Porting my own Veins of the Earth to LOVE

[rmcode]

Screenshot 2016-10-01 10.33.06.png (18.02 KiB) Viewed 4166 times

[bartbes]

Maybe LÖVE accesses the files differently when they are packed in a .love file?

It's all about filesystems! NTFS and FAT are case-insensitive filesystems, Ext* are case-sensitive filesystems, and basically anything you'll find on linux is. HFS is an apple creation, so as you may expect, it's weird. It can be case-sensitive, but it's configurable. So this is why you see different result on different OSes (or really, different file systems!). Now, importantly, zip files are case-sensitive! So when you unpack the zip file onto a case-insensitive filesystem, your case mismatches suddenly don't matter.

Thankfully there's an easy fix for all of this: be consistent! It's genuinely not that difficult to not have case mismatches.

[Zireael]

Thanks bartbes, that's enlightening.

However in this case it's not case-sensitivity:

Code: Select all

--colors
dofile("colors.lua")

When I run the game unpacked (e.g. from Zerobrane IDE), it works perfectly. When double-clicking a .love, suddenly it doesn't. Huh?

[bartbes]

Well, those are two separate problems. The error in this case is using dofile, since dofile bypasses love's virtual filesystem (aka love.filesystem). The love alternative is using love.filesystem.load, then calling the result. Generally, though, there's no real reason to be using dofile in the first place.

[Zireael]

Thanks muchly. I think this dofile is a leftover of the original code - the engine I used previously just did dofile(), no bells and whistles attached.

*find and replace intensifies*

EDIT: Okay, ran the .love and saw no other bugs - should be good to play! Feel free to bounce ideas in the thread, too.

[Zireael]

Last update before I get too busy to do anything:

I fixed a bug where you could press movement keys during NPC turns.
Added more NPCs. Warning, they are dumb, so they kill each other because they try to path through each other and the combat code doesn't check for faction allegiances yet. This, however, lets you peek at the log at how treasure would be generated for each of the dead NPCs.

I see two solutions to pathing problem: 1) drop jumper and use Djikstra instead 2) can I somehow regen jumper's pathing grid so that x,y with actors (other than player) in them are marked as impassable?

P.S. On non-code front, I decided to use the fact that I'm porting the game to change the underlying rules to an original system. The new system is not coded in yet, obviously, as it's mostly a pile of notes so far. It will have to go through testing (hopefully automated) before you'll be able to play with it. The major change is that the basic die will become d100 (d%) instead of d20.

[Zireael]

I used the last two days to get a handle of UI. I decided to roll my own code instead of using a library for that.

Therefore you can now chat to non-hostile NPCs, provided you know the language they speak. (A happy side effect is that the combat code now cares about faction allegiances). If you don't, the text gets scrambled. I use ROT13 for that for now, although I have plans to expand this to generating a pseudo-language, word by word and/or using a different, totally fantasy font - I mean like runes-lite or something - to prevent the player from somehow deciphering the text he isn't supposed to.

Your answers get scrambled too, but this is I think an unintended consequence - the real goal is to not display ANY options if you don't speak the language, except for maybe 'Leave' or some such that allows you to quit the dialogue.


Dialog scrambling in action

Compared to T-Engine version, I am still missing proc-gen NPC portraits, but they should make it in in the next few days. Also you can't see the dwarven accent or the drow word swapper code in action since there are no dwarves yet and the drow are all hostile.

[Zireael]

Some players in the T-Engine version requested that the backgrounds be more desaturated so that items/actors/whatever stand out.

How would I go about achieving the effect from the 2nd picture linked? I found https://github.com/Amadiro/love-shaders ... Desaturate but it desaturates completely, ie. makes it grayscale...

[pgimeno]

If you absolutely need to do it in real time, you can overlay the desaturated image with less than 100% alpha. But my guess is that it's better to have the images desaturated to start with.

[Zireael]

I got a ton of stuff done in the last couple of days even though I am a slow coder and an even slower spriter.

The character dialogue now handles the situation where you don't speak the NPC's language better. Your answers don't get scrambled in any case. You just don't get any of the normal answers, just a [Leave] option which closes the dialog screen. If you do speak the language, the answers now feature a small note telling you which skill they test for (i.e. [Bluff], [Diplomacy]).


Beginnings of a character creation screen

I was inspired by ToEE's character creation I saw in a gameplay vid on YT. I think this is the only cRPG game with randomly rolled stats where you first roll and then assign every one of the results to one of the stats. All the other games I can recall (BG1-2, IWDII, PS:T, NWN1-2, Angband, Incursion) didn't allow you to reassign the rolls. If you got a high roll but it got assigned to a less-than-useful stat, time to reroll. Oh, the number of times I rolled to get a 18/100 in BG1...

The HUD now features a body picture - I used a screenshot of Deus Ex 1 as a reference. The picture is grayscale and colored by LOVE's color functions, so I'll be able to recolor it on the fly once I hook up some more code to it. The new ruleset features HP per body part (head, torso, 2 arms, 2 legs) so the color of your torso in the pic will tell you how damaged your torso is.