Porting ToME2 to the T4 engine

[Faeryan]

Don't think I've posted on this thread ever, but I've watched closely for a time now. Don't know what made me skip trying this earlier, cause I was a big fan of ToME2. Zizzo, you might even remember me from the old forums as Mayfair (not to be confused with Maylith) but we were just talking about ToME2 ingame and I decided now is finally the time to hop on and try this goodie.

[darkgod]

I'd vote for a quest entry per princess/fumblefinger; for clarity and "historicity"

I've given the current svn version a spin; some errors poping up sometimes but I see *many* things that make me happy!
It looks neat and to have progressed rather well, and brings back so many memories ..

PS: I tell you again, join us on IRC !!!

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I would suggest surrendering on the IRC front, neither of us will leave well enough alone until we can have you available. Bonus, access to immediate resolution to coding problems.

[Jaylow7]

Was messing around with this a bit, and ran into an error...

This happened as I attempted to enter the Weapons store, after visiting a few other stores.

Code: Select all

error = "Lua Error: /mod/class/Object.lua:656: attempt to concatenate local 't_desc' (a table value)\
  At [C]:-1 __concat\
  At /mod/class/Object.lua:656 getDesc\
  At /engine/dialogs/ShowStore.lua:127 generateList\
  At /engine/dialogs/ShowStore.lua:57 init\
  At /mod/dialogs/ShowStore.lua:45 init\
  At /engine/class.lua:104 new\
  At /mod/class/Store.lua:408 interact\
  At /mod/resolvers.lua:39 check\
  At [string \"return function(self, x, y, what, ...) local ...\"]:1 checkAllEntities\
  At /engine/Actor.lua:198 move\
  At /mod/class/Actor.lua:431 move\
  At /mod/class/Player.lua:199 moveDir\
  At /mod/class/Player.lua:192 moveDir\
  At /mod/class/Game.lua:692 move_or_scroll\
  At /mod/class/Game.lua:703 \
  At /engine/KeyBind.lua:229 

Also on the subject of achievements.. IMO the ones for the special levels should be triggered by the player having the level's artifacts in their inventory. I always considered that to be "completing" the level.
Assuming such a thing is possible of course. Can the achievement system hook into the character's inventory?

[Zizzo]

[We Apologize for the Delay;™ bit under the weather. Apparently there's a flu thing going around and no one told me... ]

Hmmmmm. As long as it's something that could be surmounted by addon, no complaints to rerouting in angband. (I'm envisioning the rebirth of theme, and it's additional special levels potentially creating issues if your fix is TOO hardcoded.)

Ouch, I hadn't thought about addons adding special levels. And unfortunately, "too hardcoded" pretty much exactly describes the modification at the moment. And having the max value of a user setting change from one character to the next depending on addon state sounds like an utter nightmare... y'know what? Screw it, plan B: the princess quest room will get generated by the T2DungeonLevel map generator, and the special levels use the Static generator; that should be enough to arrange not to trigger the quest on the special levels, so at least you won't get the "Leave me alone, stupid quest monster!" message in the middle of the Crypt level (which is mainly what I really wanted to fix anyway). You'll just have to re-visit the normal level after leaving the special level to get that level's quest, which is what T2 currently does.

Don't think I've posted on this thread ever, but I've watched closely for a time now. Don't know what made me skip trying this earlier, cause I was a big fan of ToME2. Zizzo, you might even remember me from the old forums as Mayfair (not to be confused with Maylith) but we were just talking about ToME2 ingame and I decided now is finally the time to hop on and try this goodie.

Yes, the name does ring a bell. Welcome aboard. Wish I had something more polished for you to try...

I'd vote for a quest entry per princess/fumblefinger; for clarity and "historicity"

[nod] That will make things simpler, I believe. It'll just be a lot of quest entries for people who take all 98 quests.

I've given the current svn version a spin; some errors poping up sometimes but I see *many* things that make me happy!]]

Well, I can't very well fix the errors if you don't report them.

To wit:

Was messing around with this a bit, and ran into an error...

This happened as I attempted to enter the Weapons store, after visiting a few other stores.

[sound F/X: source diving] Ah, right, Actor:getTalentFullDescription() returns a tstring instead of a string. I keep forgetting which methods return which... Fixed in SVN.

Also on the subject of achievements.. IMO the ones for the special levels should be triggered by the player having the level's artifacts in their inventory. I always considered that to be "completing" the level.

That's closer to what initially occurred to me: pick up the artifact(s), if any, and kill the head baddie(s), if any.

Assuming such a thing is possible of course. Can the achievement system hook into the character's inventory?

[sound F/X: source diving] I believe so. Achievements can be defined with a can_gain() method, which has access to data from the Actor trying to gain the achievement (the player, typically). That's sort of how T4's Pyromancer achievement works, for instance; each time you do fire damage, it tries to give you the achievement, and the can_gain() method accumulates the amount of damage you did and returns true when the total gets high enough. I can probably make something similar work for this.

[Zizzo]

Oh, a question I meant to ask in the previous post: does anyone regularly take the "adventurer joins your party" reward from the Lost Sword quest? More to the point, would anyone object strongly if I didn't implement it?

