The spitemaster
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Lately I've been trying to convince several of my friends to play DROD. They have seen it once or twice at my house. They are all the types that would love this game. However they are restricted from downloading it by pariniod parents, viruses and whatnot.

As a solution to this problem, I think that a game on carvelnet may solve that problem. If we use holds from contests like Holds al dente, and other one room holds we could minimise actual playing time on the web, with just enough to hook players. As an added bounus we would get much more brand new players that found it off searching for puzzle games.


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I met a man that wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
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[Last edited by The spitemaster at 11-16-2006 03:19 AM]

Ezlo
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That's a good idea, but I have no idea if it would be feasible or not. If so, I think that's something that could be great for DROD.

NiroZ
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Although I think that this is a good idea ( I won't comment about the feasibility of it though), I think your reasoning is flawed. Nothing short of a limited account of windows(or one that blocks fonts anyway) can stop you from playing DROD, due to the inventions of CDs and the like.

Banjooie
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NiroZ wrote:
Although I think that this is a good idea ( I won't comment about the feasibility of it though), I think your reasoning is flawed. Nothing short of a limited account of windows(or one that blocks fonts anyway) can stop you from playing DROD, due to the inventions of CDs and the like.

You live in a bizarre world where the following exchange doesn't happen.

Parent: I APPEAR TO SEE SOME PROGRAM ON THIS COMPUTER

Kid: Yes'm?

Parent: I BELIEVE YOU HAVE DOWNLOADED IT ONTO THIS COMPUTER

Kid: No no it's on a CD it--

Parent: YOU ARE INSTALLING THINGS ONTO MY COMPUTER THAT'S IT NO MORE COMPUTER FOR YOU

Kid: but it--

Parent: NO

NiroZ
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Banjooie wrote, in summary:
Role-play of a parent who doesn't like their computer changed at all/highly paranoid.

Tried perhaps running DROD entirely from a memory stick or a CD with the .ini directing the .dat files to go somewhere else perhaps?
Nothing short of someone who doesn't want you on the computer anyway or is out to get you/in a foul mood will stop you then.

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 11-16-2006 11:55 AM]

Briareos
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NiroZ wrote:
Nothing short of someone who doesn't want you on the computer anyway or is out to get you/in a foul mood will stop you then.

Unless it's some concerned parents seeing their siblings playing some game on the shared computer that they don't remember installing on it - where it came/comes from doesn't really matter in that case.

Then again, it's my parents coming to me with their computer problems here...

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Pilchard VIII
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Perhaps dmake a small Macromedia Flash demo of DROD KDD or JtRH and post it on Newgrounds or something.

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Ezlo
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I don't think we want people from Newgrounds coming here. That place is a pit of horribleness.

Kevin_P86
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And besides - someone would need to convert the game to Flash, then. I am no expert on Flash development, but I can assure you, it would be A LOT of work to convert a game of the size and complexity of DROD.

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AtkinsSJ
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All I'm thinking are the bandwidth issues. How many people could be playing at once? Otherwise, a good idea. If it works for Dave the Worm, it can work here - except for the size of holds and levels posibly causing problems.

Jatopian
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Ezlo wrote:
I don't think we want people from Newgrounds coming here. That place is a pit of horribleness.

QfT

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NiroZ
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Briareos wrote:

NiroZ wrote:
Nothing short of someone who doesn't want you on the computer anyway or is out to get you/in a foul mood will stop you then.

Unless it's some concerned parents seeing their siblings playing some game on the shared computer that they don't remember installing on it - where it came/comes from doesn't really matter in that case.

Then again, it's my parents coming to me with their computer problems here...

True, but you can prove that it isn't installed on the computer. However, it really depends on the household, and I don't think that the very small minority of cases that would somehow only allow games found online to be played(which has the greatest changed of getting viruses anyway) is worth creating a version of DROD that ran in the browser. Perhaps if it was using a Java applet, but its not really feasible

NekoIncardine
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It seems to me from preliminary analysis of Flash vs. other web programming languages, that our easiest bet would actually be Java (which is a complete, full-featured language). DROD is an incarnately Object-Oriented-Friendly game which could reasonably easily be implemented in Java for the purposes of making a decent demo out of say the Caravel 1.5 release.

I would potentially be interested in helping develop such a release next summer (i.e. when I have the time), actually, if we had other developers involved.

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trick
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NekoIncardine wrote:
DROD is an incarnately Object-Oriented-Friendly game which could reasonably easily be implemented in Java for the purposes of making a decent demo out of say the Caravel 1.5 release.

