Somthing that would be nice in an RPG series

Somthing that would be nice in an RPG series

Korval

Member #1,538

September 2001

Quote:

Unreal? Hmm... I have never played it. The last game I bought was Heroes of Might and Magic III. So, I am not talking "from" Unreal, I am talking before it. Starcraft, Warcraft, Heroes... they all use scripting engine.

Warcraft, for one, does not use a scripting engine of any kind. You can't do anything close to programmed events or things of that nature. The Warcraft map editor was insufficient for reproducing some of the regular levels.

Starcraft was only slightly scriptable. I wouldn't even go far enough to call that a script as opposed to just map data. It's AI was certainly not scriptable (and believe me, I tried). The language isn't really powerful enough to do things truly different, so it isn't much of a script.

I don't know anything about Heroes of Might and Magic.

Quote:

Even ID has its own standard engine (that is why all ID games look so similar *laugh*).

QuakeC wouldn't be considered a scripting language by some people. That is because it is compiled into something. If I understand correctly, QuakeC is compiled into machine assembly that is then loaded dll-style by Quake and executed as regular code. QuakeC is more like a framework library for making Quake mods than an actual scripting language.

The reason that the Quakes look the same is because of their artists, not the underlying code. Just look at the games based on the Quake 3 engine. Most of them look very different from Quake 3.

Quote:

A game completely written in C++? Hmm... Maybe you disunderstood me... if you write starcraft without a scripting engine, the executable would be 12MB. And I am talking about: 1) AI, 2) Maps, 3) Dialogs, etc.

Maps are not scripts. Here's an example. Suppose you have a basic RPG engine that, when in a map, you can walk to a town icon, and the RPG will load and display the correct tilemap for that town. That isn't scripting unless you purposely have your gamecode call a script whenever you try to enter towns, buildings, etc to load the new map. That's data-driven code, which is somewhat different (and usually more restrictive) from a script. I think of Starcraft map scripts as falling under data-driven code rather than scripts.

Quote:

But if you use bison, and you actually know what to do

That's not going to solve the problem. I presume that this "Bison" is some kind of pre-designed scripting language and system. However, it is up to you to design objects and funtion interfaces to any Bison script that someone writes. That requires your writing interface code into your engine. This interface code can be prone to bugs, but you won't know that until you start using scripts. So the question will still arise, "Is the bug in the script interface or the script itself?".

Peter Hull

Member #1,136

March 2001

fyi Bison
Writing a parser in Bison is hard (IMO), as I mentioned before. I think, for us amateurs, it's a question of compromising a bit of flexibility and using a pre-built scripting language like LUA. i.e it's not ideal but good enough to get a project off the ground.

Pete
========
8):o

I said earlier I would set up a sourceforge project for this; well I have now, the page is here and the home page is here
I called it the MERE project because it could be an acronym for some combination of extendable, engine, modular, RPG, massive, ... , it doesn't sound too pompous and it's short to type.

It would be great if you could pop along and maybe just say 'hello' on the forums. If you'd like to work together on this, let me know (peterhull90@hotmail.com) and I will add you to the developers list. If someone would like to join in, I would be very pleased because I think it will be exciting to experiment with these Open Source tools (allegro itself is developed on sourceforge!) and work to gether with other people from allegro.cc (It's a lonely business, otherwise)

Ramble over, :-/
Pete

Stuart Moore

Member #1,809

January 2002

Not Allegro-related, but http://exult.sf.net/ Exult is looking promising for the future regarding an RPG engine. As to allowing info from previous RPGs to be used in others, well (after a fashion) it exists - Bard's Tale III can import Wizardry characters, for example, even keeping some kinds of weapon and armour. As for retaining quest info, this could be useful, and would have been fun, for example, for Black Gate and Serpent Isle.

--
Ill met by moonlight.

indloop

Member #1,702

December 2001

Id be interested in helping out on this project.

I can also host the website, I have perl, php, mysql, ssi installed on the server, so let me know.

CY-0571

Member #1,602

October 2001

This sounds somewhat like neverwinter nights from BioWare corp...

http://www.neverwinternights.com

EDIT: Some craxxor guy messed my desktop shortcuts while I was writing this >:( I should always have my firewall on...

...

Blade Nick

Member #1,597

October 2001

Hey this is good very good Some mates and I have always wanted to do someting like this. If their is still anything going down wed like to be in it so you can mail us at bladenick@hotmail.com .

Ohh and yeah if we wan't this to work we need to first get the main engin going and then distribute it to all of the people that want in. We will have to keep the maps and items in a similar structure through out the game if we all are going to make maps and extra missions and stuff like that. EG the map is based on hexagonal tiles with npc's and stuff like that which can all be scripted by a document or file that you use. If anyone has ever played UO it is similar to our idea it is just that the npc's don't really react to the player's speech. If this game is going to be a single player game you will have to get the ai going reallly reallllly reallllly well I mean better than most ai systems implimented in pro games of today. That could take years for a single person but for a group of people only weeks.