kyevan
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100k per site is the default, I think, but you can adjust it in the preferences.

AtkinsSJ
Level: Master Delver

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All you really need is a room state for every room (unexplored, visited, conquered) and the checkpoint for the current room. I'd imagine that would fit in a small file.

If you split it into levels too, when you go to the next level it could simply store the fact that the previous level is conquered.

Someone Else
Level: Smitemaster

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And possibly you would have to save whether a secret is complete.

hyphz
Level: Delver
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Isn't it necessary to save the state of gates, even in a conquered room?

Snacko
Level: Smiter
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Save for scripting, couldn't we just save the room as "conquered" or "unconquered"? What is permanently over the course of the room other than green doors, green sister doors and master walls?

Also, I can't get started on the tutorial just yet (my computer will be in the shop for about 2 more days), but am I correct in assuming these will be the only ones included?

All 2.0 elements.
Oremites


____________________________
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[Last edited by Snacko at 08-22-2008 12:33 AM]

Beef Row
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Snacko wrote:
Save for scripting, couldn't we just save the room as "conquered" or "unconquered"? What is permanently over the course of the room other than green doors, green sister doors and master walls?

Well, if you're going to use a map you also need 'explored'.

____________________________
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hyphz
Level: Delver
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File: drod.swf (104.5 KB)
Downloaded 85 times.
License: Other
From: Community project, myself and other contributors

We don't have a minimap at the moment. In fact it seems we might need to change our thinking about resolution, because it's a bit bad on the eyes at higher rezzes at the moment..

Just for people who are following this, here's the current SWF. Fair warning: this is pre-alpha. It hasn't broken anything on my machine yet, but I can't guarantee it never will. Notes:

* For tiles (like force arrows and oremites) which don't have graphics yet, nothing will be drawn. Note: NOTHING will be drawn, not even empty space (graphics are odd that way). So if you see Beethro's sword leaving "ghosts" over a space, it's because it doesn't have a tile yet.

* The control keys are QWE ASD ZXC and OP for sword rotation. This might be changed or made changable later on.

* If it loses focus, it just stops. I have no idea why.

* When Beethro dies, he waves his sword around a bit and then just carries on with what he was doing before. This is because when Beethro dies what should happen is a checkpoint restore but we don't have checkpoints yet.

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[Last edited by hyphz at 08-22-2008 03:11 AM]

TripleM
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I'm not quite sure why you're designing this game for left handed people, but you really want to swap that keyboard config over

hyphz
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TripleM wrote:
I'm not quite sure why you're designing this game for left handed people, but you really want to swap that keyboard config over

WASD is the standard key set for most games, even for right-handed people. No, I don't know why, but there it is. But as I say, it should be switchable (in fact the code for the "traditional" DROD controls is already in there, just on a branch that can't be taken at the moment)

Chaco
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I started up the program. It's very obviously an alpha version, as most of the tiles aren't even present, but most of the logic seems sound. Here's two things I noticed that should be fixed in the next version:

*Getting killed by a roach does start a death animation, but leaves you alive at the start of the next turn facing a random direction instead of restarting the room.

*You've currently got oremites set up incorrectly - when stepping off of an oremite patch onto land, Beethro should be facing the direction he stepped that turn, not the direction he was facing at the start of the turn, before the user issued the command for the current turn.

I'm willing to contribute art for any of the missing tiles if asked and given a tile size and reasonable specifications - I'm a pretty decent pixel artist.

____________________________
Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

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[Last edited by Chaco at 08-22-2008 03:16 AM]

coppro
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hyphz wrote:
WASD is the standard key set for most games, even for right-handed people. No, I don't know why, but there it is. But as I say, it should be switchable (in fact the code for the "traditional" DROD controls is already in there, just on a branch that can't be taken at the moment)

That's for first-person shooters or any other game where the mouse is an important input device. The assumption is that the right hand is on the mouse, thusly it is convenient to use WASD because it is where the left hand normally rests (granted, I'd prefer ESDF, but that's not the way things go). Otherwise, the numpad for 9-way or the arrows for 4-way control is preferred.

hyphz
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*Getting killed by a roach does start a death animation, but leaves you alive at the start of the next turn facing a random direction instead of restarting the room.

That's because we don't have checkpoints yet, and Beethro death should trigger a checkpoint restore. I basically know how to do checkpoints, though, so that should be fixed soon.

*You've currently got oremites set up incorrectly - when stepping off of an oremite patch onto land, Beethro should be facing the direction he stepped that turn, not the direction he was facing at the start of the turn, before the user issued the command for the current turn.

