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[Sar]

So, Compendium is finished. Or at least, finished enough for now.

You'll need .NET2.0 (not included), some text files containing poetry or short stories (two included) and to be able to press the arrow keys (to move) and the Z key (to fire) in order to play.

All controls are configurable in config.xml

COMPENDIUM 1.0 (~6.2MB)

Here's some screenshots:








ORIGINAL POST CONTENT FOLLOWS:

So, hey. I told myself I'd enter this competition, then immediately after that I was held up by Circumstances for about a week, then work got crazy-busy, and I've only now had the time to sit down and get it to the point where it all runs at the same time.

I'm hoping to actually finish, but I may not finish within the actual deadline. But hey - screw the deadline! YOU HEARD ME! A week late is better than nothing at all, right?

Anyway: I'm mostly posting this topic so that I can't tell myself that nobody will notice if I just give up and abandon the whole project now and spend the next week sleeping or something.

So far, I don't have much to show. There's a pretentious title screen:



...but that's entirely generated in Photoshop at the moment, so that doesn't really count.

Here's how far I've got:



- it'll be a shooter, because... well, firstly I love shooters, secondly the guys on Shmup-Dev have been mooting a procedurally-generated shooter for ages without actually going anywhere, and thirdly I already have a perfectly servicable skeleton of a shooter engine written so I can offset the last three weeks of not-working-on-this. ;-)

The idea is that instead of the supplied-random-seed approach, Compendium will read in a text file - I've been developing around classic poetry - and use that text file to generate all the numbers it needs to run the game. And for added spice, parse through the text file for bits of dialogue, questions and exclamations, and pop these up periodically as speech bubbles from the enemies.



If I have time, I'd like to have a set of graphical 'themes' it can select based on the words it finds in the source text, as well, so The Raven takes place against a lightning-filled sky with leaf-less trees and gravestones and spooky statues 'cause it has words like 'demon' and 'terrors' in it, while I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud would be all blue-skies and fluffy-clouds, 'cause it has words like 'bliss' and 'dances' in.

[Jasper Byrne]

That's a really sweet idea!

[Melly]

I already love this.

[Ed]

Great idea!

If I have time, I'd like to have a set of graphical 'themes' it can select based on the words it finds in the source text, as well, so The Raven takes place against a lightning-filled sky with leaf-less trees and gravestones and spooky statues 'cause it has words like 'demon' and 'terrors' in it, while I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud would be all blue-skies and fluffy-clouds, 'cause it has words like 'bliss' and 'dances' in.

DEFINITELY use some sort of Google image search integration to generate the enemies!

/has no idea of the feasibility or wisdom of this

[Noyb]

DEFINITELY use some sort of Google image search integration to generate the enemies!

Safesearch off + love poems = 

I love the idea of parsing text as random dialogue. Spiffy.

[William Broom]

Awesome! Nothing much more to say.

[Sar]

Thanks for the enthusiasm, guys; it's a good motivator to actually complete the thing! ;-)

DEFINITELY use some sort of Google image search integration to generate the enemies!

It's a nice idea conceptually, but I'm not sure how feasible it'd be, unfortunately. Even leaving aside the fact that half the development's being done at my desk at work where I don't have 'net access. ;-)

If one were to literally just load in images from Google image search, then all the enemies would end up being rectangular and carry around bits of background with them, which I don't like the idea of at all. I could probably come up with some way of automatically removing simple backgrounds (e.g. pictures of ravens against the sky) but probably not within the scope of the competition and certainly not with any reliability for irregular backgrounds, like... most backgrounds. :/

Another thought is just to google for a noun found in the text, pick the central third of the image result and use that to colour the enemies, perhaps - so searching for 'raven' would end up with lots of pictures with black near the middle, so the enemies would all get coloured in black. But then again, that kind of thing's not so noticable, and it would probably be equally worthwhile to just look for colour names or hints in the text itself; the same poem has lots of mentions of 'dark' or 'plutonian' or 'stygian' from which the same conclusions could be drawn with a sufficient dictionary of colour-hints.


