Messages

166

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 22, 2019, 01:53:29 am »

For now rivers are implemented as the good old stencil layer applied to the fractal. It is not ideal, because I want some nice waterfalls and inflows going from out of hills. But that can be done by an opportunistic algorithm, sampling search space randomly for potential nice features.

IIRC, people reverse engineered different sim cities. I should look how they did that. But I already guess they used some hacks that worked for them, but will unlikely work for me.

167

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 20, 2019, 11:42:58 pm »

Ok. Initial fractal heightmap is working. As usual, it is the easiest part, much harder would be planting trees, objects and caves. Although say roads and rivers are fractals too, but they need special handling. In serious applications they are generated from statistical data, but I'm using ad-hoc constraints, parts of which should be passed from world map.

168

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 20, 2019, 01:23:48 pm »

While XCOM/Spelunky style maps generated from premade parts work fine in many cases (especially for modern city streets), they are a bit repetitive, with obvious seams, severely limited in geometry and require creating many parts. Now I want local maps to closely correspond to the world map, which requires more fine grained resolution, that can be used as an input for fractal generator.

169

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 12, 2019, 04:49:17 pm »

The problem with adding more features is that each feature usually relates to other feature, creating combinatorial explosion. For example, if you add rain, then it would look stupid if fire would continue burning under the rain, so you must add the feature of water extinguishing flame. Same way, when you add barebones gas dynamics, like oxygen, the same flame must also burn oxygen down and stop if there is no oxygen. Now that somewhat restricts level design, like you can't have a closed castle dungeon with torches, because you can't have flames in vacuum, and must provide some ventilation, which I've solved for now by allowing doors and windows to pass air.

Another feature is world/travel map, which obviously should allow player to pre-equip his units before combat. Original XCOM had no world map equip feature, forcing player to reequip his units during each battle, while say Realms of Arkania, required doing everything on the world map. In my case, I use scripting to apply item effects on the unit, and site-level script isn't available on the world map. Solution: add camping mode, which would present player with makeshift map with a campfire, so the player could pre-equip his units or say cast healing spells.

170

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 11, 2019, 02:04:49 am »

Added some barebone supply/demand economics for shop items. Guess in future I could also add crafting and/or trading by allowing city shops to have different prices. That way player could raise some funds without any battles or dungeon exploration, by just traveling between cities. Although that somewhat duplicates the delivery quests. And it is not obvious how bandits would hunt player inside such system. Maybe competing merchants will hire assassins?. Still I'm not really creating anything truly new, because long ago there was that Merchant Prince game by Holistic Design, who also did another great game - Emperor of the Fading Sons.

Countless other additions, among them are multithreading, SSE optimized RLE blitting and dynamically animated lightnings for main menu, which required implementing software 3d rendering, because you can't deform polygons without taking Z-dimension into account for texture space, otherwise without Z it will result into what is known as affine texture mapping. So even such simple lightning effects require full blown polygonal renderer.

171

IDT Modding Hub / Re: FOXC - Fantasy OpenXcom

« on: September 11, 2019, 01:52:02 am »

Just an update, B__0 has been hard at work making sprites, we now have some basic Orc and Barbarians sprites!

Join us on the IDT servers and keep track of our progress:
IDT: https://discord.gg/QGGkax7

Sprites are nice, but these green orcs blend with green background  Still that could be a feature if you really want to tease player.

172

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: September 09, 2019, 09:18:35 pm »

Now I'm trying to decide on a story. There are three stereotypical variations:
Background Story 1:
The Great King [KingName] the [First, Second, Third] of [Dynasty Name] has hired you and several other warlords to protect the kingdom from increasing monster attacks and investigate their cause.

Background Story 2:
The ruthless tyran rules this land, taxing poor people to no end. Can you put an end to his rule? Beware of king's still loyal generals.

Background Story 3:
The king of this land has died, leaving no heirs. Now it is up to local warlords to fight for the throne. You're one of these warlords.

Well, as Carmack said story is very secondary to the game, and all three variations are very similar, but story could have various cosmetic nuances affecting gameplay and driving it forward (i.e. what competing forces player will have and how he/she will compete with them). Obviously the best solution would be picking one randomly at the start of the game, or letting player to pick the setting. Yet that will require some time to polish and playtest, so the best idea for now is to implement some single story. Then adding some other possibilities.

Were you "anonimous" (note the "i", not "y")? Did you register in 1999 or get the account later? (People are making bets...) Were you "logicoop1"? (If yes, punched tape was invented in 1725, 2 centuries before Zuse.)
 Probably more true than you think. As far as I know, he's been working on this project since mid-2000s to test his unorthodox ideas about programming and language design. He's kinda Terrence Andrew Davis of game design, but atheist and self-taught.

That is untrue.

173

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: July 28, 2019, 09:16:27 pm »

Only some parts are reverse engineered. Most code was created using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
And OXCE is even more different when I alter some behaviors to be more generic.

But this was not my point, get same situation but OXC is pure and independent GPL program not connected to original game.
You profit from selling data not exes.

