Will definitely be configurable, no worries.
I’d definitely like to see those in a game. If you fire a gun it’s nice if it actually goes bang.
Some of us are working hard on a tileset that should be ready to go as soon as tile set support in implemented.
That being said, though, ASCII graphics are the calling card of rogue like games. Tile sets shouldn’t be inherently expected/needed.
Yes, but WHY are ascii characters something that show up in roguelikes? They don’t make a game better in any way.
Dungeons of Dredmor for example is a roguelike, and it has full graphics and animation, not to mention sounds and music.
It would be far worse with silent ascii.
I guess I’m just wondering why people make this type of game as ascii to start with instead of just making a flash game with roguelike mechanics…
[quote=“DG123, post:24, topic:2547”]Yes, but WHY are ascii characters something that show up in roguelikes? They don’t make a game better in any way.
Dungeons of Dredmor for example is a roguelike, and it has full graphics and animation, not to mention sounds and music.
It would be far worse with silent ascii.
I guess I’m just wondering why people make this type of game as ascii to start with instead of just making a flash game with roguelike mechanics…[/quote]
Have you ever played a zombie survival simulator as fleshed out as Cataclysm? I know you haven’t, because no other zombie game is as deep as this. Rogue Like games worry less about graphics so they can focus on having excellent and deep game play.
Agreed.
Not everyone requires graphics and noises to enjoy a game. I appreciate how ASCII and silence allows me to fill in all the gaps with my imagination.
Also, not having to worry about the graphical side of development opens up a lot of opportunities to make changes quickly.
Say you have a monster named “Epic Bunny of Doom” and have a model made for it to show all of its gruesome epicness. Now suppose you change your mind and instead want it to be the “Epic Caterpillar of Doom.” You have the model for a killer bunny now which may not fit in anywhere else in the game and that model probably took a lot of hard work, time, and money to get right so you don’t want to throw it out or put it into mothballs. You also need to get an epic caterpillar model made now which will cost more time and money. Unless you already have something in place to use that bunny model you may end up scrapping the change from bunny to caterpillar.
With ASCII graphics the change is usually as simple as making a new monster definition and assigning the character and color values for display. Much easier in contrast to a 3D modeled game. With the increased speed of additions and changes, graphics beyond symbols and colors would be hard to keep up to date and usable.
TL;DR – Graphics beyond symbols and colors can sometimes get in the way. Models are nice for games that rarely change or develop slowly but will often lag behind any rapidly changing games. Sprites and tilesets can sometimes keep up, and do well with an easy to use integration system.
[quote=“DG123, post:24, topic:2547”]Yes, but WHY are ascii characters something that show up in roguelikes? They don’t make a game better in any way.
Dungeons of Dredmor for example is a roguelike, and it has full graphics and animation, not to mention sounds and music.
It would be far worse with silent ascii.
I guess I’m just wondering why people make this type of game as ascii to start with instead of just making a flash game with roguelike mechanics…[/quote]
Several reasons:
1)ASCII is easier to program.
2)ASCII is much, much faster to develop. It takes a lot less time to just say that this new monster is a yellow ‘Z’ then it does to create a isometric picture of said monster (such as is used in DoD). Going to 3D slows development down even more then that.
3)Animation is even more work on top of creating a picture. More work per new thing = slowed development = less content.
4)Animation/“graphics” takes the knowledge/ability to make said graphics. Since rougelikes are often maintained/developed by a single person or group of people, it isn’t always guaranteed that you will have someone who can do that (and it raises the chance the project will die when you only artist leaves).
5)Sound falls into the same thing as number 4 and 2. It takes more knowledge and work to get sounds that sound nice, thus slowing development and increasing the required skill base.
6)Rougelikes started out on silent terminals that could only do ASCII, they didn’t have any more capabilities. Thus, in addition to reasons 1-5, there is also the tradition factor of having a rougelike that fits the “traditional” idea of the genre.
[quote=“DG123, post:24, topic:2547”]Yes, but WHY are ascii characters something that show up in roguelikes? They don’t make a game better in any way.
