod library as a graphics library to handle the client.

There's not a whole lot to "show off" at this point, just a client that randomly generates dungeons and allows you to walk around with a light rendering system similar to what you see in DCSS. I'm adding more code everyday, and I'm sharing everything completely free under the GPLv3. It's completely documented as well

I don't think it's going to be the massive online game that most people think of when they hear "MMORPG", but I'll be happy if even one or two people ever play it

You can find out more about the project at:

http://www.theasciiproject.com/


And for a small overview of what this project is "about" (although not entirely accurate as this was taken from the old project summary):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The goal of “The ASCII Project” is to develop a Unicode-based “roguelike” MMORPG, based on a persistent world driven by a player-run economy.

The interface will resemble existing rogue-like projects, such as Dwarf Fortress and Nethack, with the heavy use of a text based interface – thus allowing for more development time to focus on engine features without the constant overhead of interfacing with a heavy (3D) graphics front end.

It’s difficult to assign the project to a specific genre, as the “Tech” research portion of the engine allows for the game world to move forward from a fantasy based game into a sci-fi based game as (much) time progresses. However for the purposes of describing the initial state of the game world, “Fantasy-Based” will suffice.

Players will be able to form relationships with each other as well as NPCs to establish tribes, villages, cities and perhaps even entire nations. All of this will be driven by a server-side “Relationship Engine”, allowing for evolving NPC relationships without requiring player interaction.

The relationship “level” between characters and NPCs will be used to determine procedural generation parameters for the evolving state of the game world. For instance, an NPC who is enemies with a given alliance may be more willing to assist players with an attack or may even pursue an attack on their own without player interaction being necessary.

Originally the server-side code was planned to be closed source, however I feel that is a poor direction for this project and everything will remain open source and covered under the GPLv3.

The ASCII Project
=================
Copyright (c) 2012 Jonathan Rumion (Yamamushi@gmail.com)

Source code is freely available at:

https://github.com/yamamushi/theasciiproject

At this point, I'm the only one coding and working on the project to keep everything organized and easily accessible. So I am open to anyone who wants to contribute in any way, whether it be: Ideas, Feature Requests, Code Collaboration, Forum Moderation, Wiki Moderation, etc.

You can contact me here on these forums, the project forums, or via my email which is available on the project website.

Even if you're completely new to the world of programming roguelikes (or game development/programming) in general, I'm trying to keep everything easy to follow so that others can learn from my (many) programming mistakes.

The project is in C++, but I haven't relied too much on C++11 as the compiler support isn't really universal at this point in time.

Right now I'm in the long process of working out the kinks involved with a 3-dimensional FOV system in a 2-dimensional world. At the top of my (seemingly endless) list of notes is the to work out a proper system for handling floor tiles (entities are stored/rendered in a different way), as I am not too happy with the way I implemented them the first (well actually this is the 4th iteration of changes to them) time around.

Last night (or rather this morning, I'm a night owl) I implemented a way for all 65,536 characters in the Unicode 5.1 standard to be drawn on the screen. Combined with the 16+ million colors that are possible with libtcod, that gives us something around 1099511627776 unique characters to work with now.

Okay I'm rambling now, I'll just direct you guys to the website above for my devlog updates :p

Screenshot from early July 2012 in the spoiler below:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

**Edit** I thought it would be fun to link my latest addition to the over 65k characters available in the projects font set:



That bear seems a little suspicious...

Update - 08/21/2012

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's been a ton of updates to the project since my last update to this thread :-)

Specifically:

• PostgreSQL backend for user account management
• Users can create new accounts/login now
• Persistent player data is saved in binary format to disk now
• A new client interface with mouse support
• A console command-line interface to the server
• Tons of bug fixes :-)

It IS still an Alpha project at the moment, but I also brought in a dedicated Windows dev to put together Windows binaries for people. It's fairly easy to build on Linux/OSX, and said Windows dev has put together instructions on our wiki for building it under MinGW on Windows :-)  - http://www.theasciiproject.com/wk/index.php/MinGW_Build

We're currently looking for Artists, writers, and people to bounce ideas off of. In any case, my next focus is a multi z-layered map, a chat system with "channels", and interacting with the world (placing/removing blocks).

Update - 08/06/2012 :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have networking working now in the project, and there is a public server up as well. The details are on the front page right now, however I don't have binaries available for people to try out yet. It's a fairly simple process to get it compiled on Linux and OSX (which I am using as my development platform), however there may be a few more steps involved with getting it running on Windows (mainly Boost C++ Libraries and soon PostgreSQL C++ Libraries).

It would be nice if a few people would test out the client/server and provide much needed feedback (there's not really a "gameplay" element right now, this is just for testing the network caching system). I know there are definitely some data speed issues going on, and getting the logs from the server will help me to track down what needs optimization to get things rolling smoothly and proper.

Also, if you're an artist/writer/programmer/someone who wants to help organize, managing everything by myself distracts me from time I would rather spend coding, so please let me know if you are interested in helping out in any way :-) :-) :-)

-Yamamushi

[MrWiggles]

So, how is this different from a mud? Beside graphical presentation.

[yamamushi]

Well a big part of the reason I even came up with the idea for this project was because I couldn't find a MUD that suited my tastes :lol:

Over the coming weeks I would like to implement a "building" system similar to what DF has. I think the idea of people working together in an online roguelike to build houses and (potentially) cities is pretty exciting, and though some MUD's have "building" systems, I couldn't really attach myself to them with the lack of any graphics.

