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[Sensei]

black and thick

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

Or a fast character creator
But seriously, if you want to encourage large scale combat, it's going to involve people dying constantly. You'll have to find a way around that to make it worthwhile- either a convenient respawning means or by not having people get too attached to their individual characters. Also, though exploitable, maybe do something like give players a bonus to XP when there's many enemy characters on screen.

[Reudh]

Posting to watch and offer two cents. This looks great so far!

[yamamushi]

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?

If you're interested, I'm pretty easy to get a hold of (email or IRC or our forums). I can also run through the code with you so that you're not completely lost in my spaghetti code haha.

I'm leaning towards a more "Survival-y" feel initially, and if you read on you'll see why :p

You'll have to find a way around that to make it worthwhile- either a convenient respawning means or by not having people get too attached to their individual characters.

There will be permadeath, :-) But I'm leaning towards a system where new players are balanced with their skills. Players can increase a specific skill set by using certain abilities over and over (ie, fighters are probably not going to be architects). This makes it harder for players to become a "jack of all trades", and it also means that there are consequences for every action they take ingame. I also want this to extend to NPC's, so that if you kill the father of a family, he's not going to respawn overnight - That family's feelings towards you are going to change drastically, etc. etc.

Of course, like I said, there's going to be a lot of kinks to work out with the whole system. So we'll tackle these issues as they come along on the development path. :-)

[izak1399]

This is going to be so rad.
I'm no good with code. But I will definitely help play it. =P

[yamamushi]

I'm one step away from getting networking right 

Because my "tile" information is stored as a struct with a wchar_t in it, and because I am using "tpl" to serialize my structs to be packed onto a socket and sent over the net, I need to find a way to split a wchar_t* to a char* and back. Otherwise all the other data is getting sent over the net without any problems, it's just that pesky wide string that I need to deal with.

I'm hoping to have it worked out by the end of the night, and if not I'll have to resort to begging in ##C++ on freenode for help -sigh-.

[Skyrunner]

I'm still watching o.O

[GalenEvil]

This is interesting. I am working on a project currently but I wish you the best of luck! I am not sure about a lot of the stuff involved with Roguelikes but if you need help with logic systems I might be able to help some. I am usually on every day or every other day. I have some experience with C++ though not a large amount.

I do most of my work on artificial intelligence systems. If that is something that you need help with, or just general pointers on how to approach an AI problem, I will do what I can to give ya a good answer.

[Skyrunner]

So... do you have specific ideas planned out for things like weapons/equipment? Things like how you would handle, say, attack stats, or durability(if any), or quality.
Or how armor works, DF-wise (each item covers a specific area), or Rest-Of-The-World-wise (single defense stat).

[yamamushi]

No specific ideas at this point, still trying to just flesh out the game engine and get everything running smoothly on the back end. Though if you have any suggestions, feel free to drop by our irc or drop a message in our forums :-)

[yamamushi]

I've made major improvements to the code since I first posted this, networking is now in place, and there are client and server build targets that communicate asynchronously over the internet (or any network, but that goes without saying). I'm handling all of the development by myself, so it's going to be slow progress getting the underlying engine running before I move on to the more interesting AI/Physics/Etc portions of the code.

I'm currently working on setting up a database back end (likely PostgreSQL), to handle the accounting for player accounts. Once I get that rolling and I cleanup the network caching (again..), I'll put the two pieces together so that players can create unique accounts on the public server and store their character information when they log out.

From there, it goes without saying that there will be a ton of underlying work necessary to get the players communicating and actually interacting with the game world. Such as destroying walls and building them, which leads into 3D (multi z-level) environments.... But all of that is in the coming weeks, it's a step by step process and I would like to get the primary engine components operating smoothly before I expand into gameplay mechanics.

[Skyrunner]

Well, if you don't have specific ideas to handle stuff, I suppose I can help in that process. And I do know -some- programming, so I might be able to have a hand in actually implementing those, instead of being just an in-the-air Idea Man.

I'm wondering, how realistic do you want the combat, how realistic are you going to handle the objects ...?

[yamamushi]

Well, if you don't have specific ideas to handle stuff, I suppose I can help in that process. And I do know -some- programming, so I might be able to have a hand in actually implementing those, instead of being just an in-the-air Idea Man.

I'm wondering, how realistic do you want the combat, how realistic are you going to handle the objects ...?

As for combat, I really haven't hit that point of the design decision process. Because I'm at the point now where I'm laying down network code and various other "base" issues with the engine, I feel that once I get these things in place I'll be able to tackle game mechanic decisions like combat/trade/health/relationships/crafting/etc with a better focus knowing that the implementation won't affect the underlying network/database code.

I do want fairly realistic objects however, but there has to be a fine line between realism and gameplay. As for a programmer, do you know any -shudder- php? or other "Web" language? If not it's fine, I was just hoping to get an API status script thrown together for the pub.theasciiproject.com public server page.

Shoot me a message or drop by the IRC if you have any questions/ideas

[yamamushi]

08/21/2012

A TON of updates to the game/project, and the version has been moved up to 0.0.0k (still an Alpha release).

[Facekillz058]

This looks neat.
It reminds me alot of Haven and Hearth.

I might check this out some time.

EDIT: Oh, are there Polearms?

EDIT 2: And a quick question about the building mechanics. Are player built structures protected at all so people cant just come along and break everything?

[yamamushi]

This looks neat.
It reminds me alot of Haven and Hearth.

I might check this out some time.

EDIT: Oh, are there Polearms?

EDIT 2: And a quick question about the building mechanics. Are player built structures protected at all so people cant just come along and break everything?

Yes, and yes :-) ... Well, the real answer to the last question is "sort of", as it's a little more complicated than a straightforward yes or no. Suffice to say that a new player isn't just going to stumble by your home and be able to tear it down without significant effort :-)