Given that it replicates original very closely, that itself can be problematic. Many Tetris clones were taken down, due to them having exactly the same game design, down to the playfield size: https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-likely-is-a-tetris-like-game-to-be-taken-down-on-the-play-store.398902/

So I guess game mechanics itself could be a subject to copyright, not patents. But classic XCOM is not as popular as Tetris, in fact it is very niche, so I doubt anyone would go after it, after all there are several very similar clones being sold at Steam.

Anyway, I think making 1-to-1 clone is boring and not worth the effort, that is why I re-redesigned everything, like using no-RNG combat. And Gollop himself with his latest games moved a bit into different direction, instead of repeating his previous games.

174

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: July 21, 2019, 02:54:43 pm »

I mean something else with game assets, they are NOT GPL, and my question was is legal to bundle them together with GPL exe.
You own all Copy Rights to it but none to your code. Image selling Piratez as standalone game as it still need OXCE.

I mean case as MS long time ago pulled off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
They use it to expand they monopoly by consuming smaller markets.

You can bundle GPL'ed data with any other licensed data. For example, Apple OSX includes BSD, GPL and proprietary code. Although they have replaced the GCC with a BSD license clang compiler. Dunno what was the reason for that, but it broke some of the more tricky code.

Regarding Piratez, it runs on the OXC engine, which is, AFAIK, a result of reverse engineering the proprietary code, in addition it requires assets from the original game. You can probably replace assets with something from OpenGameArt, but the engine code is still very murky legally, because it has the same abstract structure as the original Gollop's code, even if variable names are different.

175

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: July 20, 2019, 11:20:43 am »

Do game asserts fall under GPL? If not you can still sell them and add game engine as free bonus.
This is double edge sword, because it prevent big companies on profiting on your work for free. They need contribute back if they want use your work.
Red Hat is not MS but they still can profit from Linux and improve it.

Big companies have big budgets - they can easily hire the best engineers and artists of their own. What they are really afraid of is losing their market monopoly.

Do game asserts fall under GPL? If not you can still sell them and add game engine as free bonus.

AFAIK, GPLed game assets are treated as GPLed DLL files - i.e. the code you load at runtime. Similarly to how you can use GPL-licensed plugin with Photoshop. So they can be good as a value added content, but not something you can really build upon. I.e. you can't take a GPL licensed sci-fi novel and write a sequel to it, because you will still have to publish the sequel under GPL, including the LaTeX source code, and then everyone could print it or get for free - i.e. you have no copyright. That is why people introduced CC-BY license instead, so producers of derivative work still retain their part of copyright.

I think there need to be also a standard profit sharing version of CC-BY, which mandates sharing the parts of profits with the author, if it brought any. That can be some percent or a fixed one-time payment.

176

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: July 16, 2019, 08:09:06 pm »

1. Is this buildable from https://github.com/saniv/spell-of-mastery ?

I doub't anyone but myself can build it - few IT skilled people tried but failed. I won't be making the build user-friendly, not until I've finish the programming language design. This game is basically a big unit test for the language design and helped me to find the parts needing improvement

2. What is/was your nick at L.O.R. ?

What is LOR? Linux.Org.Ru? I've been at LOR long time ago, but they banned me for anti-GPL shilling. I dislike the share-alike clause, which forces one to release all the source code, so he/she cannot monetize any investments into it. For example, you cant take Linux, improve it and sell it, because you don't retain the exclusive copyright (contrast that with BSD). This clause in fact only helps big players, like Microsoft, as long as Linux is inferior to Windows, but superior to any small-player commercial alternative, becasue it makes market-entry harder and suffocates competition.

177

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: June 07, 2019, 05:14:50 pm »

The progress is steady 

178

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 11, 2019, 01:28:03 pm »

Looking god mate, reminds me of Heroes of might and magic.

It doesn't really have much in common. HOMM3 obviously used voronoi diagrams to generate maps, judging by the geometrically perfect biome shapes. I'm not using them, because they don't appear to have any advantage over fractals and harder to control. Especially when it comes to placing roads and rivers. With fractals, you have mountains, rivers and forests forming naturally, which give birth to settlements, which are then connected with roads. With voronoi people typically placed rivers/roads along voronoi cell edges. It is also easier to fine-tune fractals by say replacing random with statistically correct data, so you could get islands having curvature similar to that of Ireland, or some Moon crater

Also, for now I've reduced the amplitude of road variation, as it was too noisy.

179

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 11, 2019, 01:37:31 am »

Finished the initial version of island generator. For now it is good enough to test gameplay. Random generation is surprisingly methodical, it appears there is just one right way to do it, but countless wrong ones.

180

Resources / Re: Graphic Gallery

« on: May 09, 2019, 06:27:41 pm »

No, if you really want you could today load 2x bigger sprites to game and it would not crash, but problem lay in other place, offset.
Game is full of magic numbers that fit current graphic size and completely do not work with any other size. And adding arbitrary sizes will be hell of a work to do.

Hope one day you will get to refactor it. Would love to see a Diablo mod with original sprites, instead of downscaled