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Hajo
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Play FastCrawl - Delve into ancient dungeons, defeat sinister evil, and recover vast treasures - during your lunch-hour! |
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Coyote
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 Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 9:49 am Post subject: |
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Okay, just seeing an iso @-sign with a shadow below it kinda blew my mind a little...
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cowgod
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| Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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It looks ok, though I think it would be better with a larger tile size. You might not be able to change that though.
It's too bad there's not a newer open source RPG that people can modify like this. I think it would be pretty cool if there were.
I guess that's what RPG Maker is for, but it seems somehow unsatisfying. |
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ottomobiehl
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Joined: 12 May 2009
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| Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 12:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Those screen shots look good. I really like that graphic style. |
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Hajo
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 1:02 am Post subject: |
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@Coyote:
I want to keep the @ as a tribute to the ASCII roguelike games. I also hope it gives the ASCII veterans a more familiar feeling when starting Iso-Angband.
@Cowgod:
I thought most roguelikes are open source. But I have been away from the roguelike scene for a long time and maybe things changed. Iso-Angband is basically Angband, with some parts of my graphics engine from Simutrans added. Angband itself is highly configurable, that makes this job easier, I think. For NetHack and a few other roguelikes there should exists such addons, too, if I remember correctly.
The tile size is fairly easy to change in the code. At the moment it supports the shown size with a base raster of 64x32, and a zoomed out mode with 32x16. Bigger tiles would mean to see less of the dungeon, and in Angband this will mean problems, since some monsters can attack from quite afar.
@Ottomobiehl:
Thanks! At the moment it's a mix of some old, quite detailed graphics and some newer which are more abstract. But it works. There is a lot of work needed still. I think I need at least 50 more monster symbols and 20 or so for items. It's doable though, and I look forward to presenting a more polished version soon 
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cowgod
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 8:52 am Post subject: |
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| Hajo wrote: | @Cowgod:
I thought most roguelikes are open source. But I have been away from the roguelike scene for a long time and maybe things changed. Iso-Angband is basically Angband, with some parts of my graphics engine from Simutrans added. Angband itself is highly configurable, that makes this job easier, I think. For NetHack and a few other roguelikes there should exists such addons, too, if I remember correctly.
The tile size is fairly easy to change in the code. At the moment it supports the shown size with a base raster of 64x32, and a zoomed out mode with 32x16. Bigger tiles would mean to see less of the dungeon, and in Angband this will mean problems, since some monsters can attack from quite afar.
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By "newer", I really meant "not Roguelike". While there are newer roguelikes (many of which are probably open source), I meant something that produces a more modern type of RPG.
RPG Maker produces console-ish RPGs, but you can't modify RPG Maker so far as I know. It's basically a glorified map editor. There's other map editors for other games, like Neverwinter Nights and the editor that has been released for Fallout 2. But they don't give you the code to play around with.
Maybe I'll make some of my code open source at some point. Since I'm not making any money to speak of from selling games, it would be nice if someone could benefit from my code in some way.
Maybe I can even find some way to make a portion of my code open source while still selling games. I believe that Id Software did something like that with Quake. |
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Coyote
Level 255 Site Master
Joined: 23 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 9:07 am Post subject: |
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To be completely honest, I'm not a big fan of ASCII. I remember getting sucked into one roguelike, Moria, back in the day... and thinking, "Wow... you know, if this game had halfway decent graphics, it'd be a pretty solid commercial-quality game."
Turns out you'd need a lot more than pretty graphics (I was so naive...), but I don't know that I was too far off the mark, either. Hey, I bought Dungeon Hack - a roguelike using the Eye of the Beholder engine.
For that matter, I was (and remain, I guess) a fan of Diablo and Diablo II. I always considered them to be commercial, slicked-up leaves of the roguelike family tree.
Does a non-ascii graphics preclude a game from being a roguelike? I mainly consider the randomized content to be the defining detail of roguelikes - though I tend to attribute the very broad array of actions and detail to be another family feature (which the Diablo games lack).
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Hajo
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 2:29 pm Post subject: |
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@Cowgod:
ID made Doom, Doom II and Quake open source, maybe later products, too. It was very interesting to snoop into the sources For Doom they did not release the graphics assets, though, if I remember correctly.
They sold the games first, and waited till the novelty wore off, before releasing the sources.
| Coyote wrote: | To be completely honest, I'm not a big fan of ASCII. I remember getting sucked into one roguelike, Moria, back in the day... and thinking, "Wow... you know, if this game had halfway decent graphics, it'd be a pretty solid commercial-quality game."
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I totally feel with you there. Even before Iso-Angband I worked on a try to add graphics, that must have been somewhen between 1995 and 1997. At that point I didn't know of any existing tilesets, and started one of my own. It's been never released and purely an try to prettify the game for my own playing pleasure. After a while I got bored, and so that episode ended.
Later, I had Simutrans going already, I was wondering if I could use the graphics engine from Simutrans for Angband, too, and that was when Iso-Angband was born, early in 2001. At that time I had really good and rich graphics on my mind, something I could not create on my own those days. I tried to get artists working for the project, but I wanted too much and maybe did some things wrong. Finally I gave up in a moment of frustration.
Now I try again. With a less graphics heavy approach, and more in the style of doing it for myself in first place, but sharing the creations with everyone who is interested.
So, your thoughts, to add graphics to lift the game into a new league was my desire, too.
