OT: Stupid c++ (Roguelike development)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

The latest

[dogscoff]

Just downloaded and had a little play.

Damn Narf, that is so cool! I really envy you the skills to produce something like this. I used to do a little coding (nothing on this level of complexity) and I'm just now remembering that feeling you get from creating something from nothing.

Have you got a name for your roguelike yet? I suggest you call it "Zort".

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Thanks. Responces like that make my day.

"Zort"? Why Zort?

[dogscoff]

Well, Zort is one of Pinky's many exclamations (along with "Narf", "Poit", "Zounds", "Egads" and others) and Zork was a classic text-based adventure game lovingly referenced in roguelikes such as nethack (Ever wonder why the currency of the Dungeons of Doom is 'zorkmids'?)

Kind of a pun, I guess. Not a very good one though.

(I just love that you can plug "Zort" into the wikipedia and get redirected to PatB!)

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Hmm, thanks.

[Ed Kolis]

Hey Narf, does your roguelike have magic yet? I've become rather enamored of the runecraft system in the Nintendo DS RPG/RTS hybrid "Lost Magic"... it's quite original in that you draw runes on the screen to cast spells, and after a certain point in the game you can combine multiple runes to cast more powerful spells. Obviously you can't draw on the screen in a PC roguelike, but I thought the combining runes system would be really cool... ToME (Tales/Troubles of Middle Earth; http://www.t-o-m-e.net) uses a similar system for one of its mage classes, and if you're interested you could use it in your roguelike too! In fact the idea got me so excited I was thinking of starting work on yet another roguelike project that will probably fail - why I never pick up work on the existing ones I've started I don't know, but it might be fun
The idea so far is that you could have a variety of runes which your character can learn, and spells are cast not from a list but by typing the rune keys - keys on the numpad, or letter keys, or whatever - I kinda like the numpad because you can have "opposed" runes (fire and water for instance) located opposite each other and some sort of "neutral" Balance or Cosmos rune in the middle. Anyway, so you type the "cast a spell" command (say "m", like in Angband), then you type 2 runes, and after you type the second rune you can target the spell. If you combine fire and fire you might get a big fireball, for instance; air and water for maybe a freeze spell; light and air for a haste spell. The more runes your character learns, the more spells he can cast - a starting character choosing the fire-mage template might only be able to cast a fireball, but once he learns a second rune (say, earth) he could now cast four spells: fireball (fire/fire), stoneskin (earth/earth), magma bolt (fire/earth), and earthquake (earth/fire)! So if you had nine runes (say fire, water, earth, air, cosmos, chaos, light, dark, and balance) you could have 81 spells in your game. That might sound like a lot of spells to come up with, but Lost Magic has something like 400 spells and 18 runes, and to come up with those spells they used patterns - all the fire+X spells are beam attacks, all the water+X spells are rapid-fire attacks, all the dark+X spells are monster traps, etc.
Of course if you don't like this idea, don't use it, but I thought I'd just bring it to your attention!

[Ed Kolis]

Here's another spellcasting idea, borrowed this time from UnAngband: Don't just use "intelligence" as the be-all and end-all of spellcasting stats! Split it up amongst several stats! Let intelligence determine how many spells you can memorize, because you have to be smart to remember them all. Let wisdom determine how powerful your spells are, because only wise men have true magical power. Let dexterity determine how likely your spells are to actually work, because if you do the hand-waving wrong it will really screw up your spell! You can even combine this with the runecraft idea: don't let the player use all of his myriad spells at once, but instead give him a limited number of memory slots, dependent on intelligence, in which he can place spells; in order to use a spell which is not in memory, he must have the two runes used to create it available to study from and either "copy" them (casting the spell immediately but perhaps using more game ticks since the character must concentrate both on reading the runes and moving his hands, or perhaps even destroying the inscribed runes which he is carrying) or memorize them (deleting one of his existing spells from memory if there are no more free slots).

[Caduceus]

Played around with Relentless. Good job early on... I can't tell if I am equipping items I pick up though...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

For magic, I'm thinking something simple, that will allow the player to build spells.

The readme has been updated with a sentence on equiping.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

The latest
Bugfixes, updates and name change.

Now that I'm coherent, instead of thematic runes, maybe purpose-based runes. Supposing you have the runes for Fire, Summon, Ray and Monster. You could make an explosion spell (Fire with no control rune), but it would damage your character. You could make a Ray of Fire, Summon Fire (Explosion at a square within your LOS), Summon a Monster, Summon a Monster where a Ray hits something solid, Summon a Fire-based Monster, Summon a Ray (Which would fire a Ray from a square you choose at a target you choose, but wouldn't do anything usefull), or Summon a Ray of Fire (Much more usefull.)

Simple, versitile, quick - What do you think?