Underdark - band

[Therem Harth]

*scratches head*

What do I need to look into the source code? Some special program...? Or would ConTEXT be enough?

Text editor. Any text editor. If you're on Windows, the recommended one is probably Notepad++.

If all Angband variants are written in the same language, porting a given feature from one variant to another should be easy.... or shouldn't it?

If that were the case, I'd have my own full-featured variant by now.

Basically - and someone please correct me if I'm wrong - the sources of most Angband variants are not very modular. Say you have a function that you want to port from O to Vanilla so you can add a feature. This function may call other functions that work differently in O than in V; or use preprocessor macros or global variables defined who-knows-where.

(This happened with my recent failed attempt to port the V SDL interface to ToME. There's a lot of stuff that works differently in ToME than in V, or just plain doesn't exist in ToME. I probably could have pulled it off if I had a better understanding of SDL and programming in general, but yeah.)

NPP Angband has no automatic opening doors (without typing 'o' every time, just arrows on the keyboard) which is annoying. And no low hp warning.

Those should be in the options (the '=' key).

Re helping you out, unfortunately I'm about as much of a programmer as you, and also know next to nothing about D&D. I'd also advise you that, if you want to get software done right, it's probably best to do the work yourself (assuming you have the time).

[Derakon]

The source code is just text; however, you will need a compiler (a separate program) to turn that text into something that the computer can understand. Think of the compiler as a translator between a language that is fairly easy for humans to understand, and a language that the computer itself can understand. In this case the former language is C (i.e. Angband is written in C); the latter case is assembly code.

On Windows, your options for a compiler are Visual Studio and mingw.

[Antoine]

> I've got no stomach for programming anything

I suggest (amicably) that your best option is to find a personal friend who knows how to program and shares your vision for the game.

A.

[Zireael]

> I've got no stomach for programming anything

I suggest (amicably) that your best option is to find a personal friend who knows how to program and shares your vision for the game.

A.

Thanks. Two people offered to help with programming (elsewhere, not on Angband forums) before I worked out that I want an Angband variant and not a built-from-scratch roguelike. I'll have to ask them again.

@ Derakon, Therem Harth - Thanks.

[Zireael]

Some thoughts...

1. Some variants give you equipment upon start; some do not (Sangband, I'm looking at you!). I'd like to change the starting equipment slightly: you'd get the chainmail & a sword as you do in NPP or ZPlus; food rations, a torch, soft leather boots, soft leather gloves, and a container if it's possible. Is it doable?

2. Is it possible to make infravision work like the ZPlus's vampire vision?

3. What do you think about Sangband's 1.0.2 skills? Worth adding or not?

[Djabanete]

I have never taken the time to learn how to code, but I understand it's a skill that can be learned like any other. You obviously have the willingness to make some changes yourself --- that is, you're not just throwing ideas out there and hoping someone will do all the work for you. I'm thinking that you can probably deepen your coding knowledge. Developing a variant takes a ton of time (I'm basing this claim on Chris's efforts on Chengband); even if you're collaborating, you need to be willing to commit a lot of time, because otherwise the collaboration would be lopsided. So if you're already investing a lot of time, why not invest half that in sharpening your own toolkit (so to speak) so that you yourself will be empowered to make more serious changes?

Obviously if you find a collaborator that's great, but given where you're coming from and how much you've done so far, I don't think you should be too discouraged if it turns out you're working alone.

Edit: Also, you can always find tips and encouragement on Oook from very knowledgeable people (unlike me), and playtesting help (from people like me).

Edit2: And have you tried playing Crawl? It sounds similar in several ways to what you're trying to do. You might draw inspiration from it.

Edit3: For example, Crawl has dungeon branches (special dungeon offshoots of the main dungeon), which might be an interesting feature. The Orc Mines, the Snake Pit, the Elven Halls, etc. Or you could have special levels that are essentially quests, a la Hengband.

[JohnCW9]

I Edit3: For example, Crawl has dungeon branches (special dungeon offshoots of the main dungeon), which might be an interesting feature. The Orc Mines, the Snake Pit, the Elven Halls, etc. Or you could have special levels that are essentially quests, a la Hengband.

Tome2 and decentants have this. The special levels show just once per game and maybe Uniques too.

John

[Zireael]

Thanks for all replies. I got a PM from qwerty, who offered to help a bit.

