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Author Topic: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development  (Read 18548 times)

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #45 on: February 14, 2015, 05:35:10 pm »

Can your group be nomadic and go around waring folks and riding on horseback all the while scaring the local populace into giving you tribute?
nah, your units spawn from a central spot and everyone's already at war and there aren't any horses and the local populace aren't all that scared of you. Mongrelmen are sad little creatures really.

Vattic

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #46 on: February 14, 2015, 09:24:27 pm »

Are you going to mirror Goblin Camp in resource extraction with quarries being like workshops that occasionally spawn themed creatures?
I don't think so. If there is mining (and maybe there won't be), then it'll be like DF-2d style. I'm happy with creatures spawning from the edges of the map because hopefully it lets you have a bit of a chance to plan for them as opposed to just reacting.
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While the current map is temporary and slow to draw some kind of minimap would be handy for seeing where combat was happening and similar.
That might be a bit of a problem with libtcod. It's not really set up to draw smaller than a single character. There is a bit of a complex workaround to that where you essentially split every character up and draw four characters at once to print a normal letter to the screen. That would let you draw 1/4 as big as a normal letter but also adds a fair bit of complexity. I agree that a minimap would be good, but I don't think it's a priority for me just yet. Maybe I will go that workaround route in the future but not just yet.
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Edit3: Random crash to desktop out of nowhere (upgraded my only mongrelman into a soldier during combat with a drow).
Did you get an error message?
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Also is there a cap on the number of mongrelmen? I've never seen more than five at a time.
yeah, at the moment that's right. One of the next steps is to build huts which will allow you to expand your population. It's a bit limiting I know but that'll change very soon.
Had presumed there would be mining because of the metals on the resource list. I guess the list is subject to change and metals could be acquired differently (maybe they only melt items down etc). I have mixed feelings about how Goblin Camp handled quarries and the like. Mostly because the difficulty posed by the creatures seemed a bit much and lead to odd camp designs.

For minimaps there is always the DF method where it represents whole areas averaged into tiles and paints the backgrounds red when there are enemies there. It's not ideal either. I've only messed with libtcod a tiny bit, is it possible to have more than one set of characters? With a second smaller set a map would be fairly simple (I remember seeing in the libtcod tech demo / example it has separate console-like windows over the main one).

No error message it just straight up closed. I had been running it for a couple of hours or more, but it wasn't slowing down or anything before it crashed.

Have to say I really like all the npc interactions. The npcs themselves are nicely iconic and I enjoyed the humour. The lich prowling around raising the dead is great.
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #47 on: February 15, 2015, 12:05:51 am »

They are effectively dummy categories at the moment, but I'm loosely toying with the idea of scavenging precious metals or maybe looting them from enemies which would give you more of an incentive to attack aggressively as opposed to hiding away. That would lend itself to caravans and trade etc to make use of those resources.

I'm glad you like the NPC interactions - I deliberately made them caricatures so that they would have obvious personalities. I want to embrace stereotypical fantasy enemies so that they are immediately recognisable and kinda over-the-top in the way that they're one dimensional so you can predict their behaviour a bit easier.

The character set in libtcod is only limited by the data file you define as your font file. You can see the mongrelmen one in the /data/ directory. The bigger limitation is that there is a fixed tile size. You can define theoretically an infinite number of different tiles in your set but they all need to be the same size. The way around it is to do this: http://theburningplague.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/improved-map-display.html. That's a blog post I made a couple of years ago, effectively working in the opposite direction to make the map display twice as big as the normal font. I would need to go the other way and make normal characters twice as big as the font for the minimap. Not impossible but a bit of a pain. 

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #48 on: February 21, 2015, 10:36:39 pm »

This week was a bit slow and I'm a bit late on this post, but a tangible progression was the introduction of building huts as housing for your mongrelmen. The tribe population limit is linked to that so you're forced to spend wood and space on huts to boost your tribe size.

Screen shot showing a small mongrelman settlement with a bonesmith, fletcher, and an altar to the orc god which is why the local orc raiders are helping beat up some innocent wolves:

dorf

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #49 on: March 03, 2015, 06:00:30 am »

I've tried it again and it's quite smooth to play.
UI and options are pretty logical.

Nice progress!
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Porjate

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #50 on: May 05, 2015, 10:08:16 pm »

Any more progress on this? Been a while since there was an update
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #51 on: May 11, 2015, 02:58:35 am »

I've been having a bit of a break and actually just got back into work on another project which you can read about here: http://theburningplague.blogspot.com

I'll be back to work on it again soon though, it's too far along to abandon!

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #52 on: August 30, 2015, 05:46:27 pm »

After a few month's hiatus, I've started a bit more work.



Basically that's the result of me starting to work on uniques which get spawned to join your budding mongrelman civilization. First off is a fellow freak of nature who is always going to be loyal, but the plan is to include henchmen who are very powerful but demand certain things in return for their friendship, like conversion of religion or the genocide of all orcs. I'm thinking that they'll deliver an ultimatum, which if accepted will change the way the tribe behaves and if it's rejected, then I suppose you'll have a new enemy to deal with.

Dorsidwarf

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #53 on: August 30, 2015, 06:05:59 pm »

Great to see this is back on, it looks like an amazing project to be proud of!
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #54 on: September 05, 2015, 07:50:54 pm »

pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #55 on: September 05, 2015, 09:27:42 pm »

Link to the latest dev build: http://www.dropbox.com/s/c6xmajd85gi4h2l/mongrelmen060915.zip?dl=0

Probably full of bugs but it is what it is.

Antsan

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #56 on: September 06, 2015, 04:20:08 am »

Can I have a linux version? It runs slow as hell under wine.
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pat

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #57 on: September 06, 2015, 06:21:16 am »

Sorry, I don't know the first thing about linux. I had heard feedback from someone else that it ran well in wine  :-\

Antsan

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #58 on: September 06, 2015, 06:37:18 am »

Well, it has no problems running, it's just slow as hell. My graphics card said goodbye a while ago and now I'm using some old one.

You're using python, right? If you'd upload the source code I should be able to use that.
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Vattic

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Re: Mongrelmen - ascii RTS/town builder in development
« Reply #59 on: September 06, 2015, 04:06:16 pm »

Glad to see you're still working on this. Had some fun expanding a couple of settlements. Haven't yet been able to survive without siding with the orcs just to get them off my back.

Crashed to desktop after a while with no error message like before. Still fighting the urge to press Esc to quit menus. I find the events list hard to extract useful information from as new info pops up all the time; Some colour coding of messages may help.
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