Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sowelu]

Tactics are limited when ranged weapons aren't a big deal.  Yeah, in Frozen Synapse (if I'm thinking about the right game), it's important to crawl under windows, and peek out to take that rocket launcher shot, and make sure your squadmates cover each others' backs so you have good visibility at the end of the round.  Darklands has very limited ranged weapons.  And yeah--it would be pretty cool to see ranged weapons get expanded into a bigger deal, so bows and arrows fired faster for example, with bigger battlefields.  Pretty cool right up until the point where you ran up against ten bandits with bows and arrows.

Either way...turn-based games seem like they really need fog of war, to me.  And that doesn't seem very Darklandsy.

Combat in Darklands is kind of clumsy, yeah.  But I think that's mostly because the pathfinding was seriously ungood.

EDIT:  Also, simultaneous turns usually depend on ranged weapons to keep opposing agents from literally bumping into each other.  This is a very likely occurrance in a melee-focused game, and jockeying for position seems like it ought to happen at a very rapid pace, much faster than a turn.  But...I gotta say, if X-Com Apocalypse could stuff a turn-based system into a real-time engine, it's at least worth some consideration later?

[G-Flex]

Hm, I thought the mace was the best one and I never used anything else--except for the really really big hammers vs. heavily armored guys when I had no potions.  Penetration 4 IIRC, and its max strength was like...I dunno, 25 or thereabouts, which means that your strength-40 guy gets truly obscene damage bonuses using it.  I think it was tied with the military hammer for speed, or maybe faster.  Military hammers on the other hand also had great penetration and higher damage, but their max strength was 99, so your strength could never exceed it for that damage bonus.  Then again I might have misunderstood the algorithm--it was kind of a weird one--or I might be mistaking hammers for flails.

Here are the tables from the cluebook, just to clear up any confusion:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I agree that turn-based combat is unnecessary. You have enough time to think about tactics simply by pausing the game. Combat IS a little clumsy, but I think that's because of pathfinding (like Sowelu said), weird animations, and AI quirks. Pathfinding in indoor areas was seriously irritating. Dudes tripping up over each other constantly.

[Sowelu]

Mmm!  Thank you for that table.  My book's at home in a box -somewhere-.  I defer to you:  Hammers are better than maces against people in plate, and only marginally worse against everyone else (since the speed is increased a lot by other factors).  If you're fond of fighting berserk with light encumbrance, maces are a serious force of nature though.  Speed 40 means you can knock back your enemies before they get a swing, while speed 50 doesn't always get that luxury.  It gets hardcore.

So, uh, pathfinding.  I figure that critters have a bounding circle, and you can squeeze through the bounding circle of a buddy, but you can't attack (or you attack a lot worse) while you're in there and you move slower.  (Whoever got there first suffers no penalty.)  That solves most of the pathfinding issues right there, since allies will gently nudge each other out of the way while they move, and will tend to automatically spread out to cover an enemy best (like it currently handles the auto-choice between berserk, normal, vulnerable, parry).

[Soulwynd]

Tactics are limited when ranged weapons aren't a big deal.

Well, take Toribash as another example because, while I know it's not your intention, it's sounding more like the melee combat you have in mind lacks a lot of options and might be as boring as the one we had in darklands. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed darklands quite a bit but it wasn't much due to combat. I think DnD and other RPGs should serve as inspiration in this case, even tho they're not STB it can even be applied to real time. There are a lot of combat maneuvers each weapon type can have, each with its own advantages and disadvantages so people aren't just smash this guy, keep your back against the wall, etc.

Part of the problem, I think, came from the AI, they just rushed into you and that was pretty much it. No formation, no moving around. That should be looked into as well.

[G-Flex]

There are a lot of combat maneuvers each weapon type can have, each with its own advantages and disadvantages so people aren't just smash this guy, keep your back against the wall, etc.

This is honestly starting to sound a bit gamey to me. The Darklands combat (aside from bugs and other bits of substandard implementation) served its purpose pretty well, even if it wasn't very flashy, and was a bit more complex than it looked.

[Gunner-Chan]

Darklands combat to me was actually pretty good. Just a bit clunky. If it was tuned up but mostly similar it would be perfect. It wasn't pretty, but neither are real fights.

[Soulwynd]

This is honestly starting to sound a bit gamey to me. The Darklands combat (aside from bugs and other bits of substandard implementation) served its purpose pretty well, even if it wasn't very flashy, and was a bit more complex than it looked.

Perhaps. I just wish to see a bit more complexity to it if you guys are remaking it. It doesn't have to be flashy and I'd hope it would be based on actual things people did in combat, despise my example for inspiration.

