Gauging interest in a Dominions Roguelike...

[Zooko]

I've hacked Dungeon Crawl a little, not because I liked the code (written in C, of medium quality), but because I like crawl's superior balance and more consistent flavor vs. alternatives such as nethack.

http://zooko.com/repos/

If you really want to write in C, then I recommend the crawl code base. For one thing, it is actively developed. However, I don't think you should write in C, but instead the Lua modding system of ToME (just from what you said about it -- I don't know anything else), or else just write your own in a nice language like Python or E.

[Ed Kolis]

Reviving dead topic...
No, I haven't revived DomBand (my name for this roguelike) - but instead I have started on a new roguelike: Dungeons of Relentless Killing, or DORK for short!
I started a thread about it over in the SE4/SE5 forum, seeing as that's a good place for off-topic discussions, and also posted on rec.games.roguelike.development...
DORK's magic system, though, will be based on Dominions' school/realm system; I'm not sure exactly how but it will. (In other words, I might have skill levels for the schools as well as for the realms, even though Dom2 doesn't, or I might do something different to simulate the research levels in the schools - perhaps the player will have to pay and wait for research to be conducted? - but there will definitely be some sort of "tech-grid" type of thing as it's known in SE4, just because it's more interesting than simple linear progressions )

[Azhur]

Here are my 2 cents then:

Create a character:

This could work pretty much similarly to Dom as there would be a sum of points to locate upon stats, magic types/power and faith (defines how much your god loves you and enables holy spells). That starting sum would be defined by the race you choose (human = cheap, draconian = expensive). The way you distribute stats, spells and dominion points, you'd automatically get a character class definition.

E.g You put all points on Strength and Dominion = Paladin.
E.g2: You put all points on magic types and Intelligence = Mage, Sorceror or Wizard.

There would also be some Perks/Traits to choose from, which show the same way as heroic abilities:

- Quickness (1,5 x speed)
- Iron Hand (Melee skill doubled)
- Lucky (Always lucky)

The last thing is to choose your favourite god

E.g: Caelum = pray for chillness and flight, while Jotunheim = kill for extra exp points and extra strenght.

Just name your character and to dungeon we shall enter!

The other way to create a new character is by generating it.

[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.