Inactive RPG making?

[Tommaso]

Hello!

I am a total newbie in this cubic world, i used to work just on 2d games, with the editor called RPG maker (the oldest version), so i am really confident with low resolution textures and mapping, but a very few experience in coding (C++ and Flash) :/

Despite of this, i have been astonished by the potential that Minecraft style games would have in the development of 3d RPG games.. and i thought to finish an old project using Terasology as core engine for the game. This is considering an heavy modding and limitation on some key features to make a more linear game with a few elements of terrain generation, monster spawning (in "wild" zones), and crafting.

The more ambitious proposal is to make from Terasology a real 3d RPG editor like RPG Maker.. this would be an editor (API?) usable with no coding knowledges, to edit events, monsters, skills, weapons, character progression..


I am more on the first idea.. and trying to do it on my own..
Anyway i would need a level editor to make game maps.. is it possible to use tools like World Painter in Terasology, too?

What do you think?

 

[Immortius]

Wait what? I'm pretty sure Terasology is not supposed to be used for other people's projects such as your "Old Project"

The Apache License means the code can be used for whatever, as long as give proper attribution. Non-code content is another story, which we still need to address.

And also make an API to make it easier to call it your own without doing anything? I don't think it's meant for that. That's just my opinion, and I'm against programs like Game Maker and stuff like that it takes little to no skill to do. The moral of this post is if you're going to try to make a game, start from scratch learn how to program, it takes time but it's worth it. Don't use programs like Game Maker, Sure it's good for beginners who just want to play around, but if you want a good looking game just learn how to program , Sorry if I got a little off-topic.

Disagree. I've played some excellent games made with Game Maker (Iji and Spelunky come to mind). Simpler tools means you can concentrate more on the equally hard and probably more important aspects of gameplay and generally making a fun game. Ideally Terasology would be similarly easy to work with and mod, although obviously it takes a lot of work to reach for that. The entity system/prefab/mod stuff is supposed to help with this. More advanced in game tools would be nice too.

Game Maker is now available on Steam, for free and Steam Workshop enabled, which is nice. Game Maker has its problems and limits of course, but I wouldn't fault anyone for using it.

Unity3D is a good 3D engine for someone looking for something easy to use as well.

As for world painter... Our saved world format is not currently very conductive for external editing, ideally that will change as well.

 

[Cervator]

Wait what? I'm pretty sure Terasology is not supposed to be used for other people's projects such as your "Old Project"

Also disagreeing here - in fact I want to encourage people to base their own projects on Terasology, we've had a couple people approach us via email with proposals like that with one person even wanting to invest in using our engine for making something specific.

At the same time, true, we don't want somebody just slapping a different label on the code and calling it their own (that has also happened a couple times). But using the engine with a different mixture of mods and goals is very different

Tommaso - one of our goals is to make it easier for users to create custom content (even mods!) from inside the game itself. Like the idea of building a creature statue from blocks then somehow imbuing it with "life" and shrinking it down to where it could work as a model. Likely that would take some extra polish outside the game, but a start is better than nothing. Same for making custom blocks, large structures, etc, then sharing those.

If we can get the right contributors it seems very possible for me that we can turn our "free style" mode into something far behind its "creative" model and allow the user to set up interesting things and events in-game. I'm not familiar with RPG Maker and its kin, so I can't say how far or close to something like that we can get, but I find the options in games like Second Life very appealing and would like to see more like that (albeit with fewer extreme furries, perhaps). Still, that entirely depends on who we can encourage to help make that happen

 

[Josh]

Also disagreeing here - in fact I want to encourage people to base their own projects on Terasology, we've had a couple people approach us via email with proposals like that with one person even wanting to invest in using our engine for making something specific.

At the same time, true, we don't want somebody just slapping a different label on the code and calling it their own (that has also happened a couple times). But using the engine with a different mixture of mods and goals is very different

Tommaso - one of our goals is to make it easier for users to create custom content (even mods!) from inside the game itself. Like the idea of building a creature statue from blocks then somehow imbuing it with "life" and shrinking it down to where it could work as a model. Likely that would take some extra polish outside the game, but a start is better than nothing. Same for making custom blocks, large structures, etc, then sharing those.

