Just some quick notes

Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 25 Feb 2015, 14:29

hwoarangmy {l Wrote}:Moreover, most games use C++ and I'm not sure Java is better for that.


No, I didn't want to say that Java is better for games. In C++ you can access the hardware directly if you want, Java always comes with some overhead, even if it's something like bounds check for array accesses or such. So ultimately C++ with OGRE is a powerful combination, more powerful than what I am using.

A remark: The Kreatur looked overpowered for my small dungeon, which only consited of a small treasury and the lair. But I assume blancing of monster spawning is something on your list already.

An idea: Did you discuss multi-level dungeons already? If not, in addition to doors and traps workshops could produce stairs at some point, which allow you to difg deeper into the ground, and move the dungeon heart farther out of reach for upperworld heroes. It could be expanded so that on level 1 smaller and weaker creatures liek to dwell, and the more powerful ones only come to you if you have deeper levels to offer.

Silly idea: Bathrooms/toilets/litterboxes. The dungeon is underground already, keeping it somewhat clean won't come for cheap. or you need to give the kobolds shovels and buckets to dig dung from the floors ...

Thinking: I'm not sure how much control a dungeon keeper actually should have. E.g. if the player should actually be allowed reach into the dungeon to grab a monster and place it somewhere else, or if should be a "god game" sort rather, where influence is all indirect, i.e. all work that is to be done must be done through the creatures, and not by yourself.

Silly idea 2: Allow monsters to eat dead opponents? The animalic monster types surely would do that in real.

Idea: Gather knowledge of the upperworlds and start raids on upperwold locations. So that the heros actually have some reason to fight you. Just dwelling underground won't disturb anyone ...

PS: Kreatur is german for creature. Mabe it should have a real name instead? Tentacle beast or Quadruped Horror?
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby BioHazardX » 26 Feb 2015, 12:54

Silly idea: Bathrooms/toilets/litterboxes. The dungeon is underground already, keeping it somewhat clean won't come for cheap. or you need to give the kobolds shovels and buckets to dig dung from the floors ...


LOL, I think it's not necessary a bathroom, who cares.....

Silly idea 2: Allow monsters to eat dead opponents? The animalic monster types surely would do that in real.



Nice idea, it could be applied as a skill for some "cannibal" monsters, like a zombie, a ghoul, a ghast or something else

PS: Kreatur is german for creature. Mabe it should have a real name instead? Tentacle beast or Quadruped Horror?


IMHO, Kreatur is ok, even if I'd prefer a better name...
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 26 Feb 2015, 13:50

Vandar {l Wrote}:A remark: The Kreatur looked overpowered for my small dungeon, which only consited of a small treasury and the lair. But I assume blancing of monster spawning is something on your list already.
Yes, balancing is in our TODO list but it has to be done as a whole when most features will be there.

Vandar {l Wrote}:An idea: Did you discuss multi-level dungeons already? If not, in addition to doors and traps workshops could produce stairs at some point, which allow you to difg deeper into the ground, and move the dungeon heart farther out of reach for upperworld heroes. It could be expanded so that on level 1 smaller and weaker creatures liek to dwell, and the more powerful ones only come to you if you have deeper levels to offer.
Well, I don't see technical reasons that would not allow to do that. When the game will be advanced enough, we could have a look. That will also depend on the players feedback.

Vandar {l Wrote}:Silly idea: Bathrooms/toilets/litterboxes. The dungeon is underground already, keeping it somewhat clean won't come for cheap. or you need to give the kobolds shovels and buckets to dig dung from the floors ...
That's also something that can be discussed. The difficulty is to find the good balance between dungeon management and strategical battles. But if players want more dungeon management, that's an interesting way.

Vandar {l Wrote}:Silly idea 2: Allow monsters to eat dead opponents? The animalic monster types surely would do that in real.
I like this idea.

Vandar {l Wrote}:Idea: Gather knowledge of the upperworlds and start raids on upperwold locations. So that the heros actually have some reason to fight you. Just dwelling underground won't disturb anyone ...
Usually, heroes don't need an invitation to come to dungeons. The know that keepers own many treasuries and that's what they try to steal...

