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[jhxmt]

(Cataclysm's system info)

That's really useful, thanks - I've played Cataclysm, but not dug into the source or really examined the mechanics in any detail, so that's good information for me to chew on.  As you and Andir have said, it sounds like a sensible method of dealing with multi-turn actions is by splitting out game-turns from action-points (or whichever terminology is used).  At first thought, that does also seem to bring with it a lot of ancillary benefits (as you say, the slower-movement-when-injured idea, or haste-type spells, or similar).

[Girlinhat]

Cataclysm also has a fancy system.  The "time dilation" device will drain your cyber-battery bank completely and increase your speed.  It does this by providing 100*energy to your movement points.  This means that if you have, say, 20 internal battery power, and you use it, then you go from (for example) 80 move points for that turn, to 2,080 move points.  The effect is that you can move a lot more before a turn passes, so in gameplay it feels as if time has stopped.  This could be useful if, say, your game featured a God of Time, and when this god arrived and spoke to the player time would stop and they would chat.  You could also freeze an enemy by reducing their move points far to the negative, and it may be easier to add a "frozen" flag and check it as turn passes, but removing move points requires very little new code, although faster monsters would recover faster, if you wanna call that good or bad.

So if you're creative, the turn system can provide fun little tricks.

[Mephisto]

(I wrote this post up a few days ago but didn't get around to posting it)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The way I'm likely going to do it might be something like this, and is vastly simplified. There will be different categories of tasks, as suggested.

For construction tasks (take the wall example), various timing information will be stored with the item in question in the world. Stuff like % completed, needed materials, etc. For each turn that some[one|thing] acts on the target in question, that will be increased appropriately. Once % reaches 100, the "work zone" if you will disappears and the result appears in its place. Something that just hit me is that this may allow for collaboration between entities. If the player were to hire some helpers, for instance, they could each use their turns to help build the wall. Certain other tasks can fall into this category, like chopping down a tree, chopping branches from said tree, or sawing the now-smooth log into planks. This allows me to easily implement a method of saying "I want to work on chopping down this tree for ten turns", allowing the player to come back later, working on a big project in their spare time. It would also be fairly easy to check on each turn whether or not an interrupt condition has been met, stopping before the number of turns specified have been completed, like getting attacked by a creature in the middle of construction or having your widget-making interrupted by someone wishing to buy a widget from you. If no interrupt condition is met, the worker proceeds immediately to the next turn of work.

Actions that can't be resumed would follow a similar structure, minus the resumption. Upon interruption, the work target would be replaced with a rubbish item appropriate for the job or a number of raw materials. Cooking would probably not fall into this category, but something related like alchemy might if the process requires constant tweaks and fiddling.

As for uninterruptable actions, I'm thinking about a method that each entity would have, interrupt(). In that, the method would take a look at what the player is currently doing. If it's not interruptable, nothing would happen.

Talking through things helps me visualize what I want to do. Now that I've read about how Cataclysm does things, I may incorporate some kind of AP type of system along with my method.

[jhxmt]

Talking through things helps me visualize what I want to do.

Yeah, likewise - unfortunately this means that what I start off intending as short, to-the-point design notes turn into great big sprawling, rambling pieces of narrative!  I need to get better at restricting my scope. 

Using the movement points concept from Cataclysm would seem to work well with the construction-project concept from your Spoilered section, by the sounds of it - you're effectively getting critters to 'spend' movement points on the construction zone (as I think you called it) to move it along.  Faster critters would contribute to the work faster (which may/may not be a good thing?) as they'd have more movement points per turn to 'spend' on the construction, which conceptually makes sense to me.

Re the 'interrupt()' method you mentioned - are you envisaging having that on the player?  So if the player is building a shed, and gets attacked by a dog, the doAttack() method of the dog works on the player, whose sufferDamage() method includes a check on the player's interrupt() method?  Something similar to that kind of structure?

I guess you could also have an interrupt()-type method on the construction zone itself, if you wanted things attacking it to interrupt work - just get its interrupt() method to negate any movement points spent on it that turn, for example.

Hmm.

[Mephisto]

Re the 'interrupt()' method you mentioned - are you envisaging having that on the player?  So if the player is building a shed, and gets attacked by a dog, the doAttack() method of the dog works on the player, whose sufferDamage() method includes a check on the player's interrupt() method?  Something similar to that kind of structure?

I guess you could also have an interrupt()-type method on the construction zone itself, if you wanted things attacking it to interrupt work - just get its interrupt() method to negate any movement points spent on it that turn, for example.

Hmm.