Thanks! Fixed.

I'm willing to contribute art for any of the missing tiles if asked and given a tile size and reasonable specifications - I'm a pretty decent pixel artist.

Any art that you would be prepared to offer would be great - even the existing tiles could be improved, if you were interested in that. The tiles are 56x56 PNG files at the moment, but single items with multiple images (eg, roaches with multiple facings) can be placed in a single PNG left-to-right.

Briareos
Level: Smitemaster

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hyphz wrote:

TripleM wrote:
I'm not quite sure why you're designing this game for left handed people, but you really want to swap that keyboard config over

WASD is the standard key set for most games, even for right-handed people. No, I don't know why, but there it is. But as I say, it should be switchable (in fact the code for the "traditional" DROD controls is already in there, just on a branch that can't be taken at the moment)

Well, my #1 reason for suggesting to use the number pad for directions is that the keypad usually has the same layout, whereas the alphanumeric part of the keyboard can wildly differ between countries.

I for one thing have a hard time moving southwest with the current layout since German keyboards have Y and Z swapped compared to US keyboards. So unless there's a way of getting the actual key scan-code in Flash (which should pretty much stay the same no matter what the Windows keyboard layout) as opposed to the produced characters I'd really recommend using the keypad, at least as a (choosable?) default...

____________________________
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halyavin
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hyphz wrote:
The tiles are 56x56 PNG files at the moment, but single items with multiple images (eg, roaches with multiple facings) can be placed in a single PNG left-to-right.

The tiles are 14x14, but floors should have large texture (with sizes divisible by 14). 56x56 for floors tiles would be wonderful. Other tiles can have any reasonable layout.

kyevan
Level: Disabled
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The problem with the keypad is that you don't have one on most laptops...

Also, I might switch s and x. When moving with wa-d, hitting s and not moving is rather annoying.

Honestly, though, configurable with a few defaults is the way to go.

Briareos
Level: Smitemaster

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kyevan wrote:
The problem with the keypad is that you don't have one on most laptops...

All the laptops I know allow you to turn the right half of the keyboard into a keypad replacement.

Please don't cripple controls for everyone else just because a few laptops might not allow the above - at least make it optional. And, like I said, you can't even assume everyone to have a QWERTY keyboard layout - if it isn't international keyboards then it's Dvorak layout users...

Also, if you're doing eight directions on the left hand side using S instead of X for moving south is even more non-standard than the other alternative. Yes, WASD is often used in shooters, but there moving diagonally is holding down two keys together - which really isn't an option for DROD so why do as if it were?

np: Electric President - We Will Walk Through Walls (Sleep Well)

____________________________
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
R.I.P. Robert Feldhoff (1962-2009)

Hikari
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Why not do like normal DROD has, and make it possible to, y'know, set your keys? I seem to remember having come across flash games in the past that allowed that...

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kyevan
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Briareos wrote:

kyevan wrote:
The problem with the keypad is that you don't have one on most laptops...

All the laptops I know allow you to turn the right half of the keyboard into a keypad replacement.

Sure, but then they disable the rest of the keyboard, so you'd have to enable it, move, disable, turn, enable move, argh.

Configurable is the way to go over all, there's no way to create a single keymap that will work everywhere. Well, it's either that or a clickable set of buttons to move and turn...

hyphz
Level: Delver
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I'm just doing the key config screen now. Does anyone know if there's a good way in ActionScript of converting a charCode to a representation of that character that allows for arrow keys, backspace, etc? Or perhaps a canned function for doing it somewhere?

Sillyman
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Uh... may I ask why this is being done in bitmap instead of vector? When I first saw this I thought: Hey, mediaclips, hit detection, and fixed movement amounts can do everything! Then I see that you're writing to a bitmap surface and actually implementing room state as data in a backend, which most flash games don't actually have, instead of just letting the graphics handle it... I finally worked up the courage to ask about it...

Edit: Ah, maybe it's the fact you're not using Adobe Flash, but rather an opensource actionscript compiler.

____________________________
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FNORD

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[Last edited by Sillyman at 08-23-2008 09:00 AM]

Mazer
Level: Master Delver
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Some serious bugs here...

The green door won't drop in the first room even after killing all roaches.

Beethro cannot die for some reason.

And after cleaning the room or "dying", the screen forgets to refresh.

