Eye of the Beholder IV (Ver 0.011) Level Editor (Ver 0.011)

[Zach]

Do you have some demo of your text rpg engine?

lol, no.. Like I said I have not built the engine yet. I do have a Prototype I made years ago, when I was learning Python. I'd still be using Python, but I did not like the limitations on distribution methods (pain in the ass to compile an executable, and I do not want to distribute source/bytecode)..

It is not much to show really, it was just a primitive idea of my rendering system and how I wanted the text to update (scroll the screen, not wipe it and print new text like adventure games). There is no coloring, no keyboard navigation shortcuts, etc. It's just a command prompt window.
Basically it just lets you walk around, and prevents you from moving in directions that are not Exits.

http://www.oldskoolgames.com/Morrianna.rar

This is a compiled version for Win32. Extract it to a directory, then run "game.exe". Don't disturb the directory structure already present, and make sure you extract all files. Everything required to run is there, including a Python DLL (so it would work on machines with no python/different versions)

I originally made this version for a friend so he could test it, kudos if you manage to not get bored reading all the descriptions before finding the joke I put into it

[takis76]

Reminds me like AD&D style which the Dungeon Master tell the story and the players needs to react.
And all description of the story is in your mind and players must say something to the Dungeon Master and then the Dungeon Master creates one encounter (Monster attack) and the players hit dices and attack the monster encounter with rounds.

You text RPG , it would be great to create it with this way.
But you need everytime you start your game , a new place will generated or a new adventure.

Also I will give you and some Idea , which I had used when I had my own text adventure , you can use and some interactive
commands like , (Look,Open,Go,Take,Fight) , and you must have some inventory which appears with (Inventory) command.

Also it would great to have some ASCII , player and move it with arrow keys.

You must add some interface , because players will get bored to type (West,East) , You can create something like text rpg with ASCII graphics. And you can add and colors.

I found this , change all images to text graphics.

http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/

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When you walk in the dark dungeon , you look one big dragon , what will you do now?
The dragon seems is sleeping. (Is not good idea to disturb him!)
The player types , Examine command.

You see the dragond sleeps on the big chest.

The player types , Examine Chest.

You see one golden keylock on the chest.

Blah blah...

[Zach]

No offense, but clearly I've already thought of all that stuff, inventory, quests, monsters and all that.. If you read the Text RPG thread in the Gaming Forum you will see that I have a plan and know what I want to do...

I don't think you understood when I said it was a prototype.. It was just a mockup of the idea, and the only thing I did was test the way I want to render the text. And it was made 2 years ago, in a week when I was learning Python.

There will be no command prompt window, because I am going to make a Program/GUI Window interface, but I will have it skinned etc, to look more like a game client.
Also there will be no image/graphics, because it is a Text game. There will be no "ASCII character graphics" because then it will not be a Text game, it will just be another Rogue-type Clone / Dungeon crawler..

The entire game will be presented in Text, just like a MUD game in. Everything is described through text, and the player interacts with the world through typed commands.
I might have some music and/or ambient sounds, though. I need to experiment with the idea once I get my Tools & Game Engine built.

[Kuron]

takis76: How is your game progressing?

[takis76]

@Kuron
My game development is in progress, except I have a lots of difficulties about some special effect funtions of Pure Basic,
I am making a lots of experiments to find some easy way for me to do things, which I can't understand.
I will try to use, PureGDK library (The DarkBasic functions in PureBasic) to do some special things, that I can't do them with Pure Basic native functions directly, because I don't understand them yet.

I feel very shy to continue to ask for help from here very constantly and as you have see, now I am making posts in the forums asking for things that might I have asked for them before again and again less often. Even someone give me some answer which I appreciate very much and thank you.

But might again there will be something that I will not understand. For example all gui window functions of PureBasic which I wasn't able to understand them yet, I left them for later on and I moved my level editor to Visual Basic 6.
Little old, but worked in windows 7 and did what I wan't, I manage to make my map editor and the development will not delay much.

About some special effects which are little difficult to understand with the native functions of PureBasic, I will make them with some other way, or with libraries or with PureGDK. The good new is, I will not change the language, I will create my game with PureBasic , because is fast and efficient.

In case some thing will not able to be happen in run time, there are and painting programs will do the work well.

Now, I am working on the monster artificial intelligence algorithms and I have and some problem about the monster collision between other monsters, not with the environment and players. And with some special effects, like sprite colorising and some text translucent effects. You have helped me a lot about this, but I still have difficulties, I am trying to have separated sprite for each of the effect, if I want to have smaller or bigger sprite, I have a separated sprite.These sprite3D functions are very difficult for me and I don't want to convert my existing sprites to 3D version of sprites, because I eat even more memory for the same sprites.

If I hit my sprites and I want to have some colorized sprite, I have separated colorized sprite for the hit effect of my monsters, because these drawing functions on the images and all of these complex procedures to draw on the images first and then draw all of these images on my screen are little difficult and images are not transparent. I tried to do the trick to put everything on one image and I manage to have translucent images and translucent effects on these images, but these images wasn't transparent because there is not any draw transparent image function or any display tranparent image function with PureBasic.

PureBasic is very nice language, but all of these complexities are not necessary, convert this to that and use this in order to do that.
For example StarDrawing and StopDrawing functions are not necessary for draw something even text or line or box. (My opinion).
Or for example if you want to make some sprite zoomed or rotated is not necessary to convert it in sprite 3D first, it would be happen directly. Or if you want to do something translucent or colorized , is not necessary to put it on images first and them put on the on screen again, is like the language is not compatible with its internal functions. Or the language is not compatible with its internal sections.
Why everything are not simpler. (This just my opinion, I don't judge the language).
If I were a language programmer and if I had too much knowledge to able to program my own programming language, all my functions will be much simpler. And more directly.

