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[Izzimach]

Yes, Trolls do rave, and crashing a troll rave is a good way to get and endless supply of magic glowsticks.



Er, anyways, I played a crapload of Rogue and then Moria in college, so I'll always have a soft spot for random dungeons.  However, I've had a lot of fun with more active combat as seen in games like Fable and Phantasy Star Online.  So beating up monsters by hitting buttons rapidly is where I'll start making my game.


There are some rooms, and some hallways connecting rooms, and the rooms have monsters and items in them.  What else do you want, really?

I would like to get away from the swords/wizards/armor tropes and go for a more modern setting, where monsters lurk in passages hidden under a large city.  I'm thinking of something like Unknown Armies or Shin Megami Tensei; you still have critters and magic, but you also have wrenches and skateboards and shovels.  All of which make useful weapons, incidentally.

Since I don't want this game to take forever, loot will be pretty minimal; you collect weapons, spray paint (?), and some consumables.  Armor, scrolls, wands, etc. are to be added later, or not at all.  Spray paint is used mainly to spray magic runes on your weapons to produce cool effects... perhaps similar to the method described in Red Rogue.


That's about all I have so far.  Plot?  Town?  Protagonist?  I'll get around to it at some point.  At the moment though, I'd like to focus on implementing a mostly-working dungeon experience, from putting in monsters to getting loot to defeating some "boss" thing at the end.








An old prototype of dungeon generation:
http://izzimach.fileave.com/dungeongenprototype/index.html

[dspencer]

Please keep spray paint. And name. This sounds really cool!

[Paint by Numbers]

This is looking and sounding really awesome right now! I love the idea of spray-painting glyphs and such onto things (and a spray paint can is pretty much useful for everything, from leaving yourself notes to attacking monsters!).

Gotta keep an eye on this one!

[isaac]

Sounds great. I too love rougelikes & more actiony games.

Also: Troll hardcore techno plz.

[jwaap]

please isaac, when will people learn to write ROGUE instead of ROUGE

looking good btw

[Wander]

rouge? 

ha.. hahaha... ha.

i thought it was on porpoise.

[Izzimach]

I'm trying out a little mini-game involving the "magic spray-paint" idea for enchanting weapons and painting wards/traps on the floor or walls.  Basically, you paint a simple shape which produces magic energy flow according to a simple wave propagation algorithm.  Some energy flows around the glyph and some of it radiates off.  The pattern of radiation off the glyph determines what magic effect you get.



I haven't yet figured out what number-crunching I'll do with the radiated waves to determine the final magic result, because I'm still fiddling with the wave mechanics.  Plus, I need to come up with some simple prebuilt glyphs for people who don't want to bother with glyph fiddling.

Here's a little mini-game prototype of the "magic spray-paint" mechanic written in processing (requires java).  Left-click and drag to paint, right-click to clear; you may have to wait a few seconds for the magic flow to start up after you paint.

[Izzimach]

Some basic inventory is added, and monsters drop stuff which a player can equip.  Weapons will have different attacks associated with them, and presumably some sort of damage type and/or bonus.  I'll see how long I can put up with the programmer-art "icons" on my inventory screen.



Combat has all the basics like animation, hit detection, and health, as well some non-essentials like motion lines and funny status icons.



Can you understand what's going on there?  Me neither.    I'll work on that.

Next I need to add in the glyph system, which is for both weapon enchantments and a variation  of Elbereth in Nethack  You'll be able to spray-paint magic glyphs on walls/floors, weapons, and room decorations (rocks/tables/etc) for various effects.  Presumably various glyph shapes and colors would enhance your weapons, provide protective barriers, and act as magical traps.  I have basic rigid body dynamics support, so one situation I'm shooting for is to spray paint an exploding glyph on a boulder and roll it down a hallway into a pack of monsters.  I have to give the player some motivation to use up all this spray paint he's gonna find!

Finally, here is a screen shot of a box which you can push around but will most likely end up either smashed with a weapon or made to explode with a magical glyph.



Oh, and what should a troll rave sound like?  I figured I would just make a simple 120(150?)BPM beat on FL studio and throw in some wierdo squealing every few seconds, because hey, who knows what trolls like to dance to?

[Izzimach]

Urk.  I got the graffiti glyph/magic spray-paint working, although it almost killed me.  I went through three different implementations and finally settled on this one.  I had to fiddle with the whole rendering pipeline to stack glowing things on top of objects properly.  But it works!  Usually.



In essence, you can paint magical glowing graffiti on walls, objects (crates), and weapons to create magic effects.  You choose from pre-set shapes and colors which are combined to produce various effects such the "shoot at nearby monsters" glyph shown below, in red.



I struggled a bit to find a system which allowed some customization of graffiti glyphs without being a nightmare to program.  The current system uses the glyph shape to determine the general glyph effect, while the color determines elemental effects (flame, ice, butterscotch) and also modifies the effect.  For instance, the "shooty" glyph shape shoots at monsters for about 50 seconds and vanishes, while the red color gives it a fire elemental type and make it shoot a bit faster than normal.

Weapons are a little troublesome, since (1) it is hard to project the big glyph onto long thin weapons so they are visible and (2) some glyph effects such as minion summoning don't really make sense when cast on a weapon.  Thus, painting your weapon may produce an effect different than but related to the paint-on-wall effect for any given glyph.