[Sowelu]

Argh!  I hit the back button by mistake and lost my typing.  Anyway.  I agree that some maneuvers might be neat, like charging into battle instead of calmly walking, or being able to sidle around an enemy while taking big penalties.  But!  I honestly believe that everything suggested for combat upgrades can come later, once the basics are down.  So!

Combat system is underway.  I'm going to make it a straight clone of the simplest parts I can pull out of combat:  Walking around, melee, isometric tiles.  No upgrades from base Darklands unless it actively makes the coding easier.

Now if there's one thing I'm terrible at--and find very frustrating to work on--it's placeholder images.  So with that in mind, is anyone good at reverse engineering file formats?  Does anyone happen to really like it?  Or more likely, does someone feel like screen-capping some stuff?  Because I would absolutely adore anyone who could generate some spritesheets.  I mean it might be silly to keep using the original graphics, yes.  But it would give us some serious remake cred and be totally useful in the meantime.  And oh yeah, hardcore nostalgia factor, which is very important here I feel.  http://wallace.net/darklands/ has a little data on image formats.

...and it looks like the Darklands mailing list discussed this to death back in 2004 and ripping the stuff might well be impossible.  Also I guess they tried to make a combat sim sometime back then too?  I don't even remember.  But still!

EDIT:  Ah, that's a fine example of what I don't want to do.  I guess their sim had body-part damage?  Pretty cool in DF and all, but not in my Darklands please.  Oh man were there ever a lot of fan efforts back in '03/'04.

[Sowelu]

I have not flaked out completely:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's Gunther pathing around some city tiles with randomly generated obstacle tiles, which...are red squares because I haven't ripped much stuff yet.  But it'll be good and proper walls before long.  The stat blocks are good and ready to display stats.

Next up:  Image ripping for walls (tedious).  Clicking to set path goals (simple).  Proper stats (simple really).  The original font for giggles.  Better walk cycles ugh.  But combat is really not that far off:  You make a couple guys path towards each other and start hitting each other once they're close enough.

Once I can set up a couple teams and make them fight each other in a cityscape that doesn't look awful, I'll either move on to world map or CYOA cards.  Awful tempting to support the original card format...That file is at least well-documented enough to import straight.

[Cheese]

Oh wow, this is actually happening?

[Sowelu]

Oh wow, this is actually happening?

Meh.  Maybe!  At present, I'm dinking around with C# and seeing what I can do.

Just went digging around on the old mailing list, and it looks like Quadko actually already made a world-map and city thing.  Like, you can walk around on the map, enter cities, and wander around in them.  It's hackish and 5-6 years old, but it's certainly inspiring.  That and the "oh hey, it's all the map graphics and some formats, decoded" part.  Do not think I would straight-up use any of his code, but I might just drop a line saying "Hey do you mind if I rip off a lot of your stuff and credit you" because some of the interface stuff is pretty sweet.

At this point I really need to figure out what I want to improve, and how.  Like...do I convert the old message cards into a new format, like XML or something?  That was Quadko's approach and I'm rather fond of it.  No matter what I do, I'll be following his example on a lot of stuff.  Turns out that the combat prototype I thought I saw was nothing remotely like the Darklands one, so mine will apparently be the first Darklands tactical...thing.

The overworld map format, the overworld graphics, the city data, the message cards, and the background images are all solved problems.  So...I guess it would be pretty neat to attack the message cards next.  Rip the whole file to XML or something and go from there.

Of course if anyone wants to help with decompiling the combat sprites or tiles or just screencap them, hey.  That's cool too.  That sort of thing is what takes this from "meh this is getting frustrating" to "Oh hey, all the data is there, this will be totally awesome when finished".

[olemars]

Maybe I'll take a look at the data files and see what sort of mess it is. Although I guess I should actually play the original a bit first, since it's been years and I never got very far.

[sluissa]

I'm taking a look at it. No real experience doing this, but I'm somewhat familiar with how X-COM did it, and it looks very similar. I'll let you know if I find out anything.

EDIT: Got the .cat files unpacked. but can't make any sense of the IMC files. They're apparently mostly battle sprite animations. You probably already knew all that though. Oh well. Sorry. I might try a few more crazy things if I can think of any. But for now I"m tapped out.

[G-Flex]

The cluebook has a lot of information in terms of battle mechanics, for what it's worth. I'm not sure how the skill rolls (and similar things) are done, but that MIGHT be reverse-engineerable, which of course is not a word (e.g. increase skills/stats to find out what's relevant for a task, and how the chance of success scales marginally at each point).

[Mephansteras]

I don't have time to help with any of this right now, but I wish you good luck!

And, when you get further in, I can probably take some time to help you test/QA stuff.