The progress:

Now I am working on my monster artificial intelligence algorithms,some sprites, new monsters ,battle system,adventure score system and monster collision with other monsters this is my game progress so far.

Version 0.008 will have the battle system ready, monster collision with other monsters ready and some special effects about some tranlucent texts or colorized sprites ready with any way I will find, either I use some paint program or some runtime algorithm or function from native function of PureBasic or PureGDK.

The result counts , if the game runs fast in all operating systems and does all the effects and the player is satisfied, then this enough for me. How things was happen, regards the programming realm. But the player,the game play and whole game itself must be perfect.

This game will kick ass. Slowly-slowly, I will make it perfect, so far you don't have seen much yet.(In fact you have seen nothing). I have lots of surprises.

This will be the best Eye of the Beholder sequel you have ever seen. Some of you, have seen and know little about another one Dungeon Crawler Game is in progress, "The Legend of Grimrock", this will kick ass too. But I want to break the limits, I want my game kick more ass than "Grimrock".
But I can't compete the Grimrock team.
The Grimrock team is proffessional and are four, but in my game, I am working completely alone and I am not proffessional. And I am not compare a bigger company with bigger funds with me....

Have a nice day, when the version 0.008 will be out this post will be updated.

[takis76]

Merry christmass (Late) and happy new year (Not late yet). The version updated look the first post. (0.008 is out).
Have a nice day...

[Kuron]

Wow, I wasn't quick enough. I missed .008 completely.

Tried .011. As always, it looks really good. This is easily the second best looking game ever created with PB. Unfortunately, there are some issues:

1. Loading of the game is extremely slow, much, much slower than it needs to be. I am guessing this is because of everything needing to be converted out of the .bin files before it can be loaded? It is so slow on loading that I would avoid playing the game for this reason.

2. There are a lot of black lines flashing on the screen of the game. This is unacceptable.

Those issues aside, the game is looking very good. Unfortunately these are two very serious issues.

I haven't tried the level editor, yet.

[takis76]

Hello ,
Happy new year...

My game works perfect here.
It loads in 9 seconds (But the loading time depends how fast is your computer and how free memory you have and how many open programs you have). In worst case I have been waiting up to 30 seconds to load , but I had 10 firefoxes opened 10 explores , the level editor , the graphic program , music programs and any kind of other text programs , and editing graphics , plus the PureBasic Language loaded and Visual Basic Language loaded and some DarkBasic loaded to convert some old code to PureBasic.

And there are no black flashing lines.

One issie I had was , when I opened a screen with "#PB_Screen_SmartSynchronization" Option , I have flicking in TFT monitors But with CRT Monitors works well.

When I used "#PB_Screen_NoSynchronization" Option the flicking effect corrected in TFT monitors but I think I had some issue with CRT monitors but rare.

I have one other version try this one: http://www.commercial-center.com/eob4_p ... 0.011a.zip

Tell me if this loaded faster or if you had any flicking effect.

The version 0.008 was the earlier one so the version 0.011 is more enjoyable and soon 0.012 will be out.

I changed the resolution from stretched desktop to full screen. I will try some desktop stretched resolution for you if you have problem to load it or some flicking effect.

Or I will include 2 exe files. So far I have tried it in 3 different computers in 3 Different video graphics cards and with Windows XP and Windows 7.

[Kuron]

One issie I had was , when I opened a screen with "#PB_Screen_SmartSynchronization" Option , I have flicking in TFT monitors But with CRT Monitors works well.

You need to quit programming for CRTs and quit using CRT-specific resolutions. Nobody uses CRTs anymore.

Tell me if this loaded faster or if you had any flicking effect.

Flickering is not only worse, but now the game isn't centered on the screen. It is shifted to the left and a portion of the left side of the game is blocked and there is an empty black space to the right.

Loading is still just as slow.

[takis76]

Strange , here in my TFT not CRT monitor , works perfect and loads in just 9 seconds.

And my monitor don't shifts to the right.

I will try other refresh rate or the desktop stretched resolution.
It didn't have problems.

I will inform with new version...

[Demivec]

Nobody uses CRTs anymore.

I and my trusty CRT monitor (of 17 years) take offense at that sentiment.


On the other hand I would agree with this:

You need to ... quit using CRT-specific resolutions

[takis76]

Try this version of exe file in the zip

http://www.commercial-center.com/eob4_p ... 4_test.zip

Tell me if the loading became quicker or at least if the flicking stopped.

[takis76]

Or try this:
This is with stretched desktop openwindowscreen

http://www.commercial-center.com/eob4_p ... _test2.zip

All exe files work if you put in the game directory.

Tell me what of them was the best one to keep it.

For me , everything works here.

[Kuron]

takis76: I will try and download those later tonight. Currently I am in the middle of downloading some stuff and I don't have the fastest internet connection. If, not tonight, I will try them sometime tomorrow.

Nobody uses CRTs anymore.

I and my trusty CRT monitor (of 17 years) take offense at that sentiment.

I, too, still have one, but I don't use it to test against as I really don't expect any EUs to have one. If I had my way, we would all still have CRT monitors and TVs. I feel so strongly about this that I actually have one brand new CRT TV that I bought and stuck in the closet to use when my current TV finally dies. I have also collected four more CRT TVs that people were getting rid of that still work fine. I literally have a closet full of spare TVs.

That said, for computers, I have grown to like my LCDs. I love the widescreen on my main system, so nice for watching movies on.

[takis76]

Kuron wrote:
Nobody uses CRTs anymore.

I still using CRT and TFT and my opinion is the CRTs are the best monitors for me.