Yay! That is great Alvers

Ah I remember this, thanks for bringing it back into the daylight

i still want to program the magic 8-ball into IVAN.

On anaother note, I'm wondering if anyone has found an easier way to build up rooms in the dungeon.dat files? i.e. a more wysiwyg way rather than manipulating a bunch of ascii? (That said, editing the script in ascii still has some charm to it).

I just wrote this note (attached) on a suitable method for editing graphics in IVAN. It explains a way of opening and editing pcx files using a couple of free graphics editing programmes in windows.

I vote we put Squash on the payroll.
That stuff about the OWTERRAIN macro really clarifies things for me (a bit), thanks!


I think gwterrain is supposed to mean ground-world terrain, or everything on the world map that is the ground, in the same way that glterrain refers to ground-level terrain.

Certainly it was unwitting, as I say, it was reverse engineered

It strikes me that the world map generation may be the most antiquated part of the code, since it has that hand-made feel to it.

Maybe we need an island spawner, or that a certain proportion of the continents generated are islands (jeez, where's that Sid Meier at?). I don't know. If the island is placed last then it will be fine, there will be a way even if it is hacked. It would be good to have a general way of doing it though. Hmm. I think it would pay to put the island close by underwater tunnel. What about an inland island on a lake on the continent that PetrusLikes??


This explains everything that I ever wanted to know about how New Attnan comes to be upon Valpuri, thank you


Learning to make (and make) dungeons is labour intensive no matter what. I have already been asked to document dungeon building in IVAN and I'm happy to do it, regardless of whether there is an overhaul of world generation or not. The way I see it is that basically there is no end to the power of cut-and-paste, and the IVAN community is endlessly creative, so if it is easier to make dungeons without coding then I imagine people will be attracted enough to that feature + good documentation to script their own dungeons.


I say go for it. It is such low-hanging fruit . The existing manner in which continents are generated is too clunky and converting the classes to objects fulfills a step toward making novel world locations scriptable.

Vasily has a git repository here. As far as I know he only works with linux. Apparently he stopped working on his VASYA script because of this.

Worldmap:

The method I used is post somewhere in the forum under Programming.

The way that the devs implemented the placement of locations is a little bit muddy. Most of the "bugs" were written in worldmap.cpp. I have a special interest in improving this because I'd like to try to introduce named continents (named after forum members ). Should be easy though because continents already have numbers.
The bugs include continents being too big (i think I fixed this in CLIVAN). One which I did not fix was this line:

if(AttnamPos != TunnelExit && ElpuriCavePos != TunnelExit)
{...

The above was invented by the devs and it works fine for IVAN 0.50 and CVS, but causes problems for instance when you add more locations. As an example, while testing CLIVAN I once loaded a game where I could not find the "Dark Forest" location anywhere on the map, and I can only presume another location ("Muntuo" since it is the same terrain type i.e. Leafy Forest) was written over the top of it.
I'm sure if each location had a unique terrain type, then this would be solved, but then the game would have to spend inordinate time trying to generate a continent that "PetrusLikes".
So basically I have a feel for some of the undocumented features and some points about what is wrong, but to overhaul this would take me maybe 80 to 120 hours to come up with a paper model.

Oh, and no money for me please leave it for the pros, like Squash. I already have a job, this can be my hobby.

So the above code restricts certain monsters to certain dungeons, I think it will mostly work as written It will certainly enable dungeon builders to have more control over the theme of their dungeon. Does the code support being able to specify that a monster may spawn in multiple dungeons, but not gloomy caves, say for example:

purplehedgehog
{
...

DungeonSet = UNDER_WATER_TUNNEL|BLACK_FORTRESS;
}

Restricting that monster to only those two dungeons? I know I have used flags here, and the variables like BLACK_FORTRESS aren't #defined as flags. But I just want to get a feel for how this will go.

As for segregating dungeons, for starters I liked what vasilly did by bursting dungeon.dat apart so that each dungeon has its own data file. That would drastically improve things rather than devs working on a monolithic dungeon.dat file.

Also: Shall the next version of IVAN proceed from the IVAN CVS version? (I feel it would be the right place to begin)

All I can say is that I'm surprised at how well my brain functions while drunk. I have started a fairly demanding job in electirc power which is not even in the field of software engineering. My time is really constrained by this, but I am still committed to the development of IVAN. I am not a real computer programmer, so I feel like I am not the right person to take on the responsibility of development. I personally hope that Z or someone of similar pedigree may take on the role, but I acknowledge that Z is very busy with his own roguelike development which is in itself a masterpiece.
Basically I am a writer of algorithms, a diver of source codes and a copy-paster, I don't know how pointers work, "structs" are still pretty grey to me and I don't understand a whole lot of other shit. So i don't feel qualified to manipulate the over-arching structure of IVAN, yet.

I agree with the things that SquashMonster has said, and I particularly agree with segregated dungeons which are mutually exclusive, as a vehicle for spreading out the development into the community, by way of people creating novel dungeons. Having created some new characters, i wondered if I could make them specific only to the dungeons I had created. Vanilla IVAN does seem to be a complete game, and alternate dungeons seem like a feasible way forward for IVAN development.

Right now I think the Phase 1 goals are achieveable and we should begin forthwith. The first thing we should agree on is cvs or svn or some other form of sharing the code. Sourceforge or something would be good. I strongly believe in sourcediving, and any aspiring IVAN dev may spend at least 6 months worth, maybe 6 hours per week examining the source and trying to make the code do wierd shits. It's not hard, just takes a lot of staring. Further, I think that as many devs need to be on board as possible. Even people who cannot code to begin with. Compiling is not hard, so anyone can be the programmer really.

Hi Squash! I don't count as a programmer either, probably for the same reasons. I'd also prefer to revert to the main line of IVAN development, in a group setting, but at the moment I'm using CLIVAN as a test bed for wacky ideas.

Wonderful work Translating IVAN must've been very challenging.

Navastater, hmm, the Devs came up with it. It's part of the holy stack and can be found in Mola_Mola.rtf:


By the way, did you translate the opening story and the encrypted scroll?