[Normandy]

As a former (and maybe current, depending on how next semester turns out...) member of the project, I wish you best of luck! I'll try and help out where I can, but after having spent the last couple of years coding in a just about every language that isn't C++, I can't help but feel a sort of primal fear every time I need to go near it.

[Skyrunner]

Hmm.. I don't see why you don't use C++11, because most compilers *should* support it by now. The major ones do, such as Visual C++ Studio, or that expensive compiler with a fancy name that I don't quite recall.

As for the unicode thing, while I don't know about everything else, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to use the Korean characters in it xD

Anyhow, good luck. If ever a quick job pops up I might try my hand at it >.>

[yamamushi]

Unfortunate

Hmm.. I don't see why you don't use C++11, because most compilers *should* support it by now. The major ones do, such as Visual C++ Studio, or that expensive compiler with a fancy name that I don't quite recall.

As for the unicode thing, while I don't know about everything else, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to use the Korean characters in it xD

Anyhow, good luck. If ever a quick job pops up I might try my hand at it >.>

Unfortunately the GCC/clang compiler that ships with Xcode 4.3.3 on OSX Lion doesn't have support for Lambda's yet, and I'm afraid to see what else isn't fully supported. I suppose the main feature I want to use out of C++11 is Atomics, and most compilers have supported them for a while now.

Actually I do think there are quite a few Korean characters in the font set I put together too, U+AC00 - U+D7A3 and U+110x - U+11Fx are Hangul characters, and my bitmap font supports everything from U+0000 (technically an "invalid" code) all the way up to U+FFFF .

[Skyrunner]

The small_unicode.png only has the characters that are separate from each other.

If the unicode file you made is the font.png, I can't see anything D:


...Anyways, you won't need to use them anyways >.> Some of the squiggly characters look like they could be useful, though, like for..snakes? xD

[yamamushi]

The small_unicode.png font in there came from the libtcod forums,  though unfortunately it only has support for 11904 characters, and I wasn't happy enough with that :p

So I put together the "font.png" file, the reason you might not be able to see them is because they are white characters rendered on an alpha layer background. You could try opening it in a different image viewer, or perhaps dragging the image over a black background I had to do it that way so that the impact on the load time of the client would be minimal. And even at 1.8mb, it only added about half a second of load time to my startup

[Skyrunner]

So that's why. :/
I'm away from my own computer for a while, and there's no Photoshop here.
Only Paint.
And everyone knows how efficient, feature-packed, exciting, powerful, and just dang useful Paint is.

[yamamushi]

I uploaded a new file into the "data" directory - "sample_full_unicode.png". It's rendered black on a solid white background, so you should be able to look at that without any problems :-)

[Skyrunner]

Do you know, by any chance, how to download a single file from git? I don't know how to, if it's possible, and downloading the whole archive is rather ... undesirable >.>

[yamamushi]

Hrm,

I'm not sure how you can pull down a single file (I'm rather new to git as well), so I uploaded the fonts to the website for you:

http://www.theasciiproject.com/fonts/sample_full_unicode.png
http://www.theasciiproject.com/fonts/font.png

:-)

[Skyrunner]

How would you solve combat? o.O
Would you have a text screen portion where messages like The bear seems a little suspicious... scroll up?

Also, the Chinese characters are black and thickDENSE

I suppose the game is real-time, not turn-based like most roguelikes?

[yamamushi]

black and thick

lol.


The game is going to be real-time, however there will still be scrolling information messages about the environment and creatures and whatnot. However that information will be in a different portion of the screen, so that the chat portion of the screen isn't affected. Here in a couple of days, I may get around to implementing a very basic interface that will be used. The screenshots up on the website don't show any interface at all right now

As for combat, I want there to be simple controls as well as more complicated options kind of like what DF Adventure Mode offers. I'm sure it will need to be worked out a bit before there's a system that works well for all types of players in a rogue-like world online. It may work a little bit like how pvp MUD's work.

Because I want there to be large-scale battles, ie more than just a handful of players on the screen, the game is going to need to provide a way to do combat that doesn't cause people to die constantly due to its complexity. However I think when development on the combat mechanics begin, we'll already have people playing that will be able to provide needed input on what they'd like to see combat played out like.

The goals for this first development cycle are to release a client that will be able to connect to our server, or a server that players can run on their own, so that multiple people can interact on one map at the same time together.

Gameplay features for the first "release" (I don't really want to call it that) are to be able to move around on a map and dig out tiles and place them places to build things, kind of like a 2-dimensional early-version minecraft game. Players will also be able to move up multiple z-levels to build 3-dimensional things in a 2d game. From there I'll have a more fleshed out long term development plan, but my primary goals right now just involve coding the endless series of things in my notepad filled checklist to get to that first milestone.

I'm keeping everything completely open source so that people can add or rework things as they wish, and so that they can follow along with my development. I don't want this seem like vaporware, so it's important to me personally to keep the github updated with my progress as much as possible so that people know there is work actually being done on this project.

[Doohl]

This is a really interesting project and I'd love to see where it goes! If it's worth anything, I offer my help if you need it. I've worked with Libtcod and C++ extensively in a small roguelike I tried to make, but didn't really kick off.

I'm curious, however. Are you planning on taking the game towards a more Survival-y feel or traditional MMO running around towns and doing quests stuff?