If we can get the right contributors it seems very possible for me that we can turn our "free style" mode into something far behind its "creative" model and allow the user to set up interesting things and events in-game. I'm not familiar with RPG Maker and its kin, so I can't say how far or close to something like that we can get, but I find the options in games like Second Life very appealing and would like to see more like that (albeit with fewer extreme furries, perhaps). Still, that entirely depends on who we can encourage to help make that happen

I'll read the license better last time, sorry for jumping to conclusions.

 

[Tommaso]

Well, immortius and cervator you got the point
The idea was exactly making a pack of mods, that together give a custom gameplay. In agreement with the open-source approach.
This would match together with a huge amount of single player custom maps, something that can give a quite long gaming experience.

You both are telling me that Terasology is mostly oriented to the creation of new contents in game.. this would be good to create custom blocks and events, but it's seems so difficult to make the same thing for large natural maps and creature modeling and animations..

I don't know.. i feel that making everything in game would be more like playing in a sandbox, than developing an enviroment in which making my own game..

Maybe i would use a less defined and simple voxel engine, more than terasology that is more player oriented? Making a lot of mod or refining a base code would be equally difficult, isn't it?
What's your advice?

 

[Cervator]

Well, we'd like for Terasology to support the creation of user-generated content in-game but I don't think we're quite aiming for the point of that being the main goal to the point where you'd have a game-maker game (would be nice though, of course). There's a definite voxel world gameplay design meant for a central "game mode" that doesn't rely on that

It will certainly still be easier to make mods, blocks, models, etc out-of-game and that's likely where the experts will work. Allowing a limited array of customization options in-game is more to get people hooked on the idea of making their own stuff so they'll learn more and pick up on out-of-game tools if they're interested

I suspect it would be easier to make a game mode out of a set of mods than it would be to take a more raw voxel platform and build a whole game on top. Although that may be possible - that's sort of what our friends over at Spout are aiming for. Although the feel there may also be that you're building a big mod to make your game.

If you like the idea of aiming for a long-term goal of your own "game mode" inside Terasology I think we can help make that happen

 

[Skaldarnar]

I would like to add the opportunity of making new game content via extensible (mod) interfaces. The Grammar System I work is only one example of how the game could be extended, and the idea of having people collect several mods/build their own, write an own backstory, label this package like they want and come out with "My Game - a Terasology Story" or something would be great to see...
Getting some feedback from more and more people gives me a review of what people want and what we should support with TS.

 

[Tommaso]

Ok, so how can i start to read and understand some code?

It's not programming that scares me, but the whole pack of programs i need to install.. just opening the java project seems too difficult :/

Can't i just use notepad?

 

[Cervator]

Ok, so how can i start to read and understand some code?

It's not programming that scares me, but the whole pack of programs i need to install.. just opening the java project seems too difficult :/

Can't i just use notepad?

You can totally use Notepad, although I'd at least suggest Notepad++ ... but you'll come to appreciate the power and convenience using IntelliJ and you really don't have to do that much more

Git is the scary step and if you really want you can try to get at the code purely by downloading the source as a zip off GitHub, running that one "gradlew idea" step in the project root from the command line, then opening IntelliJ

I'm right in the middle of getting to grips with our new modding setup and our fancy ES in general, so I can say playing with it isn't that bad at all. Since the modding system is new there are still some things we need to straighten out, like the need to manually compile each mod dir once (which isn't very involved - right click the directory in IntelliJ and pick compile)

Do you have some starting ideas of what sort of content you'd like to play with? I could probably get you some better feedback with that in mind, and if you'll hop on IRC in US evenings or just about any time during weekends there's plenty of step-by-step advice available there - just may have to be patient if everybody is AFK

 

[Tommaso]

I thought i could to start from:
1)enemies/npc modeling
2)textures
3)animations

4)mapping of main locations: i'd like to create some particular maps - example for the main locations/cities/dungeons..
..and this is a key question i have: it would be possible to mix some fixed maps chunks and randomly generated ones?
i think of a defined building in a randomly generated landscape, or defined rooms and tunnels randomly matched to make a dungeon..

5)i would have all the enviroment, and i could add the backstory, the events, items, weapons, effects, cinematics, and everything

PS: i just can't do the gradlew step, i don't understand what's that about.. i can import the src in Intellij but no libraries and SDK.. maybe i should ask in pvt..

