The Way of the Fallen

New screenshots

2008-10-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

Here are some screenshots of new improved engine of the game.

Good morning.. or not

2008-07-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

Yep, definatly not..

I have discovered few major problems with my code. Those are kinda of problems which requires some changes in the deepest core of the game.. That's why I'm considering of rewriting the whole engine.. That would postpone the release a bit but in the long run, I think, it would help me in future patches not to mention stability of the game itself.

I was planing to introduce the "real" multiplaying in the future but if I start working on new ( improved?) engine, I might aswell implement multiplaying there. I think the rewriting wouldn't be so time consuming since I got good part of engine code well coded and working, so on those parts it's just copy&paste.

Multiplayer

2008-07-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

Pampam,

I turned the face of the project towards multiplayer.. For now and on the first release only multiplayer aspects are going to be.. auction house ( where you can sell crafted items or dropped items to other players), ingame chat.. otherways of interaction are not yet supported since it requires alot of work both client and server side.

I also made new starting menu (mainly becouse of multiplaying needs it). Player has to create a new account in order for him to start playing. No worries its real fast and simple thing to do.. all player needs to do is type in character name(has to be unique among players) and password (no restrictions... yet) After that player has set up his account and is ready to customize the character. Players who have already registered can just type in name and password and continue playing.

First release getting near

2008-07-21T04:15:00.001-07:00

Hiya,

The first realease of wof is getting near.. I still got the panels I wrote on last post to be done but after that the UI is good enough for first realease. I struggled with saving and loading today and didn't get any further what I was when I started working on em.. driving me nuts...

Besides playing with save/load I managed to implement aggressive behavior to monsters.. From now on monsters who are flagged as aggressive will engage player if player is in their aggrorange and if monster can see the player. I places random amount of wolves in the vicinity of the village of Fuchie. I had really hard time getting to opposite side of the village map :D

I think I have to implement somekind of disengage range.. at the moment mobs who player agroes will run to player no matter who far player has gone..

Bigger screen

2008-07-18T04:57:00.001-07:00

I also made the default screen a bit bigger from 80x50 to 100x60. The game view remains the same ( 80x50) but now it won't be filled with GUI panels. Instead panels will be places on bottom of the screen ( >50) and to right side of the screen ( > 80).

Currently there are following panels:
targetWindow
playerWindow
logWindow
cooldownWindow

and to be added:
hotbarWindow
tipsWindow
effectsWindow

Saving and Loading

2008-07-18T04:50:00.001-07:00

Today I made a huge progress with saving and loading. They actually work ( to a point :D). Game creates file .dat which holds every player variable except effects and quests ( which I have to save separatly). Game also saves items and mobs of visited locations into file __mobs.dat /_items.dat. I tested this by creating temporary worldmap of 6 places..

Loading the game seems to crash sometimes, I have to trace that bug before doing anything else. So far I know that it has something to do with items.. itemList of the current enviroment bugs somehow.. Haven't figured out yet is it the saving of the enviroments items or loading them up which bugs.

Quests

2008-07-17T03:41:00.001-07:00

I have added Journal to game. It basicly holds players quests and shows help and status of them. Also for the sake of testing I made my shopkeeper give few quests to player and so far everything seems to work the way it should.

At the moment quests are quite boring.. gather this or kill that or visit some place. In the future I am going to add some event type quests also.. like escorts for example. Quest rewards are exp and money but as I go down the road there might be items and spells seen as rewards also.