Doing a DROD-like game in Java shouldn't be harder than doing it in C++, provided you know the language (should be possible in Flash too, I think, what with ActionScript and all), but .. if you want to do a DROD clone, it might be a bit trickier. Are you prepared to reimplement the timing and behavior of everything down to the tiniest detail ? Emulate all the bugs features that snuck into the engine once upon a time and that now, for compatibility reasons, can't get fixed ? I guess you could attempt to autoconvert the C++ code to Java code (or copy/paste/fix), but, well, I haven't tried doing something like that myself, but I imagine you'd run into serious problems. There's operator overloading, pointers, etc etc.

I mean, not to discourage you, but if you want compatibility, it might be more work than you think.

~ Gerry

Syntax
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NekoIncardine wrote:
It seems to me from preliminary analysis of Flash vs. other web programming languages, that our easiest bet would actually be Java (which is a complete, full-featured language). DROD is an incarnately Object-Oriented-Friendly game which could reasonably easily be implemented in Java for the purposes of making a decent demo out of say the Caravel 1.5 release.

I would potentially be interested in helping develop such a release next summer (i.e. when I have the time), actually, if we had other developers involved.

You're absolutely right... DROD lends itself very well to Java dev. As trick points out though, it will be the "business" logic which will be potentially hard to replicate perfectly (esp timing order and slayer movement logic).

I wrote a roach only clone (in java) but then it's then tedious to create the levels so would probably need to decipher the current level files.

As for the legaility/ethicity (?) of this I'm uncertain. But if it's given the go-ahead, I'd gladly help out. Been using C for 15 odd years, and java since beta.

Briareos
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Syntax wrote:
As for the legaility/ethicity (?) of this I'm uncertain.

Well, the code is MPL (aka Mozilla Public License), so as long as you release your modifications, you should be fine - modifications which, as you're going from one language to another, would be quite substantial of course (including replacing the used third-party libraries with Java equivalents, if those exist), but it's been done before; see iText vs. iTextSharp, the latter of which I've used quite a bit...

IIRC the foundation graphics can't be used (unless the Powers That Be CaravelGames(TM) give you permission to do so), but you could always use the DROD:AE graphics or one of the modded styles (again, if you get permission).

Another problem could be calling the whole ported shebang DROD (cue the Mozilla Firefox vs. Debian Iceweasel brouhaha) but what's in a name anyway?

(Of course, that's my airheaded view of how things are and as such could be totally wrong, save for the "the code is MPL" part... )

np: Underworld - Cups (Salt City Orchestra's Vertical Bacon Vocal) (Bruce Lee)

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R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 11-19-2006 12:20 PM]

Syntax
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It was more along the lines of... "If Caravel are OK with it, I'll be happy to help out". As for modifying the code, we wouldn't be so not sure how the licence applies. It would be a reverse engineering job.

But yeah... I'd want an OK before doing anything of the sort.

Someone Else
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reverse engineering?
You can download the code!

Briareos
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Someone Else wrote:
reverse engineering?
You can download the code!

Yeah, that's what I was thinking...

I don't think adapting code written in one programming language for a different language counts as "reverse engineering", unless the could is totally unreadable, unmanageable and incomprehensible in the first place...

(Ever had to reverse engineer your own code because you didn't understand a thing years later? )

np: lackluster_live_lab30_04112006

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coppro
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Briareos wrote:
(Ever had to reverse engineer your own code because you didn't understand a thing years later? )

Yes, actually.

Chaco
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Am I the only guy who actually comments on almost every line when he programs his little bracket-triangle program?

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Kevin_P86
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Chaco wrote:
Am I the only guy who actually comments on almost every line when he programs his little bracket-triangle program?

Yes. You most definitely are...

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googa
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What a coincidence this thread. I was thinking about it last night.

starwed
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I've thought about writing a Firefox extension to emulate the most trivial aspects of the game. (Starting with just roaches, walls, and Beethro, pretty much.)

Javascript + SVG should be enough to do everything even a full featured client would need.

Briareos
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starwed wrote:
I've thought about writing a Firefox extension to emulate the most trivial aspects of the game. (Starting with just roaches, walls, and Beethro, pretty much.)

Javascript + SVG should be enough to do everything even a full featured client would need.

Talk about "Deadly Browser of Death"...

(Too bad that that JavaScript Lemmings re-implementation someone made a while ago had to be pulled... )

np: Autechre - Radio 10.04.05

____________________________
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R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

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[Last edited by Briareos at 12-16-2006 05:52 PM]

halyavin
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Have someone a free graphic for DROD JtRH? I need it for some of my projects (I also have idea to make a drod-simulator in java or at least a room-visualizator).
PS Reimplementing monster movement behaviour isn't hard task. You just have to be careful while reading DROD source code.

Maurog
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You can use my tiles if you want, but there are only walls, doors, roaches and snakes now. I have this uh, unfinished drod-simulator in java, and all the tiles are free for non-commercial use. They're in the Data directory of the zipfile that's attached to this thread. Hope it helps. Hmm, I really need to advance this thing some more...

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