Lastly, though, I like the idea that running the game with the same source text will always result in the exact same generated text, and pulling stuff out of GIS would change that since the results change over time. Even if it's just colour, it might make a large difference if - say - you're talking about black things on a dark background compared to light things on a dark background. :/

[Ed]

Hence my disclaimer

Are these of any interest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

(I was thinking of making a kind of semantic net for a kind of rogue-like open world game thing, so that the game would know that oaks grew from acorns, oaks were symbolic of strength, etc, so that characters and the overall culture of the world had a kind of common sense to it. I never actually implemented it though. Maybe one day...)

Anyway, the poem-seed idea has loads of potential, looking forward to seeing what happens with it. Now I see what you were talking about in some other thread about a proc-gen game without use of a random function!

[increpare]

Hence my disclaimer

Are these of any interest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

They're certainly of interest to me.  Somehow I overlooked them when I was downloading datasets earlier on... .

[Sar]

So, yeah... I managed to spend most of the last week playing Rock Band, which finally got a release over here. Hitting things with sticks = awesome. According to Alex Rastapopolous (I know that's not his real name and he probably isn't the head of a sinister opium cartel) I can now play the drums for Garbage, Weezer and Bon Jovi. Awesome! I can only assume Garbage, Weezer and Bon Jovi have really crappy drummers. Or maybe he was being economical with the truth, I don't know.

Still, I did some stuff. Mostly I've been wasting my time getting sidetracked by balancing and pacing each stage of development despite the fact that as soon as I put the next bit in everything will change and all the balancing will have been for naught. But hey, it does more things than it did when I put the first screenshots up, at least.

So, firstly: downloadable work-in-progress version:

http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20080531.zip

It's developed in C# and SDL.NET. You'll definitely need the .NET2 runtime to run it, you may also need the SDL.NET runtime. I can't remember whether everything you need is in the zip or not, and it's half three in the morning so I can't be bothered to read up on it. Neither thing is very big, and Google will help you find them. Buttons are arrows and X and Escape to close it down if you manage to finish. Or get bored. One of these is more likely than the other, right now.

If you want to use anything other than The Raven for input then add '-O' to the commandline when running and the game will give you an open-file dialog box with which to find a text file. If you want the game to rip out dialogue and use it for enemies periodically, you'll have to make sure that text file uses double-quotes for its dialogue because there's no way I'm going to spend time working out which apostrophes are apostrophes and which ones are supposed to be single quotes.

The last project I wrote with this engine ran fine on OSX and Linux, but needed Mono and some fiddling on each platform. *shrug*.

Anyway, without further ado: screenshots.





You will notice that all the things which were square before are now round. And that the game now has a border! Joy.


Next I think I will have to make some pretty graphics so that I don't go insane looking at coloured circles.

EDIT: Pretty graphics:

[Sar]

Hmm. I'm thinking the random-recolouring probably needs a bit more work on the weightings...

[Cheif Emu]

I love the idea that enemies will use dialoge from the text file, its brilliant.

[Sar]

I love the idea that enemies will use dialoge from the text file, its brilliant.

I've wasted a fair bit of my development time playing with "Full-Life Consequences" as the source file and giggling periodically. Does that make me a bad person?

[Cheif Emu]

Those new graphics are cool, can they spin around or can they only move directly vertically/horizontally?

Also, how many different themes will you have?

If I have time, I'd like to have a set of graphical 'themes' it can select based on the words it finds in the source text, as well, so The Raven takes place against a lightning-filled sky with leaf-less trees and gravestones and spooky statues 'cause it has words like 'demon' and 'terrors' in it, while I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud would be all blue-skies and fluffy-clouds, 'cause it has words like 'bliss' and 'dances' in.

Because that sounds like a very cool idea, could you have words from the text file incorperated into the background?

[Sar]

can they spin around or can they only move directly vertically/horizontally?

The engine quite happily supports sprite rotation, but currently nothing like that is used... mostly 'cause currently, all the enemies only move horizontally in straight lines. Certainly once I get some bullet sprites drawn they'll be rotating, at the very least.

Also, how many different themes will you have?

Currently it's looking like just one in terms of player and enemy and bullet sprites, and two in terms of backgrounds, at least as far as the competition deadline goes. Drawing graphics takes a while, after all... and I'd still like to get some more movement behaviours and balancing done before the deadline. I've not managed to make nearly enough time for this one way or another. :/



(The other one is a cheat, really - scrolling starfield.)

After the deadline, if I end up with something that's actually fun enough to play then I'd like to expand it, and adding extra themes is the first way I'd do that.