I ran into Player classes code again while coding journal and I gotta say I hate it! I so have to rewrite those damn dialogs again. It's such a mess that I doubt I can read it one week from now. PUUH

Combat

2008-07-16T04:41:00.001-07:00

Today I tweak combatsystem a bit. Now all damage is calculated throught abilities.. Every creature has two basic abilities: mainhand and offhand. Offhand might be integrated to mainhand in few cases, like if wielding two-handed-weapon. Every skill ability uses mainhand or offhand to inflict damage.. This is not really a new thing but from this moment on creatures can do critical hits. from coef 1.1f to 2.0f, higher the coef is more rare it is. Also weapon base damage is calculated to skill damage (if skill uses weapon)

Putting it together

2008-07-15T04:09:00.000-07:00

I have spent most of the day further developing config class and how it works. At the moment I have managed to get it to stage where it can parse abilities which holds effects inside and creatures which holds those abilities.. for example

when loading creature Dragon

creature Dragon holds ability Dragon Breath which holds effect ignition which deals periodic damage

creature Player holds ability Firebolt which holds effect ignition which deals periodic damage

creature Player hold ability Rend which holds effect ignition which deals periodic damage and has it name changed to Bleed

Sounds simple but it's all done by config files so it was a bit of a brainteaser.

Memory leaks

2008-07-14T23:39:00.001-07:00

Pum,

I have been tracing this morning few memoryleaks.. Most of them are from excess use of TCODConsole class. Im going to use TCODConsole::Root instead of new instance of TCODConsole. That way it's even faster than it used to be and doesn't take unneccessary memory.

Yesterday when I was config the game balance a bit I opened the task manager of windows and saw that game took almost 20mb of memory.. 4.5mb is the initial size of it so it made me wonder a bit :D

Config

2008-07-14T02:31:00.001-07:00

Heya,

I didn't get much done this weekend since my newly born babygirl wanted to have some company :D Only thing I got done was spell casting bar.

Today (monday) I redesigned spells and skills classes and from now on those are one single class called abilities. I also decided that it is a good time to put all spells and skills into one single config file. This makes game balancing and editing a bit faster and to be honest dynamic is the way to go anyways. At the moment every skil/spell is read into list for all creatures but I am going to make a one single Config class which hold those details. Then all creatures can fetch their ability info from Config's list. This makes the initialization alot faster.

rework on skills

2008-07-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

Meh, yesterday I posted a post about recreating the whole skill system so that it would hold spells also.. I thought it would be a one major project but turns out.. it wasn't.. Actually I am already done with it and I am more than happy about result.

At the moment player can use skills and spells which both are loaded from the file into abilities class. I only have instant cast skills atm but I have done some testing with damage over time and direct damage spells. All of these seem to work quite nicely. Also if player moves while casting a spell (unless its instant cast), the movement will interrupt the spell casting.

Skills

2008-07-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

I created the skills class fairly soon, still when i was developing the base structure of creatures and therefore skills-class might get a facelift.. or more like face removal and installation of new improved looks.. just like M Jackson had..

I was thinking of implementing both skills and spells into same class, since they both have a lot of same variables and actions. If I do that I have to integrade that class to cooldowns class and change the cooldowns class to handle casting time too.

A huge project ahead..

Problems

2008-07-10T01:51:00.000-07:00

Pam, Crash, BANG

Iam starting to have trouble with implementing new things to creature baseclass.. I don't know what is the problem but compiler just wants to go grazy on me when i try to add new things.. Gotta solve that problem before making any other changes.

Yesterday I made some improvements on Effect class and it's working like a beaty now. Also monsters have now ENGAGE, ATTACK and FLEE actions implemented. Engage and flee doesn't have any fance pathdinging yet but Im hoping to add that later on (after I have solved the problem above)

pickup and drop

2008-07-08T02:21:00.000-07:00

Today I finished the code from picking up items from the ground and dropping them back to ground from inventory. While I coded that I ran into few clicks; first would be that I had noway of accessing enviroments itemlist from the player class so with grey mind I made itemlist static type. Not really a big deal but I persanly don't like to use static variables/functions but must is a must. Another option would have been to write three times more code and make it way more complex ( which isn't a good option either), so I picked the lesser evil. Well thats actually just one click but I am sure there's gonna be more as I start debugging :D

I also created new class 'Effects' which holds and runs all kinda of effects on creatures ( hungry, thirsty, stun, bleed etcetc) so this brings me back to designtable for the battlesystem design.

