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Posted by fejoa, Jun 12, 2016 at 6:50 am
Tomb of Xinroch in forum Other Coding
red_kangaroo wrote
If I may put my two cents in - maze level would be great for breaking the rooms-and-corridors feel of the whole game, or maybe even cavern-type floors? As in actual caves, irregular interconnected rooms of rough stone, as opposed to the current straight coridors and square rooms preset elsewhere.

Xinroch should wield his two flaming swords, as per the History of Dark Knighthood, rather than one sword and a shield. Skeleton dual-wielding flaming swords? So cool.

I was thinking about a dungeon where you would be locked in until you complete some kind of quest - smilarly as you cannot leave Oree's lair, but with larger dungeon. Maybe the Tomb is Xinroch's prison and no one can leave without finding a key to the door? You can enter but before you can get out again, you have to find a key somewhere deeper in the dungeon.

This is cool. I agree we can change the straight rooms and corridors preset for a different look to the dungeon. Also for consideration would be the wall materials and earth materials, and what colours we would like. Probably could try for a black and white theme? Octiron and bone?

There are a lot of animals cropping up, which is normal, but we may need dungeon tags after all, to enable us to ring-fence the types of monsters we need.
Victory conditions will need to be worked out, but I like the idea of retrieving a key to get out.
I'm thinking of a dual-enner beast level, about Level 7 (that's level index 6). Do you think this is a good idea, or just too crazy?

There's a little list in the first post about jobs to be done. Feel free to chip in if you like, or post some more suggestions to go on the list.

As regards to balancing, see attached IVAN_balance.doc (which you have to change to IVAN_balance.xlsx) file for a short analysis. First tab is graphs, and second tab is the data. Give me your thoughts.

Latest changes here: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/compare/XinrochTomb
Attached files
IVAN_balancing.doc (34.35 kb)
Posted by fejoa, Jun 12, 2016 at 4:45 am
Tomb of Xinroch in forum Other Coding
I thought it would be best to make a feature branch off attnam/master to be able to merge into. So, for reference I have made a little change to show how just by using the script files, you can make a new world map location. The diff is here: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/compare/XinrochTomb...fejoa:X... This works along the lines of what is written in the wiki, though I still haven't found the time to finish that article.

If you have an IVAN fork to work on this dungeon, you can merge changes into the XinrochTomb branch. Once it is more or less complete, we can deploy it on the main branch. You can pull the branch and pop the IVAN.exe in the folder on your own system, and pull changes in to stay up to date.

Nothing to stop you from downloading and changing the .dat files by hand, if the git method is at first a little overwhelming
Posted by fejoa, Jun 11, 2016 at 4:49 am
Tomb of Xinroch in forum Other Coding
Ok so I'll de-emphasise the penguins.

chaostrom wrote
Never thought I'd become reference material. I'm honoured!

Seems you already have ideas for the tomb, and I don't know a lick about balancing, I'll just make a few suggestions and leave the final design to you.

I feel there should be at least one "tactical" level, small enough that someone with high perception and/or high intelligence with ESP should be able to see the entire floor. Casters in the back/rooms whose corridors loop around so you can't walk up to them easily, dark knights in the front/open room that lets them surround you. Basically, you need to plan your moves ahead or get bogged down in a slog-fest that'll get you killed. This is a holy site for worshippers of chaotic gods, it's well defended.

You could have Xinroch's Gravekeeper as a sub-boss instead of the third form (in the flesh) 'cus he's already all rotted away. Rather, I think Xinroch himself would work better as a 2-stage fight, his skeletal form then his ghost form.

Little food! Following the theme, most enemies should be necromancers/undead/dark knights, no random animals. If you're not a follower of Mellis, you better hope one of two random rooms spawn; the kitchen or the training cage with bear(s) in it.

Similarly, since it's a tomb and not a mine, I feel it should be shorter than GC. To compensate for reduced loot, more chests spawn. Perhaps chance of a single storage room with numerous chests?

Legendary suggestions, as always! I like the tactical room, and the kitchen and training cage in particular
How long should the dungeon be? Elpuri length? That's about 9 levels.
Posted by fejoa, Jun 10, 2016 at 7:02 am
Tomb of Xinroch in forum Other Coding
So, Tomb of Xinroch. I kind of imagine fighting various incarnations of Xinroch, with ever increasing difficulty along the way. It'd be cool to try to re-unite his bones with his ghost, and then resurrect him to be able to fight him in the flesh. Then he dies and his corpse comes back to life, and you have to fight him as a zombie. Then you have to fight him as a levelled-up version of a skeleton (just give him another config, with a stats boost?). Need to code-in the main characters (Xinroch), but it'd be a doddle.

Reference material for study.

Some ideas:
* Dwarven gas chambers
* Maze rooms (needs coding)
* Paradise room (nice room to be in, featuring palm trees and a sandy beach with water, and an island)
* Penguins who perform anti-sci-talk
* Ice side-level
* Bone floor types
* Tactical level - high visibility, dark knights in the front room, casters in remote but still accessible corridors
* Xinroch's Gravekeeper
* 2-stage Xinroch fight; skeletal form and then ghost form
* Not much food
* Most enemies necromancers, undead and dark knights
* Kitchen somewhere (to feed chaos-god worshippers during their pilgrimage)
* Training cage with bears in it (maybe like an experimental necro-chamber where necromancers try to create undead animals)

Difficulty curve: follows GC, but starts a little lower and finishes steeper?