Finally, I've enclosed a short video of a simple gameplay test, where I paint some glyphs and kill some monsters.  I even pick up loot!  Yay.

[george]

Wow, I love that first screenshot with the wrench, and the combat flow in the video. Very cool stuff with the glyphs too.

[battlerager]

Wow, that glyph system looks damn neat!


Im keeping a close eye on this thread. 

[JLJac]

Hahaha awsome! I don't get why you have such ultra-low friction on the floor though

Or is the game you're developing secretly troll rave on ice? 

[Izzimach]

Hahaha awsome! I don't get why you have such ultra-low friction on the floor though

Or is the game you're developing secretly troll rave on ice? 

Well, when debugging I just want to rush from room to room in order to check the level for holes and rendering problems.  So I just cranked up the player speed and let him jump really high in order to get everywhere, in order to quickly find broken parts of the dungeon.

Here is an example of broken dungeon generation.  One of the hallways decends down to (basically) infinity:

[JLJac]

Whoa, yeah, that seems pretty bad But I noticed that it's not just the player, in the video also the corpse of a troll and a weapon slides all over the floor. I think there would be a point in upping the friction a whole lot, would make the game seem a little more realistic and less floaty.

Your concept is great, I wish you the best of luck! I can't even imagine how it would be to program a procedural map generator for 3D

[Izzimach]

I did some prototyping to find a reasonable dungeon generator.  The standard roguelike method is to randomly place some rooms and connect them together with hallways, but unfortunately that doesn't work so well for me.  With arbitrary 3D room placement you can sometimes get almost-degenerate intersections of halls that my collision solver can't handle very well.  Also, my engine needs the dungeon to be partitioned into multiple disjoint "regions" which are used to quickly specify which parts of the dungeon to draw and update.

Using the basic ideas from this article on procedural adventure maps, I start by partitioning the dungeon space into regions:



Next, the region connectivity is determined and each region is marked as either "Passage" or "Chamber".  A Passage region is simply a bunch of hallways; a Chamber region has a large central area which presumably contains monsters and other stuff.



After connectivity is determined, the halls and chambers are carved out.  This final data gets converted into a simple set of convex hulls similar to the "brushes" you would see in the old Quake maps.  Each separate region is color-coded.



Since I'm working with a arbitrary graph of nodes and edges I can use different basic layouts to generate dungeons with a slightly different character...



Finally, the graph can easily be extended to 3D by adding in multiple Z-layers of nodes.  In order to put in hard-coded rooms like boss lairs I mark out a chunk of dungeon at the start of the process, and it should get connected up to the rest of the regions.

For final reference, you can play with the prototype written in processing, although all you can do is click to start a new dungeon.

[nikki]

Some of those pics would be brilliant mini- board games !
I especially love the one with the convex quake brush shapes.

Its looking very cool 
are these pictures generated, or have you made thém in photoshop to illustrate the workings ?

the breaking up into convex shapes, has that anything todo with your path-planner ?

[Izzimach]

The maps are just screenshots of the prototype applet after each stage.  If you grab the source code and uncomment the "save(...)" lines in the code, you can run it in Processing and it will generate screenshots for you.

As for the convex hull step, that's mainly because my collision tests only work with convex hulls.  I dunno how I'm going to do pathfinding yet  though hopefully I can take the nodes originally used for dungeon generation and recycle them for pathfinding/navigation.

[Izzimach]

Well, that wasn't too bad.  Enclosed are some sample "dungeon" maps generated using the previously described algorithm expanded to 3D.




You can see the dungeons are multi-level, with some ramps connecting the levels.  The hallways are a bit rough, and generating/compiling 3D collision information takes a while (18-20 seconds on my old laptop) but I'm pleasantly surprised it works at all.

At this point I want to throw in some monsters and put up a demo.  The gamepad controls are adequate, but keyboard/mouse controls are terribad at the moment.  I tried using the "click-to-move" control scheme typical of Diablo, but it seemed pretty clunky for a full 3D environment.  What are my other choices for keyboard/mouse control?  A WoW-ish WASD scheme?  Some other FPS copycat control scheme?

[Epitaph64]

Wow, that's cool. Though I have a bit of a procedural generation fetish haha.

[Izzimach]

Alright, I've built a small test application to see if my deferred shading works on other platforms.  If anyone wants to try and download this thing and run it, I would be grateful.  The program is in XNA so you will need fairly recent graphics, but since the game runs fine on my POS HP Pavillion from years ago this is not a big worry.

the game itself is pretty bare bones... movement and attacks are somewhat integrated and there are some monsters, but it's all rough and bug-ridden at this point.  Mainly I'm interested in testing out two things in this tech test:

1. Frame rate.  I'm using deferred shading which needs a whole lot of fill rate from the graphics card, and even at the low resolution in the tech test (600x400) I only get about 20 fps on some machines.  I will probably have to add some options to drop certain effects if people are getting FPS lower than that.

2. Loading time.  Generating all the 3D collision and rendering data for dungeons takes quite a bit time, sometimes a few minutes on slow machines.  I'm interested in how slow/fast typical level generation is for other people.

As was mentioned before, this is XNA so everything is a pain.  If you have not installed and run an XNA game before you'll have to use the installer which will download and install required files for you:
http://Izzimach.fileave.com/TrollRave/TR_Installer00.zip

If you already have XNA stuff installed you can just download and run the application:
http://Izzimach.fileave.com/TrollRave/TrollRave00.zip