Dungeons of Dredmor for example is a roguelike, and it has full graphics and animation, not to mention sounds and music.
It would be far worse with silent ascii.
I guess I’m just wondering why people make this type of game as ascii to start with instead of just making a flash game with roguelike mechanics…[/quote]
There are quite a few issues here, I’ll go over them briefly.
but first, the most pertinent one:
0. If Cataclysm had been tile-only when Whales retired, I would not have started working on it.
Let that sink in. With all due modesty, if I hadn’t been here at the time, I don’t think DDA wouldn’t have happened. I’m not calling myself out as super-special here, it almost certainly wouldn’t happend if EITHER GlyphGryph or DarklingWolf had not been on board. But if it had been a tile-only game, at least one leg of the tripod would not be present.
- I’m not going to say you couldn’t write a game like Cataclysm in Flash, because people do crazy things, but Flash is not a good system for making something as large scale as Cataclysm, and is severely limiting for doing lots of programming tasks. It does what it does pretty well, but that does not include authoring a large and deep game system. Also I have no idea how collaborating on a flash game would work, and we wouldn’t have the tools we have at our disposal that the C++ ecosystem provides.
1a. Dropping flash from the picture, you can make a tiled game in C++ pretty easily, GalenEvil is hammering away at that, and if I had time/interest I could make a tiling system, it’s not that hard for a good programmer. However, when starting out, I’d have the option of spending more effort for worse results because the tiles woud be the merest placeholders, or spending less effort and getting an ASCII game that looks better running. Not much of a choice.
- Graphics and sound DEMAND polish. If I were to write a graphics-first game from the get-go (and I suspect this is the case with Whales as well), it would probably never get released in the first place, because my taste with regards to graphics far exceeds my ability to produce graphics, so I’d never be able to make a tiling game I was happy with by myself. Due to Cataclysm’s success, we’ve attracted people who are talented in that way, and I have every confidence they’l be able to make an awesome-looking game, but I basically won’t have anything to do with the art direction, because I have little to no talents in that direction. Those artistic types never would have happened if there hadn’t been a successful ASCII game in the first place.
2a. Part of this I think is that successful roguelike authors care deeply about how the game systems work, this is why they tend to be deep and have interesting mechanics. In short, roguelike authors tend to think like engineers. People that make graphical games on the other hand tend to care much more about how the game looks, and spend a lot of time polishing that part of the game at the expense of the depth of the game systems. I’m not saying it’s impossible for someone to be a virtuoso at both, but I’m not, and limiting game authoring to people who are good at both massively limits your pool of potential authors.
- When you first start with any program is when you are absolutely most vulnerable to just giving up and doing something else, ANYTHING that makes the time from when you start to when you have the game playable massively increases the chances of that game never seeing the light of day. Graphics and sounds as a prerequisite puts up a huge hurdle you have to overcome at the very start of the project.
3a. In a community project, there’s a similar learning curve when a new contributor first starts messing with the game where they’re just as likely to give up as keep going, and the more difficult build dependencies of graphics and sound add a hurdle in this dangerous zone, and reduce the number of potential contributors.
3b. Cross-platform text-based programs are hard. Cross-platform graphics and sound oriented programs are SUPER CRAZY HARD. It’s quite possible that if Cataclysm had been linux-only and tile-based, it would have never had a windows port at all.
- People LIKE ASCII. I know you don’t “get it”, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking in the first place, but take it on faith that some people actually prefer ASCII, and even without all the other complications, they’d still choose to use ASCII instead of tiles.
P.S. Yes, THIS is “briefly”.
Personally, I love heavily symbolic interfaces.
I don’t think ASCII is the best symbolic interface, but it’s pretty good and a lot easier to work with than the alternatives.
As a writer, I much prefer being given a “Z”. This allows us to go crazy with the description, being as vibrant and cutthroat as possible, letting our imaginations go wild, painting an amazing picture of the creature- yet without drawing a single line. This allows for both the player and developer to use more imagination and not be spoon-fed the appearance of things, and at the same time making everything easier and quicker.