Jobs:
* Coding maze rooms DONE
* Adding Xinroch's gravekeeper
* Adding Xinroch ghost-form
* A terrain picture of the tomb for on the world map
* Color schemes and what sort of materials to use to change the look of the dungeon
* Tactical level layout. This is one screen, 42x26 tiles big.
* Layout of the tomb entry, probably like a temple structure with guards etc, and an inner chamber with the dungeon entrance
Posted by fejoa, Jun 9, 2016 at 11:46 pm
Fullscreen mode crash in forum Trouble Shooting and Bugs
I've been following this up with the SDL forums, long suspecting that it is a bug in SDL2. There has been some talk about Direct3D renderers misbehaving with window resizing, and it may be that the bug we have is related to this one.

So I did an experiment to see whether selecting a different renderer would help. Sure enough if you set the SDL_RENDER_DRIVER environment variable to opengl then it seems to fix the problem.

Can anyone running Windows verify that IVAN full screen toggles without a crash when the sdl rendering environment variable is set in this way?
Posted by fejoa, Jun 9, 2016 at 8:04 pm
Planning for Release in forum IVAN Development
4zb4 wrote
Speaking of dungeon scripting, maybe we should finish off the Dragon Tower and Xinroch's Tomb?

You bet! I've got some script for Xinroch's Tomb that I started some years ago. I'll try to dig it up and post it
Posted by fejoa, Jun 9, 2016 at 8:21 am
Planning for Release in forum IVAN Development
capristo wrote
Haha sounds about right. Although hopefully now with dungeon scripting the releases will come more frequently!

Yeah, who was it that said "release early and release often"? I think there will be more frequent releases.
Posted by fejoa, Jun 8, 2016 at 8:53 pm
Planning for Release in forum IVAN Development
capristo wrote
With every release we've had, the new version breaks the save & hiscore files.

I think that for the latest release, with the huge worldmap changes, that was probably necessary. But for smaller releases we should allow old save files to remain valid if possible.

I also think that if there *are* real breaking changes, then we should do a major version bump. Otherwise do a minor bump.

So for a small change:
0.50.6 -> 0.50.7

For a large change that breaks hiscore/save files:
0.50.6 -> 0.51.0

I agree, although now it makes me wonder exactly what types of changes cause differences in the save files that would require a step in the save file version number.

If we did a 0.50.a to 0.50.b change every three months, which is our current rate, it would take about 123 years before we get to IVAN version 1.0 xD
Posted by fejoa, Jun 7, 2016 at 6:23 am
Planning for Release in forum IVAN Development
Just posting in the de-facto release thread: IVAN 0.50.6 for windows is out.
Posted by fejoa, Jun 6, 2016 at 5:20 am
Where to next with worldmap and new dungeon locations in forum IVAN Development
red_kangaroo wrote
Awsome! So awsome!

So, will the new dungeons be incorporated into official releases, or will they work as a plug-in? As in, we post our dungeons here and everyone can pick what they like and add it into their game, or we post and playtest, then put it into new release for everyone?

The intention is to incorporate the dungeons into official releases. This will attract players, and perhaps some developers. This means you can create full-length dungeons and be confident that they will continue to appear in continuing development.

I would say, the most direct/guru way would be to fork the git repository and you can work on your own dungeon in your own fork, commit, push changes to your remote, and then pull request the changes into attnam/master. However, as I write this I can see that with the status quo there might be long times between releases. I feel that there will be more frequent releases as dungeons reach the cut-and-polish stage.

You will want players to play test your dungeons as soon as you make changes. The players don't use github, that much is obvious. But I would recommend you use github as the vehicle of ultimate authorship, because it will enable you to show the work was yours, and help you track changes etc. It also means I can see it if you get stuck, or if there is a bug. When you feel the code is ready you can make a pull request, I can merge this into the main line and do a release. In this way it will be released to the general public.

For all github's technical usefulness, it will not get you the rapid feedback you require. The forum here is a good development nucleus with plenty of the game's legendary power players who drop in on us from time to time. When I did CLIVAN I found lots of people coming out of the woodwork to push my dungeons to their limits and the feedback was awesome! They smashed through everything and found all the loopholes, which was embarrassing, but humbling that people took the time out to review my work.

I expect if you get a thread going on the forum here you will get some eager followers. As you develop, attach your dungeon data files here and explain where they go so people can test it out. If you don't want to use git (the learning curve can seem steep, I'll admit) and you start out in this way, then that is fine too. You can even jump into github right at the end and push all the changes in one go. I know you already have a fork though...
The first part will be to flesh the thing out using your imagination, and writing the dungeon script (or copy-pasting a lot and changing things). It will be a lot of solitary hours, keep a notebook handy, graph paper is good too.