The definition of roguelike for me are the random levels and the thorough randomization of content. And that stays, even with graphics added. The step to realtime that Diablo did changes the style of the game. But for me, Diablo and Diablo II definitely are roguelike offspring, action roguelikes maybe
Iso-Angband just tries to add a graphical frontend while keeping the game as it is. This time I even try to keep the "colored symbol" approach, just that instead of colored ASCII characters, I use colored shapes. For those dabbling in art, I try to change "nonsymbolic abstraction" where the symbol is meaningless by itself, to "symbolic abstraction" (*), where the symbol carries a message, but is reduced in detail, compared to the real thing, also reduced to a simpler message. A picture (photograph) of a wolf defines one particular wolf, the outlines that I use will just say "a canine", and I think that fits well to the abstract world of the roguelike games.
I've put some more screenshots online, and I've tried to continue a development log over here - for those who are curious:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=195.msg498#msg498
(*) I hope I translated this correctly. Maybe the English has other, fixed terms for "non symbolic abstraction" and "symbolic abstraction", which I don't know. I hope I could express what I mean, though.
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getter77
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Joined: 10 Aug 2009
Posts: 56
Location: GA, USA
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| Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2009 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Coyote wrote: | | To be completely honest, I'm not a big fan of ASCII. I remember getting sucked into one roguelike, Moria, back in the day... and thinking, "Wow... you know, if this game had halfway decent graphics, it'd be a pretty solid commercial-quality game." |
:cough: http://www.minesofmorgoth.com/ :cough:
Not quite what you envisioned, but the last attempt at a follow-up to Moria of ANY sort since Angband took a crack at it all those years ago---with a looong dev period on the site. I just can't get the demo to run on my junker of a PC though.
ASCII is definitely not needed for Roguelikes though---they were merely a choice at the time beget of convenience, limited resources, and after a bit managed to function decently for a niche mystique within a good amount of the fans that dug the games.
Ye definitely need to keep an eye for Torchlight coming up as a D1/D2 fan then Coyote!
Hajo's doing great work on this...bit by bit! |
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Hajo
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| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:00 am Post subject: |
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| getter77 wrote: |
Hajo's doing great work on this...bit by bit! |
Thank you
For the curious, I've made a new development snapshot available:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=195.msg500#msg500
It includes a windows executable, the images and the sources, which hopefully compile on Linux, too. (I can't test that currently, due to a lack of Linux on my current PC.)
This is the first version that feels somewhat complete to me. The town has almost proper looks, although still very primitive, and the most important features seem to work - I still couldn't test ball spells/breath attacks, but the config entries are set up, so those should work. My rogue has been running around in town and dungeons for some hours now, and it didn't crash, that gives me some hope.
Still, there are a lot of images to add, but that's not a problem, those will be made step by step
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Hajo
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| Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:20 am Post subject: |
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No new screenshots this time, but some progress on images and config files:
- Ooze image and config.
- Jelly image and config.
- Priest image and config.
- Singing drunk image adapted.
- Village idiot image adapted.
- Mercenary image adapted.
- Merchant image adapted.
- Fixed a small mistake in bat image (removed gray bar to the right).
- Fixed config for white mouse, white rat and gray rat.
- Updated config entries for singing drunk, aimless merchant and mean mercenary.
Nothing major, mostly finetuning. The problem with the misconfigured rodent images itches me a bit, but I want to collect more changes before publishing a new release.
I've set up a thread for known bugs:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=197.0
I'll update images as I come across them during playtesting.
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Hajo
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| Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:12 am Post subject: |
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I've been working on Iso-Angband some more:
- Fix: Centipede had light gray line about 20 pixels above.
- Added broken bone image.
- Updated dungeon background tile to a dark brown color.
- Updated pebbles/iron shots image.
- Added bolts image.
- Added ring and amulet images, updated config.
A screenshot with the new broken bone, amulet and ring images. Finally I figured how to use the debuig commands to create items and now can more easily test my images and configuration:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/site/misc/iso-angband/screens/ring_amulet.png
I'm not quite pleased with the appearance of rings and amulets, but I guess in this size and style there isn't much to do. The sparks are already a break of the visual style, but rings and amulets are pretty special in roguelikes and I thought, they deserve a special touch. Most important is that the player can recognize the images easily, and such small things like rings are pretty hard to see, the sparks definitely help there.
I wonder if all magic items (rods, wands, staves) should have sparks? Potions and scrolls I like without the sparks, so I'll keep those as they are now.
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Hajo
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Hajo
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 12:47 am Post subject: |
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I've uploaded a new development snapshot, Iso-Angband 0.2.7:
http://www.funkelwerk.de/site/misc/iso-angband/releases/iso-angband-0_2_7.zip
There is a Windows executable included, so if you use Windows, you can try it right out of the box. Sources and images are included as well, and I think it should compile for Linux, too, but I had no chance to test that yet.
Change log:
- Ooze image and config.
- Jelly image and config.
- Priest image and config.
- Singing drunk image adapted.
- Village idiot image adapted.
- Mercenary image adapted.
- Merchant image adapted.
- Fixed a small mistake in bat image (gray bar to the right).
- Fixed config for white mouse, white rat and gray rat.
- Updated config entries for singing drunk, aimless merchant and mean mercenary.
- Fix: Centipede had light gray line about 20 pixels above.
- Added broken bone image.
- Updated dungeon background tile to a dark brown color.
- Updated pebbles/iron shots image.
- Added bolts image.
- Added ring and amulet images, updated config.
- Wand/rod/staff images.
- Wand/rod/staff configuration.
- Modified floor tile to show a bit less regular grid.
- Modified the granite wall tile to blend better with the magma and quartz vein tiles.
If you find mismatching images or run into something strange please let me know.
Bug report thread: http://www.funkelwerk.de/forum/index.php?topic=197.0
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Coyote
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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Haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds like it's a lot further along than I expected. Cool.
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