Wasteland Engine Remake Kinda (WERK)

The Dutch Ghost said:
It would be cool if this could lead to multiple Wasteland indie projects.
We could use a couple of hard PA RPGs in light of all the cross genre games we get nowadays.

I have various ideas for a wasteland-like game as well since a while. Thanks to the limited graphics, you can concentrate on other things of the game most of the time, which is a good thing. It's tempting.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
I gave the demo a try but the first time I could not even start as the zip file missed a file that prevented the demo from running.
Got your PM. I had thought I linked that dll with the program at compile but I guess I did it wrong or something. Thanks for the heads up, I updated the download and it should work fresh out of the rar now.


Crni Vuk said:
much karma to you Farmerk :D

I really hope you will finish your project
Thankee kindly Mr Vuk. I'll certainly try my hardest.

Lexx said:
The Dutch Ghost said:
It would be cool if this could lead to multiple Wasteland indie projects.
We could use a couple of hard PA RPGs in light of all the cross genre games we get nowadays.

I have various ideas for a wasteland-like game as well since a while. Thanks to the limited graphics, you can concentrate on other things of the game most of the time, which is a good thing. It's tempting.
Of the many reasons I'm doing this project(fame, fortune, bitches, etc) this is why I'm doing it. There are several duders out there who have brilliant ideas for games but the only thing in their way is lack of technical skills and difficulty of modding existing games. I guess in a way this will be a high powered RPG Maker.



What I'm going to work on next is something that I really need to get done before going any further. I was sticking strictly to how the original game handled movement, where the PC stayed in one place and the map moved around him. But this is extremely awkward to map around with the way I'm doing it now as only like 60% of the map is reachable by the player.

EDIT:
I have redone the movements and am quite pleased with how it turned out. But more importantly, I have started on the scripting part of the code and the first command is a success.

Here's the first command, to give you duders an idea of what scripting might look like.
Code:
doorway:1,1,map2
"doorway" is the command. ":" is a separator btween the command and the variables. "1,1" is the coordinates of the doorway tile, and "map2" is the map to load once the player steps on it.

So now it's a matter of creating more script commands while making a mapper. After that, all the higher level bull: items, inventory, combat, dialog, shops, etc. As a wise man once said, easy shiznit.

I'll make a new demo once I get the mapper and a few script commands working.
 
shihonage said:
Doesn't sound like a particularly wise man to me.

It's hard to resist every time I see someone start this kind of project with great optimism, where I can already see ... issues with approach. So speaking up here is likely a mistake and will be taken the wrong way.

But what the hell.

Look... not to destroy your enthusiasm, but currently you've accomplished about 5-10% of what will be needed from your renderer alone and about 0.3% of the engine in its entirety.

You have to plan scripting framework to be way more expansive than just "doorway:1,1,map2". This applies (and spreads into) everything - data structures and/or objects (if you use them), paths through which things are returned to the caller of the said script commands. WHICH things are returned and HOW... after all, you're making a high-powered RPG Maker.

Don't assume that the higher level bull is easy. The mapper will be easy. Higher level bull will make you tear your hair out.

You will discover the need to make many decisions reaching far ahead (and just as many short-sighted opportunities to paint yourself into a corner). You will also write much menial code that you would've assumed just magically to appear - but it won't.

I do not wish you to fail. I wish you to be forewarned as to how seriously you have to take this in order not to fail. This is not Angry Birds. It requires a Titanic-sized portion of forward-planning before you branch out in any direction with the code. Measure 70 times, cut once. And when in doubt, study existing projects, try to figure out how they did it, and steal the solutions from them. Chances are, those solutions weren't born of random whims.

Good luck.

You're preaching crazy to charles manson. I think your sarcasm detectors are malfunctioning. I know full well what's ahead of me. I'm more dedicated to this project than just an enthusiastic newcomer. I've been doing this kind of stuff for a decade, and this particular project has been going on for nearly three years.

And to look at a project in terms of "5-10% done" is complete bull in my eyes. I like to think of it in terms of sections, such as "The scripting is 3%, the map reading is 60%, the controls are 40%" and so on. It's all about the milestones. Building the start of the scripting code and having it work is a milestone in my eyes, which is exactly what I was celebrating up there. It's like running a marathon, it's discouraging to point out that you have 19 miles to go, you need to look back and say "Hey, I ran five miles" Yeah I might be a little over enthusiastic, but this is what I enjoy doing. Programming shit like this is to me as eating bacon is to fat people.
 
I could eat bacon forever.

And I'm not fat õ_õ

More on-topic: this looks like it'd be a cool thing when it's done. So good luck !
 
I'm still working on this thing. It's still going along nicely and it's still making progress. Most of the recent work has been to the behind the scenes stuff, optimization and whatnot, so no cool screenshots or whatever. Good to optimize and tighten what I have now than to have to do it later. Soon I'll have a new demo and some nifty screenshots to feast your optics on.


I ran into a problem with memory usage on closing (the tiles weren't unloading properly for some odd reason and the program was crashing on closing) so I had to rewrite how the engine loads, displays, and unloads the tiles/textures, that's been the majority of the work the past month or two. Also, because of this code for loading tiles:
Code:
getline (myfile,line);
strcpy(roomline, line.c_str());
II = atoi(roomline);
tileimages[loop] = textures[II];}
I can't do non-numeric tile file names because, for some damn reason, I'm converting the tile's file name to an integer (with the atoi command) so that I can use the file name of the tile directly with the tile's texture ID array. So I'm probably going to have to rewrite the entire engine to load tiles with a series of attributes and identifiers so I can work with those within the engine instead of directly with the tile names.

It's good that I found this out early instead of a few more months down the line though. My goal is still to make this as simple and powerful as an engine as possible for non-programmers and technically challenged folks to make a game as detailed as humanly possible.
 
Back
Top