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What there is to do & SumWars/LoS

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 17:18
by Julius
I guess everyone has seen this: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2012/12/c ... -help.html

So how can we progress on this?

For now Skorpio has made a list of things that need to be done for OD to progress:

- Tile set implementation (this should have the highest priority)
- AI improvement to allow basic gameplay for a minimalistic tower defense/rush or dota mode
- Editor improvements - Adding and deleting creatures, traps, rooms and
other props is not possible yet (only in the level file). Modifying the
map layout is not possible in editor. With these features people could
already design maps and load their own creatures and props.
- Creatures' health points don't work (and probably damage, too). They
seem to die instantly, but I'm not sure if it's not implemented yet or
if it's a bug.
- Lighting has to be improved and we have no shadows yet
- The music stutters and we need to find more music (have to search on OGA and elsewhere)
- Shaders and particles for water, fire and lava
- Sounds need to be improved.


Comment: at least on the music side West has done some awesome songs for SumWars, which would probably fit to OD too.

Otherwise? Oln (see here viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2903&p=39181#p39130 ) from OD and dezGusty from SumWars (see here http://sumwars.org/forum/index.php?topic=432.0 ) have expressed that a merger might be a good idea and maybe feasible. But both need to have a closer look at the other sides code first. Then there is someone named Mors who expressed some interest in helping out on the blog.

dezGusty is proposing to move to a common code base and implement both games as mods. I guess since SumWars has already lua scripting, using that as a start for modding would be good, e.g. it's game-code is already abstracted I think and could be implemented into the OD engine which seems to have the better graphics capabilities (and is already on OGRE3d 1.8) and also has the core editor functionality.

Ah btw, some ideas could maybe also be taken from Lips of Suna, which is also based on OGRE3D.

But I guess we are still looking for contributors. Maybe a post over at the OGRE3D recruitment board would help also?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 19:00
by Skorpio
I can't really judge whether a complete merger is beneficial or just makes everything more complicated. I'd really like to hear an opinion of a programmer.

The models could be a bit problematic, too. I just imported a model from Summoning Wars in Open Dungeons and it's a bit bigger and rotated differently. Andrew Buck made it possible to scale models in the OD level files, but there's no way to rotate them yet. I hope that won't be too difficult to fix for a programmer without messing up the animations. In Blender scaling and rotating an animated model seems to be impossible without breaking the animations. At least you can set the up axis to Y in the exporter.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 20:36
by tweek
Hello!
I happend to be a "someone named Mors who expressed some interest in helping out on the blog."
A list from Skorpio contains big tasks but for now I need some small assignments to get familiar with the code. Could you please recommend something particular?

I checked the bugtracker (http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/opendungeons) but tickets there look a little bit outdated (1+ year old). Is it still in use?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 21:27
by Julius
Skorpio {l Wrote}:I can't really judge whether a complete merger is beneficial or just makes everything more complicated. I'd really like to hear an opinion of a programmer.


Yeah, I agree. So far we had only some rather theoretical oppinions. Would be great if someone who actually had a look at the code could comment. However even if it doesn't work out, it would be still great if we could revive at least one of the projects.

About the model animations... well I think that is not really the biggest problem right now. If everything else doesn't work they could be still either redone, or we could try to export them to .bhv animation only files and reapply them to another differently scaled/rotated skeleton later on. At least theoretically that should work and is probably less work then redoing them.

@tweek/Mors: great that you are willing to have a look at the code! I guess the bug-tracker should still be of some relevance as development has stalled for almost a year now AFAIK.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 21:33
by Skorpio
Welcome tweek! Would you like a cup of coffee? :)

I don't know what a minor task would be. Maybe Oln can help you getting started, because he was the last main developer. He's still around and you could send him a PM.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 21:58
by charlie
Be more imaginative Skorpio. What's a simple feature you wished the demo had?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 22:51
by Skorpio
Would it be easy to add spells? :p

Could you maybe check out how the "addtiles" command works and make it possible to add and remove ground tiles from a map with a mouse click? Currently you can only specify a square area which will be filled by entering the coordinates in the console, and I don't know if there's a way to remove tiles. Not sure if this is a simple task. :)

Also, when you press "new game" the game starts immediately. It would be nice to have a map pick screen, even though there's only the testmap. And an esc menu would be nice.

The lights flicker too much at the moment. Maybe the flickering should be turned off completely till we can improve it.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 07 Dec 2012, 23:49
by paul424
Traditionally, I can ask for new Tiles in an SVN in the same format as the old ones , plus someone engaging in discussion of Events.

As I debate with myself , I come to conclussion that the heart of 'game world control' should be a suit of simple and orthogonal functions written in hardcoded in OD's C++ source code, which should be exposed to Event System, AngelScript System, and maybe even a console,those would be something like : setting the position of Creature, setting its health ....etc. Those functions could be composed to make more complex ones , or trigger some Events, or define new Events all those without the recompilation of the main binary .
Events could be some patterns of sequence of actions , expressed in grammar like regular expression or some other one , which would be enough useful to be worth writing a parser :P

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 08 Dec 2012, 15:34
by Danimal
Arent all of those too deep into code? I think the making a somewhat playable demo can be a good start, just make a good map and post on homepage. Even if its without the new models or tiles, at least we can say we are not dead and attract the interest a new release always get. Obviously, after that, things need to start moving a bit. A more friendly map creator could be a good thing for example.