[Faeryan]

Oh, a question I meant to ask in the previous post: does anyone regularly take the "adventurer joins your party" reward from the Lost Sword quest? More to the point, would anyone object strongly if I didn't implement it?

Haven't really played this version that much but during the real ToME2 days I think I tried it once.
I remember playing with 99 quests so that's rather many adventurers even for one game. Not to mention the playthroughs I did.

[Atarlost]

Oh, a question I meant to ask in the previous post: does anyone regularly take the "adventurer joins your party" reward from the Lost Sword quest? More to the point, would anyone object strongly if I didn't implement it?

Not since I realized there was a different reward if you rejected getting a companion.

If you could level him up and give him gear like a second PC that could be cool, but anything like that is a stretch goal for after the remake is done. No point having him able to join before then.

[Jaylow7]

Oh, a question I meant to ask in the previous post: does anyone regularly take the "adventurer joins your party" reward from the Lost Sword quest? More to the point, would anyone object strongly if I didn't implement it?

I always took the skill reward, once I knew it was a thing. (Which amusingly was from reading Bjorn's DitL on the old wiki)

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Oh, a question I meant to ask in the previous post: does anyone regularly take the "adventurer joins your party" reward from the Lost Sword quest? More to the point, would anyone object strongly if I didn't implement it?

I always took the skill reward, once I knew it was a thing. (Which amusingly was from reading Bjorn's DitL on the old wiki)

Ditto, except the bjorn part. We only took him after that when we rapidly mashed the key and somehow chose yes.

[Zizzo]

Haven't really played this version that much but during the real ToME2 days I think I tried it once.

Not since I realized there was a different reward if you rejected getting a companion.

I always took the skill reward, once I knew it was a thing.

Ditto, except the bjorn part.

I'll take that, then, as a consensus that I don't need to bother with it. Which is convenient, since I didn't.

(Which amusingly was from reading Bjorn's DitL on the old wiki)

*blush* [bows]

And on a related note, I think I'm getting close to a release (famous last words...).

[Zizzo]

Aaand keeping my fingers crossed that I actually managed to catch all the bugs this time:

Release 0.1.4 "But Your Princess Is In Another Dungeon"

The main new feature, as advertised, is implementation of princess quests and lost sword quests. I've made a few small changes of note:

• As noted, the lost sword quest doesn't currently offer the option of having the newly re-sworded adventurer joining your party. That may be added in the future.
• The lost sword quest makes an effort not to offer you magic-based skills if you have Antimagic, or vice-versa.
• The princess quest reward is *ID*'d for you after you choose it, as a courtesy to the player (and also because I wanted the quest description to be able to include what the reward was).
• If I've done this right, the princess quest room won't create a down stair on the last level of a zone.

And assorted other new things in this release:

• Names and flavor text for all the skill-level-50 achievements, with much help from Crim's suggestions.
• Stub achievements for all the special levels (except Mount Doom, which will get one when I eventually implement the plotline quests). None of them are currently achievable, of course, as they all depend on artifacts that don't exist yet.
• More module hooks and actor callbacks. Also, quests can now install callbacks and bind to hooks. [This is another thing I'm probably more proud of than I should be, because I particularly wanted to keep these quests "localized", in the sense that, to the extent possible, no part of the code outside the quest definition should have to know anything about the quest.]
• All the usual bug fixes and internal infrastructure rearrangements.

As always, the .team file for the release is available from my site, along with the Subversion repo and WebSVN front-end thereto.

[Zizzo]

And accumulated questions and comments from this release:

• A difference I've noticed between T2 and TE4: In T2, objects that you've seen on an unlit and otherwise unremembered floor grid will be remembered on the map, while in TE4, said objects get forgotten once you're out of LoS of them. I'd really like to do it the T2 way here; it's useful in Moria, for instance, in picking up behind the four or five packs of orcs/ogres/trolls you've had to fight across half a dozen rooms before getting a chance to go back and see what they dropped. Is there an easy way to do this that I'm missing?

As for what's next (unless anyone has any requests, as always), I was thinking about trying to decipher how artifacts are handled in T2 and TE4 and actually implement the former in the latter, but after a discussion over in the T2 section, I'm kinda tempted to take a stab at resurrecting the automatizer...

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Can't say the automatizer really ever helped me. But I was hardly what you'd call a high-level player in T2. It was a nightmare to manage and use.... unless you can make it better, I can't see it as a real priority over plot-stuff.

Bonus, finishing out the plot-stuff gives us a 'winnable' game we can advertise to others, thus acquiring new players and testers. This could, in turn, bring us to a better idea of what is still needed/wanted by the playing community.

[Jaylow7]

I'd suggest going with what you'd been thinking originally, and start working on getting the code support in place for artifacts.

Crim raises a good point, the sooner the game is "winnable" the sooner you might get more testers. With artifacts in place, you could go from there to the code needed to handle generation of the One Ring and Mount Doom. And Dol Guldur, of course.

The automatizer would be nice, but I don't think it's a priority atm.