Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm thinking of using Python for the game. I'd been working on a vague idea of a multiplayer Roguelike version of Neverwinter Nights implemented in Python, but I ran out of steam on  that, so I've decided to go for something a little less impossibly ambitious.

Here's a few topics I'm grasping with my cold, unliving hands for info on:

• Line of Sight code. I made a valiant effort at converting a nice looking recursive shadowcasting algorithm to Python, but in the end it defeated me with a quick nested function call to the jaw, and that was that.
  
• Map generation - I'm thinking of setting the game in a town, maybe with a small wilderness area about it, possibly with a view of expanding it to multiple towns and cities. I'm thinking a grid layout, as used in some US cities, as well as UK cities like Middlesbrough, would make things easier to begin with (as well as providing the nice ironic.. uh.. ironicness of humanity's attempt to impose order collapsing into chaos)
  
• Anything else you can think of
  

So, yeah, if you've got any ideas, hints or tips, feel free to send 'em my way.

You've seen them. You've probably slashed them with a pointy armament of some description.

I propose a change to the fleshy spheres of not very much doom, in fact I've been working on it in the editors. (You can't add tissues, it seems, since it causes a crash)

I'm going to give the fleshballs a brain.

Not just any kind of brain here though, but one capable of much... good... brain... things.

This would compensate for their non-existant physical stats.

They'd move by teleportation, and psychic levitation. Teleportation's in already, so yay.

In later versions of 'Armok, I hope to give them tentacles to dangle ominously beneath their psychically floating form as they float about in search of sustenance...

Perhaps they could be possessors or something... ooh yeah...

Anyway, all that lies far in the distant future. For now I'm just giving them brains and immense mental capabilities.

If it is true, it could be really cool to have a thing like Hearse for Nethack, (which exchanges bones files between players). Also, perhaps having one world that people play in one at a time, changing and adding to it like a complicated piece of interactive fiction.

When the game moves further along, will there be ways of getting statistics on things? Like, the numbers of people in a town/civilization/continent, or the numbers of species and their relative populations, and such?

One thing I've been itching to ask for a while is about the game interface. What plans exist for it?

Also, the maps in-game. Would it be possible for them to only display areas you've seen, or own a map of? (And then you could end up buying less accurate maps to save a few coins, and the map conveniently leaves out the huge orc camp, the swamp with the grabbing tentacles, the sheer 90,000 metre drop, etc..)

Talking of maps, some civilizations or even individual cities might have groups of people specifically chosen by the ruling body for a certain task:
official map makers, official architects, official civil engineering teams, artificiers who are by appointment to the ruling body, a state-sponsored group of healers, etc...

Anyway, the 'ruler-approved' stuff could be of higher quality than your average junk (but they'd probably cost extra)

Could a civilization be, for example, a democracy, or a commune with equal division of labour?

Um...

Well, that's it for now.