Thinking on things easily doable, main menu screen could be redone into something like dk2, buttons over a 3d scenario composed of a view of an undergroud corridor, with eerie music, water drops sounds and creepy shadows moving in the distance.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 08 Dec 2012, 21:03
by Dratz-_C
Hello everyone,
I am here from a topic on the Summoning Wars forum. I have known of Open Dungeons for sometime as I would see it on my way to the Red Eclipse forum, also on freegamedev.net. When expedient, I try to create artistic using both Summoning Wars and Red Eclipse. I have no practical programming experience. I am working on getting Open Dungeons to run on my Windows XP 32-bit PC. Preliminarily however, based on my experience with Summoning Wars and what people are communicating to me about Open Dungeons, I think it might be a good combination to use Open Dungeons' map editor, and multi-player faculties with Summoning Wars artistic content and single-player faculties. On the other hand, it would require some an array of: patience for this list to be completed; possibly solicitation if new interested coders are required; feasibility assessments and, if the results are favorable, potentiality assessments by those coders; programmatic planning using Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic, and Time-specific (SMART) goal setting; and corresponding execution by these willing coders in accordance with their planning. I guess we shall see what happens in the coming months. In any case, thanks for your welcoming me to the Open Dungeons forum.
Cheers

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 08 Dec 2012, 22:20
by Skorpio
Welcome, Dratz-_C!

Yeah, soliciting is pretty important. We have to find more contributors. Would anyone be willing to try to recruit more people on other sites/forums? Paul has already tried this, but I guess since the development was so slow nobody was really interested.

We should probably focus on the editor first. A fully functional editor and at least some minimal gameplay will hopefully attract more people, especially artists who want to check out their stuff in-game.

I've asked on the Summoning Wars forum if they could implement their shadow system in Open Dungeons as well. Would be great to get some shadows. :)

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 09 Dec 2012, 20:49
by Julius
I think the OGRE3D forums would be a good place to start doing some "recruitment" efforts, however I guess we would need to come up with a nice presentation of things by people actually working on either game (e.g. I, as somewhat of an supportive outsider would feel a bit strange posting around trying to get people to help out).

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 09 Dec 2012, 21:28
by Skorpio
It seems I have to do the recruiting, although I don't think I'm the right person for this. I wish we could at least get a new release out, before we start recruiting more people.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 10 Dec 2012, 02:00
by charlie
OK, well, there's a task for any potential coder/contributor - to build a new release.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 10 Dec 2012, 19:30
by Danimal
Why havent the current one been released? is there a big problem? (besides programmer lack)

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 10 Dec 2012, 20:09
by oln
I think svenskmand had some issues with cross-compiling windows binaries from linux.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 10 Dec 2012, 23:10
by Skorpio
Did Svenskmand tell anyone when he'll have time again?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 12:34
by Danimal
I get most programming is done from Linux, but cant Cmake spit out a windows version easily? also code should be independient of OS used, cant a some programmer with windows do it?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 13:05
by oln
It should build fine on windows as far as I know, what svenskmand tried was cross-compiling from linux. He hasn't logged in in a month so I don't know what's happened with him.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 14:25
by TheAncientGoat
Just throwing my towel into the ring, regarding Lips of Suna; it already has pretty much all of the functionality you need to make a DungeonKeeper (and SummoningWars) type game, destructable/minable tiles, room definitions, systems for traps and creatures (even a physics system which would make for very interesting traps). I scripted a base building scenario in a couple of hours... One would have to implement AI routines and a flagging system, but it wouldn't be extreme amounts of work. The engine could even support multiple Z layers for more interesting dungeon designs.

Do note, however, the last time I got a project to use the engine, the entire project exploded :P

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 22:32
by Skorpio
Hehe, that sounds interesting. Do you mean the contributor count did explode or the project itself? :)

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 22:53
by Danimal
I think he meant it the bad way, but since anyone we get to help will start anew, we migth as well switch engines?

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 11 Dec 2012, 23:25
by Skorpio
But Lips of Suna uses the same engine. :p

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 12 Dec 2012, 00:01
by charlie
It was DungeonHack, and the problem wasn't really with the LoS engine itself, but the approach the coder over there took. He just tried to do a bunch of stuff himself, and failed, and then gave up because he figured some features were tough to do with the then current state of the engine. He didn't contact the LoS team via their forum here, so never got answers to his questions. Since he abandoned the LoS engine (which kinda killed DH, because he wanted to do a rewrite from scratch - their 3rd - which I pointed out was nonsense and he then stopped working on it) it gained all the features he was lamenting didn't exist. So... communication. If you work with anybody else's code, you communicate with them.

Re: What there is to do & merging with SumWars?

PostPosted: 12 Dec 2012, 10:36
by paul424
Scorpio : Psshhh

Danimal : Yes, switching engines might be a thundering move, like shortening the front line by von Paulus in 1942 against USSR. Please start to switch engines ASAP.




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