Since we don’t have to animate the player attacking with every weapon, EVERYTHING can be a weapon. Imagine how long it would take to animate every single action with every single object… but instead we can add new ones in seconds.
I personally want a tile set which only shows floors, walls, counters and furniture.
That way the monsters and items will not only stand out, but also allow us to visualize them in our own way.
[quote=“Jericoshost, post:32, topic:2547”]I personally want a tile set which only shows floors, walls, counters and furniture.
That way the monsters and items will not only stand out, but also allow us to visualize them in our own way.[/quote]
Depending on how Evil does his programming that will be possible. All it would take would be to draw the furniture in place and then in the spots where the monsters are supposed to go just draw a Z or any other letter that represents a monster.
Ascii is fine in CDDA but in certain games like DF i feel like tilesets are necessary cause there are too many things displayed and moving around at the same tile. If you have large room filled with &=/][}{}}}{{==/{=}/}/{=/±/=,/-+/==’!!:::*/-/=&//= all over the place ill just be like well you know what this looks too messed up for and looking for a particuliar thing will make my eyes bleed so fuck this close the game. Its in those times that tilesets are awesome amd a blessing. In CDDA its okay you can get used to it, but the moment that tilesets will be working in the game ill never look back to ascii graphics, it will make it so much nicer visually.
Some people like ascii cause its old school, but so is 8 bits graphics tilesets 
Well, in ASCII we can see some nice things happening. Like on scene there might be
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZ@ZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Shows how sleepy that @ was right?
Or maybe the time that I saw
SSR DDR and MCR
(Squirrel, squirrel, rabbit)
(Deer, deer, rabbit)
(Moose, Cayote, Rabbit)
We don’t like ASCII because it’s old school, we like it because
A. It’s so much fucking easier to program with!
B. It lets us use our imagination instead of being spoon-fed.
[quote=“Otaku, post:33, topic:2547”][quote=“Jericoshost, post:32, topic:2547”]I personally want a tile set which only shows floors, walls, counters and furniture.
That way the monsters and items will not only stand out, but also allow us to visualize them in our own way.[/quote]
Depending on how Evil does his programming that will be possible. All it would take would be to draw the furniture in place and then in the spots where the monsters are supposed to go just draw a Z or any other letter that represents a monster.[/quote]
We could maybe do it with SDL-text (what the SDL build does now) and tiles, that’d be funky. In fact, you might fall back to that if you just don’t have a tile assigned to an entity.
You can also have a tileset where all the foreground tiles (or just some of them, according to your taste) are renderings of letters.
What about making tile set sheets for each type of object/environment/monster in the game, one in ASCII and one in graphic tiles?
(I have seen sheets before where it was all the terrain, all the objects, and all the monsters each on their own sheets)
Then you just swap the sheets so each player can make the game visually appealing to themselves?
Like you would goto:
(Folders)
Data> Tile,
Current Tiles (The one being used, stored as editable ‘sheets’)
Tileset1 (GFX type backups)
Tileset01 (ASCII options)
TilesetCustom (To store player made versions?)
Could that work?
No indeed I have not. Project Zomboid is about the nearest equivalent but it feels incredibly lacking somehow. It needs all the weapons and items that Cataclysm has in it. Also I actually prefer the turn based mechanic to isometric real time.
But I would KILL for a zombie survival simulator that had advanced graphics and physics while also having all the features of Cataclysm.
Imagine Cataclysm in an engine like Metro Last Light with destructible buildings, the ability to build stuff, and all the features found in an RPG like this. Hell, it could even use VR. Imagine living out Cataclysm in first person with photorealistic graphics, creepy sounds, and a genuinely scary atmosphere.
I HOPE that is what the future holds.
Sadly at the moment we’re stuck with games like DayZ (PVP fest with little zombie threat and a really awful engine), and a few similar games that simply don’t seem very impressive.
This game. Is not a RPG. It is a RL. A role playing game has leveling up, different stats for the same weapons and so on and so forth. A roguelike is… Well, Cataclysm, DF, ecetra ecetra.