I don't really know at the moment. I'm nowhere near the point where I've got critters running around building things and interrupting each other. Currently, I've been hacking solely on loading my tilesets and properly splitting them into correctly-sized squares. I don't even have @s walking around the screen yet.

What you said sounds like a plausible structure and I'll probably go with something like that as long as I don't have any more epiphanies.

My thought was that the interrupt method would be a part of every mob, either an instance or class method of whatever superclass they're all derived from. That would allow critters (or you) to interrupt workers that you may have hired, allow you to stumble upon a pack of wolves chowing down on a deer that they killed and interrupt their meal, and stuff like that.

[EnigmaticHat]

I got GameMaker studio on steam.  I understand the basic ideas of programming but the only language I really understand is actionscript from my outdated version of Flash MX, which I don't think is particularly ideal for rougelike making.  Its also been a while since I made anything with that.

So: how do you guys think GameMaker would work for building a rougelike?  Does it have any limits or problems I should know about?

[Girlinhat]

No idea about GameMaker, but generally speaking those types of programs have a lot of shortcomings on what you're allowed to do.  It may do well for a generic RPG, but if you want to add some unique abilities that would be difficult to generalize (like if you want your character's arm to explode in a bolt of lightning that casts blocks of ice on nearby tiles).

[Mephisto]

Spelunky was done in Game Maker, so it's at least possible to create a roguelike-lite.

[MorleyDev]

GameMaker used to be pretty laughable for anything but a prototype. You could do a full game with it but there were some good technical reasons not too. You could get around them but it never seemed worth fighting against the program to me. It may have improved, but if it's still a RAD tool through and through I'd generally recommend only using it to make protoypes...

[alexandertnt]

The gamemaker scripting language is... limited. It's a good place to start off learning how to make games though.

If you understand actionscript reasonably well then there should not be much problem using gml (game maker language), most imperative languages are very similar to each other.

Also, you can download Lua for gamemaker now.

From my experience gamemaker is quite hard to optimise, so it seems only really suited for small projects.

[zehive]

Alright, I've never touched coding in my life. I figured I'd go around and jump into, what feels to me, to be the deep end. Well I started following roguebasins tutorial to get my feet wet and I found out I had a problem, I have no idea what the hell they're on about. Okay, I understand what they want me to write and I have the basic gist of why it is the way it is, but then its like 'okay now run that code!' wait what? Also where have I been supposed to be dumping these files? I suppose into the folder you told me to make at the start. But now I've got everything in there, I've just gone off and named and saved what I've got and now when you say 'run' I don't even know from where I'm supposed to do that. Just click? Because just clicking flashes the CLI in my face that then immediately disappears.

Am I hopeless?

[Levi]

Am I hopeless?

Nah. 

Is this the libtcod python one?  Its probably just giving you an error and then disappearing before you can see it.  You can either open up a terminal (Start->Run->Cmd) and navigate to your project folder and type "python yourprogram.py", OR you can get an editor that lets you run and see errors directly, like Scite.  If you use scite, you can run it directly from there by pressing F5.

Debugging is hard when you can't see your errors.

[zehive]

Well funnily enough this tutorial had an optional bit of setting up a debug program, I just changed the target file to the one I had been working with and it did indeed tell me that there has been an error.


Edit:

However now its giving me various module difficulties, saying that the module object has no attribute 'blah blah'.

I don't know where it's gone wrong now. I have a compiled python file named libtcodpy just the same as I suppose the uncompiled version also sitting right there. I have everything exactly the same as the tutorial told me. Whats gone wrong here?

Spoiler: What I've got (click to show/hide)

import libtcodpy as libtcod

#actual size of the window
SCREEN_WIDTH = 80
SCREEN_HEIGHT = 50

LIMIT_FPS = 20 #20 frames-per-second maximum

libtcod.console_set_custom_font('arial10x10.png', libtcod.FONT_TYPE_GREYSCALE | libtcod.FONT_LAYOUT_TCOD)

libtcod.console_init_root(SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT, 'python/libtcod tutorial', False)

libtcod.sys_set_fps(LIMIT_FPS)

while not libtcod.console_is_window_closed():

    libtcod.console_set_foreground_color(0, libtcod.white)
   
    libtcod.console_print_left(0, 1, 1, libtcod.BKGND_NONE, '@')
   
    libt.console_flush()

[Calech]

libt.console_flush()

Whilst I have no experience with Python and my coding skills have about 10 years of rust... does libt exist anywhere or should this also be libtcod?

[Girlinhat]

No, that should be libtcod.flush()

You could also change

Code: [Select]

import libtcodpy as libtcodto

Code: [Select]

limport libtcodpy as libtor somesuch.