Questions, suggestions, and introduction (not in that order)

[WiseAllec]

Hi, and thanks for building a very nice game engine

I'm pretty much a noob at lua and löve programing, but I have programmed in ActionScript, JavaScript, Visual Basic, Pascal, and a little bit of C (I'd say that in terms of programming skills I'm about intermediate). I'm thinking of starting a personal project with löve, an RPG, and was wondering if I could get some pointers on the matter (since I've never actually made one before, but have played plenty of them). I would also like to suggest a couple of features that I believe would be a nice addition to the engine.

The graphics are going to be done in pixel art, I'm hoping to be able to do a sort of Secret of Mana battle system (basically, you can roam around while in battle) with a touch of Chrono Trigger (Single and Combined Techs), and Legend of Legaia (Key Combos) to it, maybe use the particle system for spells and whatnot. It's still basically an idea, haven't really started to do any programming or art for the game yet... In terms of the art, anybody have any good tuts on pixel art? I'm still new to game building, so there are some things that I don't know... Should I load a whole dungeon into memory? Or should I separate it by large sections? Same question applies to world map. Any suggestions?

In terms of some features that I think would be a nice addition to the engine... A cool feature would be gamepad support. Does SDL support gamepad input devices? Would it be possible to define in the game.conf file the location and the name (if it is not named main.lua) of the main lua script, instead of always having it in the root directory of the game folder (if nothing is specified in the game.conf file it should use the default settings)? I noticed that you are able to control individual volume levels of sound objects, but not music objects... Why not use the same system for both music and sound objects (individual volume controls)? Just one last thing, since I've never actually programmed in lua before, but have programmed in other languages, a great addition to the documentation (which I'm sure other users would also benefit from) would be a beginners guide or such, a very simple program that teaches us how to declare variables, arrays, objects, etc... Y'know, the basics, just to get a feel for the language.

I know that my personal project is a bit big and difficult to make... Considering that I still have a lot to learn. It's basically a little dream of mine to be able to make something like this, your engine is quite simple to use, open source, and multi-platform, it's got a particle system (and a physics engine is on the way, nice) it's perfect for what I want to do.

I'll close this message with a congratulations, your documentation is very good, your engine is very well done, simple and fun to use. I guess I'm in löve (sorry, that one was inevitable :lol: ).

[mike]

For pixel tutorials, go here: http://www.zoggles.co.uk/asp/tutorials.asp?show=index
For pixel art examples, go here: http://www.pixeljoint.com/default.asp

- SDL does support gamepads, but it needs to be wrapped in a non-gay manner, so that will have to wait until a future release (not too far off, if I remember correctly). It's in the works, but not available yet.
- Why do you want to set a separate root folder for the main.lua file? How will this help you, ever? (I am a bit of an organization freak, but one file outside the "system" never really bothered me)
- The sound/music volume stuff is based on the idea that... wait, let rude explain this one.
- Hmm, to get a feel for the language you should go for the official Lua tutorials, they do a better job of explaining things than we do. For beginner LÖVE things, consider looking at this shitty video.

If I didn't answer all your questions then excuse me, as I am partly blind and fully lazy.

[WiseAllec]

I think you pretty much answered all of my questions... well... except for the sound part anyways, I'll wait for rude's response then. On the game.conf idea... yeah, forget it... It was a stupid idea to begin with, something about me being worried that too many separate lua files would be in the root folder, there must be some way of importing scripts in lua, never mind. Thanks for the quick response

And good job on the video btw, mmmmmmm cheese, yumm

[mike]

You can import files using include or require (found in love.filesystem). I do love foldering my files, yes I do...

[mastastealth]

Hmm...would be very interesting to see if LÖVE is even capable of making a full RPG at its current state. One suggestion I have is you really should have the WHOLE RPG completely planned out in paper and pencil before going about coding it. You can wing it afterwards with any ideas you have later, but you would need an extremely well thought-out foundation for an RPG.

[rude]

Hello WiseAllec.

Audio: yes, the same system should be used, and it will. SDL_mixer only allows for one playing Music at the same time, which is why the music volume is set on the "device" (the way it is done in SDL_mixer). Of course, the game developer does not have to know that, and it should be simple to mimic the behaviour of Sound.

Is it possible to make a full RPG in LÖVE's current state? I can't see why not, but it would truly be a lot of work. A RPG-related feature I would like to see one day is some sort of Map object. This would increase the performance of tile-rendering drastically, and plugins could be made for editors like Tiled.

a great addition to the documentation (which I'm sure other users would also benefit from) would be a beginners guide or such

Noted.

I'll close this message with a congratulations, your documentation is very good, your engine is very well done, simple and fun to use.

(^-^)/

[WiseAllec]

What would constitute a map object? I'm guessing a tile size (in powers of 2, like 32, 64, 128 etc pixels high and wide), total map size, index based contextual mapping (ex: if in the world map (I'm guessing it would be 0) 1 = grass tile, 2 = sand tile, 3 = water tile etc... if in a dungeon, specify the dungeon 1 = cave of doom, 2 = castle of destiny etc... and then the tiles 1 = wall tile, 2 = floor tile, 3 = lava tile etc...), prechaching the needed tiles, and preloading the next viewable tiles (precache and preload are different in this context, I'm thinking in the ways of since we don't want to load a whole map that will occupy a butt load of pixels at a time, which I'm thinking might slow down performance, just load the total amount of tiles needed to view on the screen and an extra row or column in the appropriate direction). Would this be correct? Did I miss anything? Oo

[rude]

Yeah, something like that. Of course, the Map object would come with Tileset objects, and Layer objects as well I suppose. But be warned that I will not focus on this yet. Physics, audio improvements and networking first.