Bay 12 Games Forum

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Er settlement.

I already have a character who's set up in the wilderness by a mountain and a giant clay field, with my eye on a neat little bay a little bit up the river, but I'd like an alt who's participating in a village. I've been playing for a day or so and I've got the general hang of it - at first i felt like it was a grindfest (since thats what all the guides were saying) but after the hour or two it took me to get all the skills, it felt less grindy and more expansive.

So yes, the hearthcode please!

Quick suggestion:

If you fit each card layout onto a 3.5x2 square, you can easily mass-print these at home on those business-card blanks you can buy at office supply stores. I can help with layout and PDF authoring if you need it.

DS has a touch screen, it's better than a mouse for clicking on stuff.

R and L buttons can act as shift buttons giving us 3x8-4=26 combinations, excluding unshifted directional buttons...

I've been debating this myself. Use the stylus or use the buttons? Using the stylus would simply mean making giant boxes for the user to click on; it seems like it'd be pretty tacky, and reverting to infiltration mode would mean either giant ugly arrows for navigation.

Using the dpad + keys however seems more intuitive, both to navigate menus and during infiltration mode; the dpad would be used to move, and each of the keys (abxy) could be assigned to the unique commands (use, fight, talk). Not only is this more sensible, but it would be something that would be easily ported to a different handheld system with a similar control scheme (d-pad + 4key + shoulders), which means less work for everyone. This is the one I'm leaning toward; sure, LCS might lose some of it's charm, but better to have a new interface than to have an illegible keyboard you're pecking at all day long.

but i dont know if it would be possible because all the games i have are 128 * 160. and LCS has to be a lot more than that 80*12 x 25*8? = 960 x 200. I  dont really remember the height of  ASCII text (8x12?).  and as my cell phone has only 640*480 then youd have to resize the window to 55 or something instead of 12... Easy...   

the interface would have to be rewritten, specifically the i/o. I have a mockup of how it'd work on a DS (the answer is a header with very abbreviated column titles) where a character is 8x8 (each screen is 32 tiles by 24 tiles), but I'm not sure how it'd work with a phone. Also, the header drawing and such isn't very encapsulated [it simply calls the pdcurses library command followed by what it draws instead of something port-ready like DrawHeader.infiltrate()].

I'm slowly going through the source to see if it's worth it to sit there and change all of the calculations to fit with the DS and if it's even powerful enough to handle the processing involved, especially with the simulation of issues (which to me is pretty much the most key concept in the game); if it can't simulate the issues during runtime the game would just be mayhem crime squad. If it is worth it, then it'll be a hell of a time going through and getting everything to fit on two tiny DS screens, plus the thought process behind how to do input (stylus? dpad+abxy? combination? VIRTUAL KEYBOARD?!).

For an interesting idea if the DS can't handle the issues simulation is porting a singleplayer version of LCS to the DS where you control a squad; after a playthrough (say there's a set number of days) the game spits out a code that you'd input on a master website to create a sortof metagame; the things you do individually effect the metagame as a whole, so as more people play and contribute action codes the master site would affect the state of the metaworld and tip it liberal or conservative. A better idea would be if everyone could connect to a central server and gameplay would effect the metagame on the fly, but I don't think nintendo would like that very much.

There's a big list of PDcurses API-style user's guide at http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net/doc/PDCurses.txt. PDcurses is used as the i/o for LCS, so if you want a similar system, it's your best bet. Technically you don't even have to glance at the LCS source, although it'd be a good idea as an example of implementation (although what happens in there shouldn't necessarily be taken as best practices).

So after some poking around with DS homebrew develoment environments(PAlib, devkit arm) it turns out that the DS has some native text output; combined with some smart GUI design and controls, this means that a Curses library is not really necessary. All that's needed is to somehow map out the keyboard controls on the touchscreen and the buttons.

The only major limitation of course would be the processor power and memory requirements. The Nintendo DS has 4mb of ram and 63+33mhz processor (CPU+GPU); I'm not aware of the minimum requirement for to run LCS. However, putting LCS on the DS is actually not too much of a stretch.

the way i see it, there are two ways of doing this:
1) a straight port with the GUI rewritten, using (during infiltration) the top display for the map and the bottom for squad info and commands and (during assignment [for lack of a better word]) the top to navigate squads and the bottom for commands
2) rewrite the whole thing from the ground up to focus on a single squad. basically continue LCS in spirit

(1) is good b/c it's a straight port and it keeps the game, but is bad b/c all of the graphics would have to be redone, plus the narrower characters would make it hard to see.
(2) is good b/c it lets us start from scratch; development might be smoother and it would allow us to develop the displays and the game code at the same time. it's bad b/c it would be...well, starting from scratch. BUT IT'D BE FUN

i'm trying to run LCS on my DSlinux, but I have a Slot-1 (top slot) device and apparently Linux would very much like that delicious memories.

Your thoughts?