Cleaning up code

2008-07-07T04:21:00.001-07:00

Heya, I said on my previous post that I would do some brainstorming on this post but I haven't got time to do that just yet:) Instead of that I spend some time to clean up my code a bit, it's much easier to read now and has some kinda of logic in presentation.

I implemented the time class which holds and modifies the time variables, weather system reads its required variables from timeclass ( time of the day and so on)

Ah yes, I made a permanent objects called signs I have places on the doorways of the citys houses. When those hits the players fov, text appears to show which house that is (general goods, blacksmith etc). Signs can also be used to put on crossroads and/or special area entrances.

Weekend

2008-07-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

During this weekend I have managed to do quite a bit of work :) I am actually quite happy with the amount of code I have done. First of all, I changes my map from integer to char array.. Not a big change but it helps me. Then I tweaked the Log system. It now cuts the sentences "right", meaning that if cuts them from whitespace, not in middle of word for example.

Creatures got races and bodyparts (slots) . So now I am able to write more complex combat code ( in the future ). I also added two new places to starting town. Graveyard which is full of zombies and skeletons and a playingground which is full of.. umm fruits. Both are questareas for first quests to help player to get to know the game.

While implementing those new areas, I also implemented random forest generator so that i wouldnt have to put all the trees to map by hand.

I have also wondered about skill and magic presentation and alternative ways of Hitpoints and spellpoints. Ill write more of my thoughts about these on the next post.

I can't think of a title...

2008-07-04T04:10:00.000-07:00

I did a framework for messaging system. It can display 8 newest messages all the time and has a history to display every message ever received. It has still some bugs, for example line breaking is not taking words in account. It just cuts the string when it meets logs max width size.. I gotta work on that so that it seeks the last whitespace and cuts the line there.

I made also little tweaking on equipmentlist ui. Now it shows stats of the selected item at the end of the list. Still not too happy about that solution but it just will have to do till i figure out something better.

In fact the whole code for equipment and inventorylists makes me wince everytime I have to take a look at it.. its working just the way it should but it is soooo poor coding.. I think ill have to rewrite it all before it drives me grazy.

I am also starting to think that I should size up the game console a bit. 80x50 is not that big and the game might look better and feel better with a bit bigger enviroment. Will see how it goes.. Im not too keen to tweak UIs before i get the basic things done.

Screenshots

2008-07-03T04:15:00.000-07:00

Here are some screenshots, bare in mind that these clips are rough examples and will get tweaked.

First, there is my first attempt to create some kind of start screen for the game. Highly inspired by UR since I didnt have much time.

Second screenshot shows how the equipmentlist and character details are shown currently. Player can cycle throught that list also with up and down arrow. When player hits enter it tried to remove selected item and put it back to inventory. TODO: item stats after the item name.
Below equipment list, there is character detail panel. Its still very rough design but it shows what kind of attributes there are in the game already.

And finly, here is inventorylist, player can cycle trought the list by pressing up and down arrows.On the left is the actual list and on the right is item details.

Tweaking

2008-07-03T04:05:00.000-07:00

I have made some tweaking on weather and FOV systems. I still have to do something about light changes from morning to day etcetc the jump at the moment from completely dark to almost daylight doesnt seem "realistic"

I also tweaked inventory, equipment, skill and NPC dialogs. Now player can which from inventory dialog to equipment, and so on, with left and right arrow keys. Also if player is talking to vendor (for example blacksmith) player can check his inventory and equipment by pressing arrow keys and get back to vendor-dialog without ever "leaving" the vendor. This helps player to manage potions/items etc much easier.

Weather

2008-07-02T06:04:00.000-07:00

Hiya,

I used all the time today to improve the weather system. As Stated in prior post the enviroment has a rain effect. Today I implementet clouds and time. Enviroment changes its light according to time of the day; at night the enviroment is dark and at day its more visible.

I also implemented controls for the weather system to control cloud and rain intensity and to change time. I think I'm going to spend next few days tweaking the weather system more. It is going to be a big part of how player sees and feels the game enviroment. I am confident that time has also a part in everyday live of NPC and monsters and therefore in players live.

