The Roguelike Thread

I'm sure all of you out there have played at least one roguelike before, be it the oldies like Nethack or new ones like DoomRL.

What I want to know is, is it possible to create a Roguelike using MMF2?

I'm no good artist, so the idea of using letters appeals to me greatly.
Unfortunately, I can't do TurnBased AI at all.

I can do inventories, using List Objects and then saving them (its how I do saving because Array's never work for me), but how do get combat, skils, magic etc to work?

Any tips, tricks or advice posted here please.

Come one guys.... LB?, Jacob?...anyone? :(

If you need to whet your appetite for classic rpg action, get DoomRL here:

http://www.chaosforge.org

I want to make a star wars themed roguelike, but with fusion... :D

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Originally Posted by BAugustus

I'm sure all of you out there have played at least one roguelike before, be it the oldies like Nethack or new ones like DoomRL.

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Nope, never. :(

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Originally Posted by BAugustus

What I want to know is, is it possible to create a Roguelike using MMF2?

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Yes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BAugustus

I'm no good artist, so the idea of using letters appeals to me greatly.
Unfortunately, I can't do TurnBased AI at all.

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Well don't say you can't! I'm sure with some help you'll be able to. What kind of help do you need?

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Originally Posted by BAugustus

I can do inventories, using List Objects and then saving them (its how I do saving because Array's never work for me), but how do get combat, skils, magic etc to work?

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A) Your inventories seem easy to manipulate.
B) You might want to start on a smaller scale. I didn't lookup "Roguelike" so I don't know in what context combat, skills, and magic are used, but assuming they are used in a "battle" then you probably would need to do a few tutorials on turnbased battles. Check out Nivram's site I'll bet he has one.
C) Skills magic etc will be easy to add as soon as the general turnbased thing is figured out.

Sorry I didn't go in much detail, but I felt bad that nobody posted yet. I'm not an expert so I don't have much more to say, and quite frankly I'm pretty tired right now. I'll come back and see if I have any ideas tomorrow or so.

Thanks ricky, you're the best :cry:

So a roguelike is a turn-based adventure game, where the world is depicted with letters and symbols.

Eg, the player is (@), and a zombie (z)
You can also use colors to differentiate types of zombies, from zombie spawn to zombie king etc.

The idea is, the player can perform one action a turn, be it reading a book to learn something new, drinking a potion to restore health, moving one square around the world, or attacking a monster.

Attacking a monster can be ranged, by shooting an arrow, using magic or (if you are next to one, with a sword equipped) attacking a monster in melee.

If you've played anything at all like Diablo, World of Warcraft or even a RPG, just imagine it with letters and ten times (in my opinion) the amount of gameplay.

I know r-likes don't appeal to everyone, this is a personal project, I just wanted anyone's advice/tips.

Will check nivram's site when I get a chance...

Thanks again Ricky.

Okay so I did read your post the other day and a Roguelike is very possible to do in MMF2.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BAugustus

I can do inventories, using List Objects and then saving them (its how I do saving because Array's never work for me), but how do get combat, skils, magic etc to work?

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For the calculations of the combat/skills/magic they are simply just numbers and are just based on your inventory items and stats. You make up all of this stuff just as you see fit.

So for example if you have a monster with 2 armour and 20 health and the player has 5 strength and a small dagger which grants +2 strength then you can calculate an attack like this:

Damage to monster = ((Base Strength + Weapon Strength) - Monster Armour)
> Damage to monster = ((5+2) - 2)
> Damage to monster = 5

Then you could have all kinds of other augmenting numbers such as a damage aura for a spell or something which grants +10% damage:

Damage to monster = ((Base Strength + Weapon Strength) - Monster Armour) * Damage Aura

> Damage to monster = ((5+2) - 2) * 0.10
= 5.5 (perhaps it rounds up to 6)

Roguelikes are very simple in that they are mainly just numbers. You just add, subtract, multiply, divide and manipulate them however you want until your game is fun and fair to play.

For the inventory it would be best to refer to your objects in the game by IDs and then 'lookup' their values somewhere else. So an array would be one good way of doing this, or some other way of storing a series of tables. Eg:

ID Table:
Sword = 1
Dagger = 2

Damage Table:
1 = 4
2 = 2

Agility Table:
1 = 1
2 = 2

You could store the data in many other ways, such as comma seperate values:

1 = Sword,4,1
2 = Dagger,2,2

These all represent the same information:
A sword which does 4 extra damage and gives +1 agility. And a dagger that does 2 extra damage and gives +2 agility.