Vandar {l Wrote}:PS: Kreatur is german for creature. Mabe it should have a real name instead? Tentacle beast or Quadruped Horror?
Well, why not ? I know that Kreatur was supposed to be a temporary creature but since its graphics and animations are not bad, we kept it. We will see what our artists think about that :)
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 26 Feb 2015, 14:29

Although I aesthetically don't like the Kreatur (not saying it is badly made, it's just a matter of personal taste), I think it should stay. The animations look smooth, it's scary, and I would consider it a reaper-class inhabitant.

Personally I like the idea of multi-level dungeons, since it allows for longer games, e.g. heroes have captured levels 1 -3, but you still have the lower levels, and want to fight back for control over the whole dungeon. But you mentioned you want games between 30 and 60 minutes, so this suggestion doesn't fit to your plan very well.

Heroes going for the gold of the keepers is a good explantion why heroes intrude the dungeons. I was rather thinking the "save the world" type of heros, but adventurers looking for hidden treasures sure is a better idea.

In the screenshots I saw a library and other rooms. Does it depend on the map which rooms are available, or are those not yet in the released versions?
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 26 Feb 2015, 14:48

ATM, when you start a game, the available rooms are treasury, dormitory, hatchery and library.

If you build a library, you will get new rooms: training room, forge and crypt (as well as spells and traps).
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 26 Feb 2015, 15:07

Cool, I'll test that this evening :)
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Danimal » 26 Feb 2015, 16:08

for the record, bugs and weak creeps cant research, you need an orc, lizardman or something that look inteligent
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 26 Feb 2015, 16:38

I see. Do OD monsters have preferred activities yet? I remember that the wizards from DK 1 went researching without being ordered, others liked to go training or work in the workshops.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Bertram » 26 Feb 2015, 17:09

I see. Do OD monsters have preferred activities yet? I remember that the wizards from DK 1 went researching without being ordered, others liked to go training or work in the workshops.

Yes, they do. :) hwoarangmy added both an efficiency job value and and likeness value for each rooms.
This is permitting to have creatures that like wandering in a specific room with more or less efficiency, and creatures that will work in a room but will never go there by themselves.
See here:
https://github.com/OpenDungeons/OpenDun ... es.cfg#L52

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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 26 Feb 2015, 21:49

That's a lot of attributes for the creatures ...

I've been looking at the code a bit, and I must say it looks pretty clean, and well readable. Congrats :)
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 26 Feb 2015, 23:23

Thanks. And if you like Object Oriented code, we have used pretty much :cool:
And if you come from the java world, we didn't use design patterns :)
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 26 Feb 2015, 23:41

Yes, I like object oriented design. Design patterns aren't a bad thing per se, I think it's good to have a number of standard solutions for problems at hand. And having named patterns helps to talk about implementations, if you can quickly say you implemented a listener or a facade for something, without needing to explain all the details of such a concept.

The first pattern book was all C++, I believe.

Building the library worked, and I got a workshop and a training room enabled, also an additional spell. I haven't tested fighting yet, but everything so far looks rock-solid to me. As you said in another thread, now it's no longer to make a game, but to improve the game that you've made.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 26 Feb 2015, 23:53

Vandar {l Wrote}:Design patterns aren't a bad thing
Of course not. I wasn't saying it's a bad thing, I use them pretty often. But in Java we really use them a lot. And in OD, that's not the case.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 27 Feb 2015, 12:41

Does OD have the same creature limit like DK had it? While playing DK 1, a long time I was wondering why there aren't any further creatures joining my dungeon, which offered everything and more, just until recently when I saw on a web page, that each map had a limit of creatures, and more just wouldn't come.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Bertram » 27 Feb 2015, 13:16

But in Java we really use them a lot. And in OD, that's not the case.

Might come from the a-bit-feral-type of open-source projects, I'd say. I've got nothing against design patterns myself and I'm at least relieved the whole team agrees about fighting against anti-patterns. (Even if we do it implicitely without told agreement.)

I do think we also add what feels right and understandable, and from experience, it's much more important than any design pattern if I had to choose.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 27 Feb 2015, 14:56

Vandar {l Wrote}:Does OD have the same creature limit like DK had it?
Yes, there is a maximum number of creatures limit. The reason is to not overload too much the game by having hundreds of creatures. However, this number can be changed in config files so if your computer allows it, you can increase it.


