ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi, I was curious about what is involved in creating an addon. What kind of programming skills, if any, are required? Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, I didnt find it.

It really depends on what you are trying to do. If you want to add something that has been done before (class, race, items, or zone), it can be accomplished with as little as copy/pasting a few dozen lines of code from an existing addon. If you are trying something new (new monsters, changing something existing, or creating novel effects), it can take quite a bit more skill to pull off.

ToME is written in Lua, so that would be helpful to learn, but not required. Personally, I learned most of my ToME-modding skills from looking up how specific things worked, and extrapolating from there.

Check out the development section of http://te4.org/wiki/Main_Page

This includes all the basics of how to incorporate addon code into the game.

Basic lua proficiency is a must. But lua is one of the easiest languages to pick up, particularly if you already have some programming experience, and you can learn as you go.

I'd suggest starting small and logging into the IRC channel (#tome on irc.rizon.net see http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=23463) for help as needed.

Alright thanks. I was thinking it might be fun for my high school students to make their own new classes. We are learning c++ next spring and could do it as a side project maybe; I can learn lua in the meantime, hehe.

Mod tome for a highschool project? Man and all we had was a single apple computer with a green terminal

A whole class can take a bit of work.
Or maybe I just go overboard on the number of categories I do...
More importantly, it takes a while to go from first playing the game, to being able to make sense of the code, and understand what sort of things you can do that aren't going to be a nightmare to code.

Maybe I can introduce them to the game casually this semester. They are not completely new to coding, having worked with Arduino electronics projects in the past. I will learn LUA myself in the next few months and make a more informed decision; its just hard to find a good coding experience. You might remember beginner stuff like "lets do accounting!!! A program to balance your budget, 15 year old!!!!" Being able to do something video game related would be nice, other options out there are frankly lame. A modding style option with a programming requirement seems like a great level of challenge, as opposed to some others I've seen where you go from the ground up. Roguelikes in general really seem to mesh with education, imo. Additionally, they all play Skyrim and think its the best thing ever, maybe I can expand their horizons.

THIS. The temple of the almighty roguelikes can ALWAYS use more converts.

And wasn't Skyrim already published on PC with a kit to mod the game from there? Another potential connection that way... (I know Oblivion and Morrowind were, dunno about skyrim.)

And god knows, more unique classes/races/etc are always good. More variety, more attraction, draws in more players... Everybody wins.

coconutbowl wrote:Additionally, they all play Skyrim and think its the best thing ever, maybe I can expand their horizons.

Those poor kids.
Put them in small groups and they should be fine.

(Incidently, yes the modding tools for Skyrim are easily obtained. However, I ran out of patience attempting to code anything more complicated than trivial stuff with the toolset. It is bizzare. And there are legal issues with using a commercial product for teaching.)

I meant another connection where they might be lured into roguelikes and creating addons for tome. Not in using the TES construction set or whatever it's called now to teach. Some may already be familiar with doing things like that, and be more apt to be lured over to newer, more fertile, grounds. (Besides, Tome is cooler, and doesn't take a $6000 PC to run like Skyrim does.)

Instead of a class, it might work better to just do a talent tree. I think it should cover most of the same programming ideas, but not have as much ToME specific things in it.

Nothing really concrete to contribute, just want to chime in and say this sounds like a GREAT idea. I work in computer simulation of molecules, and stuff like figuring out how to translate physics and math into code is a lot of what I do; being able to do that in high school instead of the usual boring coding exercises like you mentioned would have been amazing. Plus learning how to use pre-existing code and fit what you want to do into a larger system, instead of just making things from scratch, is a far more realisitic representation of what happens in real-world programming. Best of luck and keep us posted on your progress please!