The benefit of having tables to do 'lookups' is that you can simply take their data based on their ID. So code such as:

Player has sword and attacks monster > monster takes 4 damage
Player has dagger and attacks monster > monster takes 2 damage

becomes one event:

Player attacks monster > monster takes damage: GetValue( "Named variable object", Str$( CurrentWeaponID( "Player" ) ))

Which means (using the named variable object, with "CurrentWeaponID" = ID of current weapon, eg. "1"): Using the current weapon ID (a number) look up what damage this weapon does (which is stored in an array/some data structure) and apply this damage to the monster.

This means you don't have to code every weapon individually. You only need one event to look up and handle how much damage is done. The same should be done for all monsters/items/spells/treasure/etc. in your game.

For the graphical drawing it would actually be easier to do graphics with actives, but if you don't want to do that and you really want to use text then it would probably be best to use something like Textblitter or Character Image with a fixed-width font. You would make a tile-engine the same way you would make one with graphics except that you change the text instead of changing the tile graphics. It would probably be best to store the map data in an array of some sort.

Wow thanks for all that info.

I have in the past, succeeded in getting an adventure game to work with various weapons etc, but graphics stopped me and I gave up.

That said, I have resolved to work on my array skills and have to admit that your damage calculations seemed really good.

My main problem is simply turn based AI, eg. what will an enemy do this turn? How far can it see, can it see me and if it can, does it move towards me, cast a spell etc.

Most often, for realtime games, i use an invisible, solid color circle that acts as a Line Of Sight. So even that's covered. I just need tips to make sure that the enemy will move in the right x/y direction.
Any time I've tried in the past, my coding ends up really weird and the enemy blips around the map.... :(

Any tips? I can't find any TurnBased tutorials on Nivram's site, or in the Tutorials section at CT.

Edit: Wow just downloaded Text Blitter--it fulfills ALL my graphics needs.

http://rickyrombo.co.nr

On the left sidebar there's a bunch of links to useful MMF2 stuff. See what you can find :)

EDIT: Oh wait, you don't trust my site... hm.

http://castles-of-britain.com/mmf2examples.htm
http://puddinghatgames.com/mmf2-tutorialsexamples
http://klikfusion.com/world/
http://www.create-games.com/home.asp
http://gamebuilder.info/
http://www.ni2.se/mmf2/

eh, they might not be as helpful as I thought, but I'm sure maybe they can help you.

For the AI, just think about what it should do and then code it! I know that sounds really general, but that's how it's done.

For an agressive AI:

Can it see the player?
Yes > Move one space towards player.
No > Move one space in a random direction.

Is it in attacking range?
Yes > Attack player
No > Do nothing

Then all you have to do is find a way to detect if the enemy can see the player (using some Line Of Sight detection - invisible detector or a more robust cell by cell detection). And also if it is in attacking range (square next to it for melee, or a few spaces away for ranged.)

Thanks for the all the great advice guys, i'm starting work as soon as possible. :D

OK, I'm having a little success and a little trouble.

I've made a .txt file named "Map" and it looks like this;

Code:

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#############################
#........................>..#
#############################

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I have a text blitter that reads this in and then draws it.
I use a second text blitter to be the character and several others to be enemies.

Now i need to know,
How do I check if the Player TBlitter is over a specific letter in the Map Text Blitter.
Eg, I need to know when the Player is over stairs ">".

Any help?

Using Text Blitter is probably the most memory intensive thing you could have done.

Yeah believe it or not, your idea to use text instead of graphics actually makes this game much more complicated.

You'd actually be better off using actives as tiles instead.

With text you can't detect collisions, so if you do continue down this path you'll have to text using their positions.

So you need to be storing the player's X and Y position (in terms of the letter-character positions) and when the player has the same X and Y position as an object you want to test, then he/she is overlapping that object.

OK, so I've scrounged up a fairly decent set of roguelike tiles.
I wasn't going to do random anyhow, so do i just pretend its any other RPG and make individual maps and frames and focus on getting manageable code that works through all the levels?

Yes? I'm not really sure what you're asking. For a game of this scale I would probably load the maps externally from a file using some level editor you create yourself to make the map(s).

Another thing you could do is use the Advanced Game Board Object to keep a representation of the current state of the game, so that you can detect whether certain tiles are next to each other.