Bertram {l Wrote}:I do think we also add what feels right and understandable, and from experience, it's much more important than any design pattern if I had to choose.
Well, IMHO, design patterns really show their power when you write a library where you want nearly everything to be customizable. In an application like OD, I'm not sure it is worth it as it doesn't help the code to be readable (because most classes would use abstract types and you don't always know which class is really used).
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 27 Feb 2015, 15:12

In DK 1, I felt confused, becuase the limit was not explained in the manual (or I just missed that section), and I didn't understand why no more creatures come in even if I build more rooms. So the problem is not the limit itself, but the fact that the player has no easy way to discover and understand it.

I see design pattern more as learning examples. They address problems that frequently occur, problems that many programmers already hve been seen, and they offer well working solutions to those problems. But as usual, it's upon the people to understand the idea, and then expand or adapt it to the actual version of the problem type, which they encounter. When I disocvered the "Design Patterns" book on the desk of a colleague, and read it, I felt it to be very valubale knowledge, still very seldom I use a pattern directly, unmodified, but knowing them is still very helpful. I think every programmer should know the 20 or so patterns from that book, understand them, also understand the problems of a "one size fits all" idea, which usually just isn't true, and use the knowledge to build their own solutions.

Furthermore, big projects with large teams benefit if similar problems are solved in similar ways, it helps to understand and maintain code of other teammates. This becomes more and more apparent the larger and older the codebase is, and the more people have worked on it.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Bertram » 27 Feb 2015, 15:44

Well, IMHO, design patterns really show their power when you write a library where you want nearly everything to be customizable. In an application like OD, I'm not sure it is worth it as it doesn't help the code to be readable (because most classes would use abstract types and you don't always know which class is really used).

I see design pattern more as learning examples. They address problems that frequently occur, problems that many programmers already hve been seen, and they offer well working solutions to those problems. But as usual, it's upon the people to understand the idea, and then expand or adapt it to the actual version of the problem type, which they encounter. When I disocvered the "Design Patterns" book on the desk of a colleague, and read it, I felt it to be very valubale knowledge, still very seldom I use a pattern directly, unmodified, but knowing them is still very helpful. I think every programmer should know the 20 or so patterns from that book, understand them, also understand the problems of a "one size fits all" idea, which usually just isn't true, and use the knowledge to build their own solutions.

The point is made, then, I guess. :)

In DK 1, I felt confused, becuase the limit was not explained in the manual (or I just missed that section), and I didn't understand why no more creatures come in even if I build more rooms. So the problem is not the limit itself, but the fact that the player has no easy way to discover and understand it.

There are two points here actually. The first point is that having a bigger room make more creatures come, and the second is the hard limit, used as a gameplay and FPS regulator.

About room size point, we're using it, but not forcefully as a direct link to the creatures number you have. In fact, each creature has got a set of spawn conditions that must be achieved to make it more likely to spawn, a specific room and its size being only one of those potential conditions.
As for the second, well, I guess we need a hard limit, especially in LANs.

IIRC, the current limit per seat is 15 creatures + eventual crypt spawns. If you happen to have a game with less that than and no creature is spawning for a long time, please send us the replay.

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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 27 Feb 2015, 15:51

I think it would suffice to have the limit of creatures per seat shown somewhere. The only real problem was, that the limit was hidden. (And I had no internet those days, so I couldn't easily browse the web, maybe the knowledge wasn#t even on the web back then).

Is the creature AI still a problem? Computers have become so much more powerful since 1997, and DK had limits like 30 or 40 on some maps, so I expected a somewhat recent computer easily can run a few hundred AIs. But I haven't done any testing ...
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Bertram » 27 Feb 2015, 16:45

I think it would suffice to have the limit of creatures per seat shown somewhere. The only real problem was, that the limit was hidden. (And I had no internet those days, so I couldn't easily browse the web, maybe the knowledge wasn#t even on the web back then).

There must be some way to show that. Would you mind if it wasn't forcefully a number?
Like a chat event saying: "You can't have more creatures at once." <-- which isn't entirely true thanks to Crypts.
or maybe the portal changing their colors or stopping to function maybe?

Is the creature AI still a problem? Computers have become so much more powerful since 1997, and DK had limits like 30 or 40 on some maps, so I expected a somewhat recent computer easily can run a few hundred AIs. But I haven't done any testing ...

Actually, hwoarangmy did a great job at the AI already and the AI isn't a real threat for performance. I'm sure you can have a play with ten of them with the current standard laptop and decent video drivers. The number of creatures shouldn't be a big bottleneck also in term of video performance, as we have a fog of war now, but normals applied on models do have a small impact.
Pathfinding, AI and a lot of stuff have already been optimized also thanks again to hwoarangmy. (He rewrote half of the game actually, or maybe more.)

