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[Sowelu]

Something I wanna point out to this thread:

Look how technologically UNadvanced DoomRL is.  Sure it has sound and music, but by and large, it's the least advanced roguelike engine ever.  There's like ten enemies, very wimpy inventory, very few stats, you can't go back levels and the levels are so totally simple...  And somehow it's a huge pile of fun (if very difficult), because it knows what it's trying to do, and it does it well.

The world needs more short roguelikes.

And your game doesn't need to be very advanced at ALL to work.  Figure out a fun core gameplay and go from there!

[Fenrir]

Fenrir, that looks neat so far!  You should try DF-style trees though, I keep thinking there's an army of green trolls there.

I can't seem to get Extended ASCII to work with pdcurses.

[Rhodan]

Sowelu, very true.  But awesome dragons are awesome... I think I'm going to combine the simplicity of DoomRL with the awesomeness that is a dragon.

Fenrir, that sucks.  In that case, keep the T's and just focus on Awesome.

I'm itching to attempt another roguelike now... But I'm on a laptop, so I can't use the numpad.
Are there any alternate control schemes worth considering?  I've played Dungeon Crawl with the "vim" keys or whatever they're called, but they never really felt right.  Mouse control?  4-directional movement?

Also, I really want to use libtcod, but I can't get it to work in Visual Studio C++. Suggestions or alternative?  I really like the autocomplete Visual Studio does, but I'm willing to try another compiler if that works better.  Preferably one that has the least messy project files.

[qwertyuiopas]

MinGW? It's entirely command line, so you can compile from a .bat file...

Or Dev-C++, it uses MinGW(It's like a graphical front-end)

[Mephisto]

Or Dev-C++, it uses MinGW(It's like a graphical front-end)

I can second this. While I haven't used VC++ even though I've got it installed, I can say that Dev-C++ has a form of autocomplete, also.

[Granite26]

But the dragon shouldn't just know where its hoard it, it should also know the hoard itself.  Imagine someone steals it?  Preferably, the dragon would store the last known location and a pointer.  If it can't find the hoard at the last known location, it should wander around looking for it.
Dragons should be Epic, not just a big 'D' you can stab, so they should have a more detailed AI so they pose a longer lasting threat to the player.  That's why at least some monsters should have persistent memories lasting over multiple levels.
I'm intrigued by this GUID thing, though.  What is it?

A GUID is a unique 50 character string.  It may be a .net thing, but I'm sure there's a class out there to generate them for your language.  In Visual Studio, I just say GUID.NewGUID.ToString and I've got a 50(45 actually, I think) character string that is all but guaranteed to be unique in the universe. (It uses MachineID and the Timestamp as part of the encoding for this).  If you wrap your collections in hashtables, you can access them by GUID rather than pointer(Pointer = Physical Property = bad)

The dragon's idea of it's horde shouldn't be tied to the horde itself.  You can (and should) store what it thinks is it's in it's memory, but why tie that back to a horde?  Psychic sense?

(Personal Opinion)
Even still, I'm a fan of DeCartes...  Your AI should be able to reproduce it's current state from itself and it's physical universe.
(\Personal Opinion

[Andir]

Dev-C++ is awesome

[qwertyuiopas]

Heres my advice: DO NOT use .net's built in GUID or serialization.
Why?

Save file size.
Use your own ID system and cut 45-50 chars to 4-5.
Use your own saving system that ignores data that doesn't need to be saved(such as commonly used strings, such as "goblin") and you can cut it down further.
Would your players complain if each level they visited added 100 kb to their save files?
Much more than if it only added 50 kb, or 40.

[Sowelu]

Agreed.  Write your own serialization.  All sorts of things can be a little wobbly with saving games.

[Andir]

If you wrap your collections in hashtables, you can access them by GUID rather than pointer(Pointer = Physical Property = bad)

Oh yeah, don't use memory pointers in save games!  There's a near impossible chance you will not load the save data into memory in the same place.  I would give each create an ID on creation starting from 0 and save that ID to the save file.  Use pointers in the run time to improve performance, use the IDs in the save to maintain relationships.  When you load the save in, set up the pointers again.

I also would not recommend GUIDs.  They are total overkill for this.  It's not likely you will be sending one of your orcs to another instance of your program or another computer where the creature ID was already taken.  Even if you did send it, you'd send the data without an ID and let the accepting client generate an ID for it.

[Rhodan]

The dragon's idea of it's horde shouldn't be tied to the horde itself.  You can (and should) store what it thinks is it's in it's memory, but why tie that back to a horde?  Psychic sense?

I think the dragon should be able to recognize it's hoard (as in, pile of gold to sleep on), and it's a lot easier to just have it know 'This is my hoard!' via a pointer or unique ID than storing a bunch of data about what the hoard was like.  It shouldn't always be allowed to access all data about it, though.  The last known location should be stored separately if the creature doesn't have a physic, spatial link to it's target.
And yeah, dragons can sense gold and treasure. And virgins.

[deadlycairn]

By the way, what is your biggest pet peeves when coding? Mine is the double == sign - the way i proofread my code (reading it and translating to logical english) means I miss it 9 times out of 10.

[Fenrir]

My biggest pet-peeve is the use of the word "coding" and "coder". It's "programming" and "programmer".

[Aqizzar]

One of my peeves is that everything has to be arranged downward in the file, so that stuff is specifically declared before it's used.  That doesn't help me, I need to be able to reference stuff wherever I think of it later.

Well, not need.  That's why it's just annoying.

[Sowelu]

One of my peeves is that everything has to be arranged downward in the file, so that stuff is specifically declared before it's used.  That doesn't help me, I need to be able to reference stuff wherever I think of it later.

Well, not need.  That's why it's just annoying.

Any half-decent IDE will let you have your header file and your .c/.cpp file opened in different tabs, so you can add a declaration anywhere in your header and then use it anywhere in your code...