ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

A bit of status update to let your know how it is going.
First some screenshots from http://www.net-core.org/tome/t4/gallery/:

First the main menu, simple, needs some embelishments :=)


Loading a game module


Creating a character, mostly notice the availability of acentued characters


Default game view, with line of sight, monsters, seen & remembered tiles. Notice also the player is not an @, this demonstrates easy graphic tiles integration.


Flying combat text: I just fried three dragons, and it shows (if not a kill it displays the damage done). The colored stains on the walls and floor are bloody death, just like in T3's Bone to be Wild


Visual targeting system. It can track monsters or be freeform targeting. It also enabled "tactical display": each actor gets an outline for its friendliness status. The targeting line turns red for inaccessible areas.


Visual area of effect targeting: When casting a spell like a fireflash it will show which area will be affected. Notice the circle drawn is not perfect, it accounts for walls & such.


Levelup is made of two parts: stats and talents.
Stats are different from T3, I believe they should be better (and they are a bit stolen too )
You get stat points every levels, and can also obviously get equipment & potions to increase them just like in T3


Talents are a merger of T3 skills & abilities. Talents are boolean, either you have them or you dont, just like T3 abilities.
There will be talents to teach spells, to improve various stats, to affect other talents, ...
Talents are split into categories. Each class gets access to some categories by default and the other ones can be learned later. Maybe with FF-like quests
Oh and no more carrying books around! Yay!


And a bit of mass murdering because it is fun


Oh and lots of stuff work with the mouse too, it even has tooltips



So currently what works:
- definition of game modules
- zones, levels and maps. with a few basic map generator
- entities: the basic building blocks of levels, they are subclassed into terrain, actors, players, objects, ...
- many actor stats and subsystems: life, stats, talents, leveling, ...
- nice targeting system
- damage types, with various projection types (bolt, ball, beam, direct)
- basic combat system
- turn based game class
- realtime game class
- energy based actor movement (allows to implement different speeds)
- many basic classes to make coding feel like a pleasure and not a pain
- documentation to most classes and methods of the engine ! (see http://www.net-core.org/tome/t4/doc/ for an example)
- mouse support. it works in many places, targeting, tooltips, dialogs, ...
- savefiles, along with persistent levels

Obviously most if not all of this is optional for modules.

Many things remain to be done obviously but I am quite happy of what I did in just over one week!
The most glaring omission is the AI and objects system (but it is just an extension of entities just like actors, not very hard to do).
I'm currently making a resource system to handle mana & such and then probably the basic framework for AI.

If you want to check it out:
svn co http://svn.net-core.org/repos/t-engine4
login: guest
pass: guestor

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[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning

Yummy!

If that is after a week, I reckon there will be quite a race to get T3 to beta before you announce your new project!

On a side note would it be possible for you to put Mercurial on a ToME server so it becomes official? We can then move T3 over to it... Obviously once T4 is ready that too!

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Regards

Jon.

Very impressive for such a short time. I'm worried about maintainability though as the codebase grows larger. If you find you you absolutely need to change the interface of some commonly-used function and overlook one or two function calls you won't find that out at compile-time but until your program crashes or does something weird.

I notice that you put the new game/load game choice in the beginning again and the module choice only after that. I think that's exactly the wrong way around and the biggest reason I absolutely hate babyface.

I'm attached to @ as the player character. If you really want the stick figure @-replacement for graphic tiles, I think you should put an if clause somewhere.

Tolkien fan nitpick: You put the wrong accent on Lúthien.

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Zothiqband -- still an Angband variant.

DG is on record as saying his spelling is very poor! I completely agree with his assessment!

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Regards

Jon.

Thanks
I hadnt felt has haqppy coding since a very big while


Not anymore than T3 which already relies very heavily on Lua.
But I tried to built it in a compartementalized (woh big word make up ! ) so such things dont happen.


I know, that's the biggest reason I like it But fear not the main menu is actually a module itself ad it hsould be very easy to change to your tastes.
Check out the code in game/special/mainmenu/


I am too, that is just an example of how tiles seemingly integrate. It's a matter of putting image='player.png" or not in the player definition


I know I couldnt find it on my keyboard

Madmonk: Care to give me a small writeup on mercurial ? I dont know it at all, why is it so good ?

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[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning

Forgive my french, but that is f***ing awesome!

*ahem*

That really does look awesome, DG. And I'm amazed that you were able to complete that much in such a short period of time. The new engine is shaping up to be quite the leap.

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And it was such a good idea...

I have split off the discussion around DVCS...

Please continue...

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Regards

Jon.

Ah, good idea, madmonk.

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And it was such a good idea...

I am impressed about this, and so inspired by this and your comments on field of view I want to plant a small though for you...

A beam has a range... Which means if it hits a wall it will reflect back... thus giving the potential for drilling yourself with your own beam... or drilling a monster twice or more...

A ball has an area of affect... which means it can reflect off walls... so when a dragon breathes you really can get hammered... Or when your favourite mage casts a ball spell in a confined space...

I am sure you get the idea, equally I am not sure how much work is involved and it may be not worth while implementing for that reason!

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Regards

Jon.

Interresting idea ..
Albeit not that easy to implement, the FOV code that computes the area would need to be made smarter, and I am not prepared to touch that thing
For beams it should not be too hard to make them reflect though.

Oh BTW, I plan on having most area of effect spells have friendly fire, so wtach out if you throw this fireflash on your head, it will hurt!

PS: the engine supports both friendly fire and not with a simple toggle in the spell code

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[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning

Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish! Nice work!

I am not sure if *every* wall would bounce back beams/balls. Some of them yes, other of them might just absorb them (or make the one square next to them more intense).

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Oliphant am I, and I never lie.

We'll see, I'll reserve that for later, I want to make things work first

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[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning

Lasting spell effects. The overlay display works even on graphical tiles )


I have a scheme of monster leveling in place too.
Monsters are actors, just like the player (which means we could have more than one player, it even handles realtime.. just saying .

My idea is that each monster is defined in the file at its minimal level (just like it was in T3), and it can havea maximun level, it will never level over it.
This means we dont get silly things like level 200 rats. Then each zone also has a min and max level.
When a player enters a level monsters will auto level to around the player level, but never more or less than their intrinsic level limits and then never more or less than the zone limit.
The deeper you go into a zone the higher the level diff with the player can get, to incraese difficulty of each levels.

This will allow to have low level and high levels zones and monsters but still be much smoother. The player wont fee lthe place is too easy if he is just a few levels over the "recommended level". I'm quite happy

Monsters do not level silly like in T3 either. They gain the same benefit from new levels than the player, in increase in life, mana, stat points ...
And then they get a "leveling template" that will auto level them according to some chart. Like a warrior template will put 2 STR and 1 CON every level and so on.

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[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning

Ohhh, wow. You are implementing all the ideas I had for my own module, did you read my mind?

The only thing missing is that I wanted monsters to have inventory slots just like the player, so beware of that little novice warrior wielding that small sword...

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