Speaking of performance, the current bottlenecks known are:
1. Ogre - We're using Ogre 1.9 and it is known to be slow, or at least slower than certain 3D engine out there, like OSG or IrrLicht.
That said, Ogre has the advantage that it is well known by the team, and we have worked hard to fix the game to work with it.
The next important step will be to move toward Ogre 2.x, which should fix most performance issues and introduce other bugs. ;)
2. The minimap. The minimap is a perf-killer. We should tweak the code to make sure we call only what's necessary when it's useful.

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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Akien » 27 Feb 2015, 18:37

Bertram {l Wrote}:
I think it would suffice to have the limit of creatures per seat shown somewhere. The only real problem was, that the limit was hidden. (And I had no internet those days, so I couldn't easily browse the web, maybe the knowledge wasn#t even on the web back then).

There must be some way to show that. Would you mind if it wasn't forcefully a number?
Like a chat event saying: "You can't have more creatures at once." <-- which isn't entirely true thanks to Crypts.
or maybe the portal changing their colors or stopping to function maybe?

Well I think we could have an entry in the top bar with $nbCreature/$maxNb, reusing your nice creature icon from the editor.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby oln » 28 Feb 2015, 03:24

2. The minimap. The minimap is a perf-killer. We should tweak the code to make sure we call only what's necessary when it's useful.

While the minimap is not very optimised, I don't think it's really a major slowdown, last time I tested turning the drawing off, the difference was a like 1-2 fps. The main cause of slowdown is rendering right now, so we'll have to look into how that can be improved.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby Vandar » 28 Feb 2015, 22:50

I've tested the 20150228er Version briefly:

- "Hand of evil" based lighting seems to have improved. At least it looks so to me. I like :)
- The icons on the bar top right are good. Also the icons near the minimap. Didn't notice them before.
- Ran into unexpected enemies. I miss the "evil eye" spell to peek into unknown areas.
- Also, I miss the load/save feature to undo such mistakes without having to start all over.
- I've got very powerful looking creatures already with a small dungeon.
- Kobolds left one, the last one square of a room unclaimed. Lazybuggers. But I've seen the code that this is intentional (not the last square, but that they just quite claiming by chance).
- Not sure if I like the shield icon if I have a creature in focus. Guess I'll get used to it. What's the meaning of the number? Got 1 and 16, maybe other numbers.

Nice progress since the last release! I particularly like the UI improvements :)
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby hwoarangmy » 28 Feb 2015, 23:33

Vandar {l Wrote}:- "Hand of evil" based lighting seems to have improved. At least it looks so to me. I like :)
Shaders have been fixed thanks to oln :cool:

Vandar {l Wrote}:- Ran into unexpected enemies. I miss the "evil eye" spell to peek into unknown areas.
I guess that will come soon :)

Vandar {l Wrote}:- Also, I miss the load/save feature to undo such mistakes without having to start all over.
I've created a PR with the save feature. It is not perfect yet (vision on rooms/traps/...) is lost after reload. But the rest works :p

Vandar {l Wrote}:- I've got very powerful looking creatures already with a small dungeon.
Yes, for now, it is not very hard to get powerfull creatures. Research are also way too fast. But that's also for testing reasons because they have been released lately. With a bit of balancing, that should change :)

Vandar {l Wrote}:- Kobolds left one, the last one square of a room unclaimed. Lazybuggers. But I've seen the code that this is intentional (not the last square, but that they just quite claiming by chance).
If you don't force them to do something by dropping them, workers might do something else (digging or carrying gold is more prioritary).

Vandar {l Wrote}:- Not sure if I like the shield icon if I have a creature in focus. Guess I'll get used to it. What's the meaning of the number? Got 1 and 16, maybe other numbers.
It represents their health. The number is the creature level.
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Re: Just some quick notes

Postby eugeneloza » 11 Apr 2015, 19:43

eugeneloza {l Wrote}:I wanna try woring in a park/forest this summer :)
Bycicle, laptop, and an hour and a half of work at fresh air :)

Today's test ride went on perfectly. Finally the weather allowed to work ~40 minutes in the forest. Looks like a really cool idea. I'll just need to buy a more comfortable chair.
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