 

[Josh]

I thought i could to start from:
1)enemies/npc modeling
2)textures
3)animations

4)mapping of main locations: i'd like to create some particular maps - example for the main locations/cities/dungeons..
..and this is a key question i have: it would be possible to mix some fixed maps chunks and randomly generated ones?
i think of a defined building in a randomly generated landscape, or defined rooms and tunnels randomly matched to make a dungeon..

5)i would have all the enviroment, and i could add the backstory, the events, items, weapons, effects, cinematics, and everything

PS: i just can't do the gradlew step, i don't understand what's that about.. i can import the src in Intellij but no libraries and SDK.. maybe i should ask in pvt..

I made a tutorial of how to setup the terasology source for eclipse, eclipse is better than intellij in my opinion.

 

[Cervator]

"gradlew idea" is something you run from a command prompt in the project root directory, there's nothing to install or anything it just works - and sets up all your IntelliJ for you like libraries which is rather a useful step

All the details on getting set up can be found in the Github Wiki although you can skip all the Git stuff if you just want to see it run and tweak a little.

As to your items:

1. Easy and useful. Well, models are easy if you know how to work Blender
2. Even easier, less scary Blender
3. Animations are supported in-game but only just barely. Creating some - cool, making them work in-game - doable, putting them to use? Unsure. We've got a galloping pony but it doesn't actually gallop anywhere nor change states to fit actual movement speed. If you could get that working - cool!
4. As in, generating the unique places or outright putting them on an in-game map in a named fashion? For generating you don't want to insert fixed chunks, you'll want to write a generator that runs at some point during world-gen and places something in the world. Skaldarnar has written a "grammar" language for procedural buildings and such while Nym Traveel is working on the actual world gen framework (what happens when)
5. Do all the things!

Best way to sort out any issues or setup questions is hopping on #terasology IRC. Just click the Chat tab on the site top to jump in if you don't have an IRC client handy

 

[Josh]

Cervator forced me to post this

 

[Skaldarnar]

Giving my 2 cents to your fourth point I'd like to refer the grammar system and maybe other "upcoming" features.
As to the grammar system, you can describe your building (at first only buildings, maybe we can expand it to mines and stuff) and the generator will produce buildings of the structure you defined (so, different buildings look similar, but can vary in size, rotation, ...).
Another point I'm looking forward to is to support fixed (building) structures that can be placed in the world. That means, you can save your handmade structures and use them when generating the map...
Though, there are still enough steps to go, but you can keep that in mind when thinking about an own game mode or something...

 

[Cervator]

Another point I'm looking forward to is to support fixed (building) structures that can be placed in the world. That means, you can save your handmade structures and use them when generating the map...

That's what I've got in mind for one of the next few steps for my portals work - refreshing the blueprints/block collections so you can place whole portals in the world or build a structure like a portal and "activate" it to be a portal if it qualifies. Considering my pace, however, anybody else wanting to tinker with that feel free

The key part there vs. the idea of fixed chunks is that the blueprints may take considerations from existing terrain, like "any solid block works here"

 

[christutty]

Just stepping in to say that I spent a lot of time in RPGs, have been tinkering with a world creation toolkit design for some time and see games such as minecraft as an excellent foundation for people to create worlds that people can explore and interact with so Tommaso, you're not the only one.

My interest is a project with a mature and functional terrain and building infrastructure to which I can add the conceptual framework for populations, economics, politics, settlement growth, believable AI that can be interacted with at a strategic level or by just wandering around inside the world, etc. Of course first I have to invent a way to avoid the need to sleep so that I've got time for that and my day job.

 

[Skaldarnar]

Heya and welcome christutty

We have some threads about some of the topics you mentioned, so it would be nice to greet you there as well. For example, village and city generation is wrapped up here, and if you need a project overview it's there for you as well

And yeah, sleeping, day job/university, coding,.... a good "tool" for organizing all that is coffee

 

[Marcin Sciesinski]

In the past, when I was working on an open-source project, I have been sleeping every other night. That gave me plenty of time to code.

 

[Marcin Sciesinski]

It is actually a true store, not a joke...

 

[Cervator]

It is actually a true store, not a joke...

Kudos for your commitment

I've occasionally been considering crazy sleep schemes like Uberman's Sleep Schedule to free up more time but daily-day life is too chaotic for me to be able to pull it off. So instead 5-hour-energy it is

christutty - those topics are some very rich ones we want to get to sooner or later. I'm hugely interested in them myself and know several others are too. Very much looking forward to how they'll evolve around here