I have Adobe Flash Player 9 and I am running the .swf from Firefox 3.

eb0ny
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hyphz wrote:
I'm just doing the key config screen now. Does anyone know if there's a good way in ActionScript of converting a charCode to a representation of that character that allows for arrow keys, backspace, etc? Or perhaps a canned function for doing it somewhere?

If you are asking this, then I assume that in ActionScript chars are not treated the same as ints. So you may have to write a function with a huge switch or if/elif/elif... statement. It is dirty, but it works.

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Snacko
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Are we going to implement an undo function?

Also, the movement keys are still listed on the Help screen as "1-9".

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hyphz
Level: Delver
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Sillyman wrote:
Uh... may I ask why this is being done in bitmap instead of vector? When I first saw this I thought: Hey, mediaclips, hit detection, and fixed movement amounts can do everything! Then I see that you're writing to a bitmap surface and actually implementing room state as data in a backend, which most flash games don't actually have, instead of just letting the graphics handle it... I finally worked up the courage to ask about it...

Edit: Ah, maybe it's the fact you're not using Adobe Flash, but rather an opensource actionscript compiler.

As I mentioned earlier - I think this would be a better way to go, but all the DROD graphics are implemented as bitmaps right now. If someone wants to actually draw up a tileset as a set of Flash assets that could be used though. I have Flash, and FlashDevelop can import Flash assets.

However, it wouldn't change the fact that the backend would basically have to track the grid - several aspects of DROD's game logic depend on having a reasonably accessible grid handy

eb0ny, character input codes in AS come as ints, but you can convert them to chars with String.charCodeAt. The problem is that for a code like "backspace", this returns an unprintable character instead of something like "BS" that could be printed in the key config screen. So I wondered if perhaps someone has already written something that would print a readable equivalent.

Mazer, Beethro not really dying's already been covered, but I'm really bothered by the claim that the green door didn't drop - I've not reproduced that in any spec.. has anyone else encountered that?

Snacko, undo is already in. I don't know if we need the Help screen at this stage, since the Prelude/KeyConfig screen covers everything it did.

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[Last edited by hyphz at 08-23-2008 10:37 PM]

Doom
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hyphz wrote:
Mazer, Beethro not really dying's already been covered, but I'm really bothered by the claim that the green door didn't drop - I've not reproduced that in any spec.. has anyone else encountered that?

I'm not actually following this project.

But I can still confirm that the same happens for me.

Also using Adobe Flash Player 9, and it doesn't matter which browser I use (IE7, Fox3 or Opera9.52)

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[Last edited by Doom at 08-23-2008 11:10 PM]

Tim
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I love the idea of that thing constantly downloading something from kongregate.com. But I don't understand why that's needed.

hyphz
Level: Delver
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Tim wrote:
I love the idea of that thing constantly downloading something from kongregate.com. But I don't understand why that's needed.

It's communicating with the testing version of the Kongregate API - if you have debug output on, you can see it gets confirmation back that statistics etc. are being checked in properly as it runs. Kongregate can detect that the game isn't really on their site, so the communications don't actually do anything other get checked and produce debug output, which you can't see in the default Flash player.

eb0ny
Level: Smiter

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hyphz wrote:
eb0ny, character input codes in AS come as ints, but you can convert them to chars with String.charCodeAt. The problem is that for a code like "backspace", this returns an unprintable character instead of something like "BS" that could be printed in the key config screen. So I wondered if perhaps someone has already written something that would print a readable equivalent.

There are only 33 unprintable characters in ascii. Put them in separate if branches to generate custom return value, and use String.charCodeAt in other cases. Putting "Backspace" instead of "BS" in key description is better anyway.

____________________________

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
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I'm beginning to wonder what our protagonist here is going to be called. I doubt that we should use Beethro Budkin, since he's currently rather busy being regular DROD's protagonist.

I suggest we use Smitemaster Sam, if only for two reasons: one, it's reasonably generic, and two, I already used it in Imperial Wandering for a similar Beethro-like smitemaster who is not actually Beethro.

(In case anyone is wondering why I bring up the point now, it's because I'm building a second level for the hold and I need to write entrance descriptions that aren't "Entrance 5". The easiest way to write these descriptions is to say "Smitemaster Sam entered the first level of the dungeon and looked around. He saw a few roaches, which marked the beginning of his adventure" or somesuch. But you need a character name for that.)

____________________________
Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

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[Last edited by Chaco at 08-30-2008 07:04 PM]

Snacko
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That's alright, hyphz knows exactly what Caravel assets we're entitled to use in exchange for 25%, but I see your point.

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