While tweaking the weather and lights I gonna do some work on FOV also (its kinda integrated into weather)

Data Structures

2008-07-01T04:32:00.001-07:00

Murr,

When I started coding this morning everything seemed fine but as soon as I tried to do more complex code on equipment- and inventorylist I had no choice but to rethink and recode my data storage structure.

I was using STL containers but those things just lack so many features I needed so I decided to start from the scratch and do one by myself. After few hours of coding and polishing I was finished with my container.. and to be honest I am quite happy with it. Its flexible, quite fast and the most importantly it works!

So now that I had working container I finished up coding the inventory- and equipmentlist. Some UI tweaking is required but the basecode is done. At the moment the UI is actually quite horrible; its for my debugging so I don't even want you to see a picture of it..

While drinking my coffee I also implemented rain effect on enviroment. Currently only rain(water) is coming down from the skies but its really a no big deal to implement snow or perhapse rain of fire ?

Inventory and Trainers

2008-06-30T02:26:00.000-07:00

Hiya

I have been working on trainers and inventory. There are still some polishing to do but basic functions are done.

___Inventory___

Inventory shows items you are carrying with small color code next to its name. Color gives a hint about quality of the item (grey for poor, green for uncommon, blue for rare and purple for epic quality item). And yes it is the same as WoW's :) I propably change the codes and texts to suit my need better but for now those will stay.

Player can cycle throught the inventory list by pressing up and down arrows. On the frame to right player can see detailed information about the item ( stats, special abilities and so on)

___Trainers___

There are trainers in specific locations in the world, some are leveltrainers and some are abilitytrainers. With leveltrainer player can gain stats (of a choice) by advancing a level (concept is widely used in MUDs). I haven't decided yet how to calculate level costs but its going to be semi-dynamic imo..

Classtrainers works in pretty much same way. Player can train skills and abilities by investing experience points and gold into them. Player can train one procent at a time at the moment. I was planing on putting some quests as a prequisite for few skills to make skill training more interesting.

Todo

2008-06-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

I was planing on implementing quest journal next and making few quests. Also a class and level trainer will be coded in next few days. When those are done ill put my mind on improving the enviroment graphics and combat code.

A lot of work to be done but when those are done I think the game is ready for little testing in my and perhapse in your behave.

And sorry for bad english gramma and so on.. Writing these text in work so I got hard time keeping my mind in one thing :)

What has been done so far..

2008-06-16T00:59:00.001-07:00

Da'lar is still on development so there are no playable or even downloadable version of this game. But still I want to share with you some of the features which are already in place and some which I plan to code in near future.

First of all, as said in previous post Da'lar is using TCOD library for it's graphics. I have found that it is the most powerful roguelike game library at the moment, in my opinion :) Jice has done a great job putting it all together.

At the moment game has a basic roguelike features such as line of sight, movement, NPCs and a very simple combat code. Addition to that I have coded clouds and torches (for player torch and for example a streetlamp).

Combat code so far includes few skills like swing, cleave and hitting with mainhand and offhand.
As this game runs in realtime all skills and abilities have cooldowns. For example mainhand and offhand cooldowns are set to 1 second, swing and cleave have cooldown of 2 and a half second.
So when player attacks target without using any skills, the mainhand cooldown is triggered preventing player hitting the target for 1s with mainhand, meanwhile player can hit the target with offhand or use skill (if the skill doesnt use mainhand).

I have also added rolling combattext above each creature for player to see how hard the creature has been hit or how hard the creature hits player (also misses, parries and dodges are included).

Some other features are "Character Details", "Cooldowns", "Open/Close door" -panels.

Da'Lar adventures

2008-06-16T00:56:00.000-07:00

Hello there,

I decided to create a devblog for my game. It's called Adventures of Da'lar. Da'lar is a roguelike game written in C++ using TCOD Library for console IO and graphical elements.