[dirGames-L] Re: The Dungeons of Nottingham - Sherwood Sequel

[CC Chamberlin]

On 12/15/05, "Gene Endrody" <gene at mmorpg.ca> wrote:

> That's good feedback. On all of my other games, I try to keep the alphabet
> keys, space, backspace and numbers available exclusively for chat with other
> players. MMORPG style games often use the / to enter and exit chat mode, but
> that can be confusing for web gamers. Well, at least the gamers that play my
> games......insanely loyal but not too bright. I'll have a good think over
> the key layout.

  Yeah, I kinda figured that after I noticed the chat feature.  (Didn't notice it until after my post.)  There are several things you could do to obviate that - you could add a little "Press RETURN to start chatting" just above your button bar, you could make the keyboard commands function keys, or you could just have an options screen that lets you toggle between the two control styles.

> Interesting feedback on the map. I want the map to reveal as you go, but I
> haven't found a good trick yet that doesn't involve rewriting the map
> texture as you go. (very hard on framerate for larger textures.) Anyone know
> if Director supports CBV Alpha blended with texture based alpha?

  It appears that your map is organized by rooms.  Maybe you can only redraw the map when you enter a new room or something.  Another idea might be to only update the map when you stand still for a few seconds; that would be fairly realistic anyway, since you probably wouldn't be able to draw a map as you are running blindly through the dungeon from the giant spiders chasing you.

> I'm not sure if anyone's bothered trying but the dungeon is infinitely
> deep....take the staircases down to the next level. Takes about 80ms to dig
> a new Dungeon level and I use a forced seed to maintain the level layout
> when you go back up to the previous level. This also make it consistent for
> multiplayer when parties of players are exploring. I'll likely generate the
> master seed on the MUS server so I can give the players a whole new dungeon
> about once a month. The final version should have multiple 3D tilesets, a
> simple magic system, NPC merchants and a mission system.

  Yeah, I tried it, and was pretty impressed.  I really like your model of the staircase.
  
  Storing the random seed is a clever way of making consistent level layouts.  But won't that also regenerate your items and chests and stuff?  Will they simply "respawn" when you re-enter the level, or are you going to store which chests have already been searched and which monsters have been slain?  Or is all that stored on the server?

  If you're willing, it sure would be good to read a postmortem about your experiences creating this game.

  CC
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CC Chamberlin
Analyst
Agricultural Communications
New Mexico State University
505-646-3954