Large Monsters in game.

After spending a lot of time going through the code and adding in some special conditions I now have large monsters working pretty much as I want them. Well, as far as movement is concerned anyhow. When it comes to combat there really shouldn't be any trouble, it'll just be a case of checking which characters are next to the occupied squares for the intention of performing an attack.

One of the big monsters in game. The green circle represents the "home" square from which movement.

I've prepared a video which shows how the routes are calculated and how it looks in game.
You can see it below:

Working on this has thrown up a whole host of issues with the code so far. There'll be a lot of polishing going on over the next few days. One problem is that at times the game was calculating things based on a static floor height of z=0.1 rather than a dynamic z=walkmesh_data height. That will have to be corrected if my later experiments with variable height floors will work. Another problem was that many things were using the player object's world position (dependent on the visual representation of the player, i.e. object orientated) in their calculations, when they should have been using the character's ['xy_location'] (a property dependent on the walk mesh dictionary, i.e. data driven). This is one of the hazards of having a data driven game system represented by an object oriented visual overlay. Data can influence visual representation, but visual representations should not at any time influence the underlying data.

In theory you could strip away the visual representation and replace it with an old school roguelike UI, or upgrade the graphics engine, or transmit the data across the internet for a multiplayer game, without the local visual conditions having any effect. One player could be using an ASCII display, while another could be using a 3d display and it wouldn't matter.

Well, that's the idea anyway. :) I'm not sure I'll ever follow through with that scenario, but it's something to consider when making the game.

Comments

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t

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