Gauging interest in a Dominions Roguelike...

[Endoperez]

If you wanted the character-generation to really go the Dominions way, then you would choose your race, then the god you worship (one for each nation/theme, possibly with some variation like Caelum pretender always liking magic but sometimes preferring Air, sometimes Water). Then you would choose your training (were you trained by a Hermit living in an abandoned Watch Tower, a Weapon Master of the Count whose Castle towered above your home village, was it that mysterious Crystal Mage living in that Wizard's Tower... OF course, Wizard's Tower shouldn't be as expensive as it is in dominions as it only shows preference of Magic over Might.

Ask Illwinter if you can use their items in it, and if they have any ideas. They link to Adom, Dungeon Crawl and Slash'Em on their home page, after all...


On the RGR.developemet newsgroup, there was just a discussion about combat tactics and styles. Two different styles were proposed:

Adom-style Tactics:
Choose your style and whack away, with differing abilities. Fencing gives you bonus to-hit, small bonus to damage, possibly extra speed if you are good at it, but you get severe maluses if you get surrounded and you can't use shield.
Agressive fighting gives extra str and att, but you lose in def.
Dodging would only work if you had some space around you. With it in effect, you get extra def and actually move to neighboring tile if attack would have hit you without extra def from dodging. The tiles would be those next to the attacker if there are suitable tiles next to him/it.


The second system would cause special movement/attack patterns to have special effects. Examples:
Move three times to the same direction. On fourth, if you hit someone, you perform a Charge attack.
If you have Halberd or similar long-reach weapon, striking to different directions give you bonus att and def. Think Hollywood or Bollywood action films. I would limit the change in direction to two "steps", so if you had attacked up, you could attack up-right, up-left, right or left and get the bonus. The bonus would come in after three attacks.
Wall-pinning. If your enemy is between you and wall, your attacks cause extra damage. If the enemy is in corner, the damage is increased and you get bonus att.

[Argitoth]

Can roguelike be online? I would only play if you could interact with other players.

[Vicious Love]

Argitoth said:
Can roguelike be online? I would only play if you could interact with other players.

Not unless you're proposing a real-time Roguelike. Which would be weird.

I suppose a hybrid game that's essentially a <i>bona fide</i> offline Roguelike with a simplified, multiplayer-oriented online component would be nice, but it'd also be a hell of a lot of work. Better to just make a multiplayer dungeon crawl that isn't a Roguelike at all. Something like Egoboo, only... well... complete.

[Ed Kolis]

Actually, there are multiplayer realtime online roguelikes... google around for MAngband, TomeNet, and Crossfire. But I don't think I'll get that complicated... a regular roguelike is hard enough to write as it is!

Speaking of which, I'm looking for a good way to store game data. I was considering XML, but it's pretty unwieldy unless you have a decent editor, which I'm having trouble finding. I was also considering some sort of relational database, but most of those require some sort of fancy installation procedures; the only one I can think of which doesn't is Access, and that's commercial and only runs on Windows. So unless I can come up with a good XML editor or a free portable DBMS which can be used by a program without the user having to jump through hoops to set it up, I think I'm left with one option (well, two, if you count hardcoding everything ): text files. But text files mean I'd have to do all the parsing and consistency checking myself - not that that's TOO daunting, but I like to make things easy. So any suggestions?

[Cainehill]

If you just format the text files properly, they're actually _very_ easy to parse. Either of two ways will suffice - delimitted fields, where each piece of information is separated by a rare/unused character ( for instance, the pipe symbol '|') or where each field is always a fixed width. Having done a lot of work with both, I suggest the delimitter, and an iostream extraction class that does conversion and error checking on the contents (this is vital in either case).

Either way, place the responsibility for data on the people editting it : if the formatting is wrong, bail out, preferably with an appropriate and useful error message showing the line of data, and the specific field / data that caused the error.

Otherwise, you write thousands of lines of code to compensate for user error, which is an incredible waste of programming time / effort if you aren't going to have tens of thousands of users.

[lebarjack]

Maybe SQLite is the solution. It's a small C database library.
I have even found some bindings for C#

[Argitoth]

Vicious Love said:

Not unless you're proposing a real-time Roguelike. Which would be weird.

I suppose a hybrid game that's essentially a <i>bona fide</i> offline Roguelike with a simplified, multiplayer-oriented online component would be nice, but it'd also be a hell of a lot of work. Better to just make a multiplayer dungeon crawl that isn't a Roguelike at all. Something like Egoboo, only... well... complete.

Alright I take that back. I've enjoyed many single-player text-based games. The most fun is when you and a friend are just playing single-player at the same time and chatting on teamspeak or something.

So, I'll play if it's realistically detailed.

[Endoperez]

Does "realistically detailed" mean that is has to have Fire Brands, Charcoal Shields, Vinemen, winged mages, red-skinned warriors whose mere touch will burn you, Moose Riders, etc etc?

Have you ever tried playing a roguelike? Linley's Dungeon Crawl is very good, and I have actually managed to beat ADoM once. There's enough challenge in both to occupy one for weeks, months or years.

[sushiboat]

Will you make it possible to use graphic tiles instead of ASCII symbols? The graphic tiles with Angband made it much more appealing to play. Even the most rudimentary pictures are much better than commas and ampersands.

[Ed Kolis]

Heh... yeah, I hope to get around to putting in graphics eventually; I have a framework for it set up but no drawing code. Probably I'll use David Gervais' tiles, just because they're of such high quality...