Some more thoughts (I'm really going to have to consolidate those thoughts sometime)

1. Would it be possible to have Sangband's skills, but Level shown on the main screen instead of unspent XP?

2. I need replies to this:

1. Some variants give you equipment upon start; some do not (Sangband, I'm looking at you!). I'd like to change the starting equipment slightly: you'd get the chainmail & a sword as you do in NPP or ZPlus; food rations, a torch, soft leather boots, soft leather gloves, and a container if it's possible. Is it doable?

2. Is it possible to make infravision work like the ZPlus's vampire vision?

----------------------------
Today I'll get to making corpses eatable. And maybe I'll start tweaking the monster list.
Zi

[Therem Harth]

Sangband does not have levels IIRC.

IMO it really would make more thematic sense to have the player start in some random town or outpost in the upper reaches of the Underdark, and let him buy all his equipment from stores. (Which is what Sangband does, I think.) Also, if you want a really flexible skills system like Sang's, starting a character with e.g. warrior-specific equipment wouldn't be so hot.

Re Infravision, you want it to light up terrain, right? I don't know about Z+, but Vampire sight in ToME is just a radius-1 light that isn't cumulative with other light sources. Personally, the code I would look at would be the Unlight special ability from Oangband - that sounds more like what you want.

BTW, I have a potentially interesting idea: have a "surface" town, but make the game "semi-ironman" - you can't go back to the town until you kill a final boss, and Word of Recall only brings you between level 1 and your max depth. I don't think that would be too hard to do.

[Zireael]

1. I know Sangband doesn't have levels, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to combine the traditional approach and the skills somehow...
2. Thanks, will look at Oangband.
3. Good idea. I could use it if it is completely impossible to remove the level 0. Is it possible to remove lvl 0 completely?

----------------------------------
Re: the templates from my first post - I mean in the D&D sense, for the player. You could be, say, a drow half-fiend or a duergar vampire, but if you took a template, you'd have to earn 200% EXP or even 250% ... just an idea. I don't know if it's doable.

[Therem Harth]

1. I know Sangband doesn't have levels, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to combine the traditional approach and the skills somehow...

Hmm. You'd have to come up with some kind of measurement of total proficiency, and display that as the level, I guess.

The alternative would be to use the ToME 2 codebase, or a ToME 2 module - ToME 2 uses both levels and skills (and would let you have a single-class system like Sangband, a single-dungeon game, etc.)

I will warn you, though, that both ToME's source code and its Lua extensions are *fragile.* Modifications in one place can make things break horribly somewhere else, causing the game to crash - usually with cryptic and unhelpful error messages.

3. Good idea. I could use it if it is completely impossible to remove the level 0. Is it possible to remove lvl 0 completely?

It'd be possible, the question is how hard it would be to code in a normal variant. (And I don't know the answer, unfortunately.)

Re: the templates from my first post - I mean in the D&D sense, for the player. You could be, say, a drow half-fiend or a duergar vampire, but if you took a template, you'd have to earn 200% EXP or even 250% ... just an idea. I don't know if it's doable.

This sounds more or less exactly like ToME's subraces.

[Zireael]

Where can I find ToME 2, then? I can only find v. 4 and it's HUGE...

[Therem Harth]

Go to https://gitorious.org/tome2/tome2/trees/v2.3.9-ah
Click on "Download v2.3.9-ah as tar.gz"

This will download the source as a tarball, which can be decompressed with most archive managers.

You need a compiler to build it, of course, and you also need cmake. cmake for Windows comes with a nice GUI that should help you compile the game.

[zaimoni]

Thanks. (I have pulled the tarballs for 2.3.6-ah through 2.3.9-ah).

Note that CMake ships broken for my MingW32 install; the lead maintainer Bill Hoffman came pretty close to openly rejecting my offer to construct a patch for CMake 2.6.x to unbreak this, and certainly did not offer to provide any guidance on what to modify for such a patch. My reading of the CMake source is that CMake cannot handle an MSYS system using sh, not even the MingW32 prebuilt sh (which I rely on heavily).

(Basically...everything is unpacked from tarballs, and the MingW32 file system root is c:\ rather than c:\mingw .)

[Therem Harth]

Ah, so that's why it failed to build on Windows last time I tried... Phooey.

Umm. Just for the record though, TCC, Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C Compiler, can compile ToME2 (at least on Linux) with no problems. In less than a minute, too. And TCC runs on Windows. I don't think it will compile anything with C++ in it though.

Edit: nope, no C++.