Kickstarter Thread - The Kickstarter is being fulfilled

[HRose]

So, I like this compromise well enough. This is my 10x10 work in progress with an handful of those sprite tiles that I tweaked a bit:

It seems a nice compromise between readability and pretty.

Current work in progress:

http://www.cesspit.net/misc/10x10.zip

[vultures]

I mean, it’s clear that the guy picked up a heap of 1-bit images so they better serve a purpose in the future. A good thing it survived the whole 8-bit->16bit->32bit image/OS transition in its base form. He only added to it, but I’m sure gonna make a fiendish font out of it… starting now.

[HRose]

It’s only that - if you use the default font with the UI, you can pick a different one (of your choosing) for the game screen, is this the case?

Nope, you can only load one font. I’ve asked to be able to load two, but it would still be only ASCII. In any case if you want sprites it’s always easier and faster to use the tile mode.

[Mrn]

I guess the only major thing left is support for the (V)iew menu that right now isn’t working.

I’ve posted a dirty “solution” to that problem here, but the patch no longer applies, and it’s wrong way of doing it anyway. I’ve been poking around the code and found a solution that seems “more right”.

Why it doesn’t work now? The current version uses only map::drawsq to draw the line. It works in curses version, but tiles version needs additional call to cata_tiles::init_draw_line.

My solution: use higher level, render agnostic game::draw_line (but the other kind than in my previous solution).

You’ll notice I’ve also removed the “if u_see” line from game::draw_line. Rationale behind it is that this function is not called draw_line_if_u_see_the_end_point; it should be more generic in the first place, which allows it’s use in other places, like drawing a trail line. I’ve also added “if u_see” to ranged.cpp to preserve the original behaviour. It has the added advantage of saving a function call to game::draw_line if we can’t see the target. You’ll see that I’ve also removed “if u_see” from cata_tiles::draw_line, since this is redundant IMO. It can be more streamlined, of course, but I intentionally tried to minimize the amount of information in the diff, to make the idea more clear. Again, I’ve checked the curses and SDL both with and without tiles and it works in every case. Apply the patch and enjoy

[HRose]

Post a patch on github? I’m not a programmer (beside working on my own roguelike, but I’m just a noob), so I wasn’t even able to compile successfully Cataclysm. I can’t test stuff until it is committed on github and compiled on the experimental builds.

[Mrn]

Unfortunately, that requires having an account on GitHub and I was hoping to avoid that. But I’ll look into that. It does seem to be more appropriate medium for posting patches.

[vultures]

The whole idea behind the retro look is to propose it’s all done ‘old-skool’ and only beautify it here and there. The .png on those C=64 forums does the exact thing, it’s the manner that’s funky; you would need a new tileset file for every color the game could use. In fact, I’ve only seen tilesets with transparent background layers so you can merge a symbol that represents a tile onto a “floor” square. I guess it worked well with multicolored tiles (4-bit) so it stick’d for the time being.
The problem that passes along with introducing a new font into the game is however slightly different - you can have green benches in parks and brown ones in shelters all getting along, but you can’t seem to have one symbol on top of another unless it’s some sort of an outline (item stacks). And then you get to the real issue - tileset pieces are bitmaps and font glyphs aren’t; they’re vectors. There can be a way around it, however, where the bitmaps can be traced and kept original - a thing that I would do. Another thing to consider whilst creating bitmap-fonts is the 255 character limit; here we have four or five times that at least. I’ve looked into the .ttf space so the problem could be solved - you can have neat vector glyphs for letters and common keyboard symbols, and vector-traced square-looking glyphs for main screen graphics, as far as you call for the corresponding #. But (there’s always a but) - it can be even more silky and smooth - retracing the shapes so they look similar to Webdings font in Windows. And, to be sure, I’ve never seen a single roguelike make use of such a resource so there can’t be one already, the font author would have to start from scratch (vectors can be a handful, believe me).
I only want to hear from the dev crew on this - if the original project makes use of the glyphs 1-255, could you be able to implement something more sophisticated, like an _advanced option to look for the right glyphs within the 256-65k range and draw them on screen? If I made such a font and made a HTML guide for you to use, so to easily find the right symbol to draw when doing it. could you be able to add the variables to the code?
I know it’s not as easy as it may look, but we can pull it off if you wanted it to.

[Rivet]

Wow!

Normally I don’t do tilesets, but I actually find myself liking yours.

[vultures]

'twas my bad suggesting the limit for the .fon type. ANSI or Win for that matter provide a better stretch, for bitmap-wide fonts.
Anyway, I’m storing bitmaps for the font, using the Terminus preset. Once there’s a significant portion done, I’ll pin it to some filehost along with a HTML fontmap. Since there are mere six to eight hundred entries with the 8x8 formatting, I feel that creating groups and having some sort of apparent documentation is due, eventually. It will make the font usage a helluva lot easier.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

A brief request, though - if someone knows of a font creation/editing tool that’s free and supports all the stamps for major formats, let me know. I’m using FontForge and feeling a bit bad about it.

[vultures]

It’s just a snippet from earlier (yesterday afternoon) to show some of the glyphs from the EightBitUS font that should pop up in the near future. There are endless tiles to be font-packed (6666 tiles in the original .png) and I hope to finish it as soon as possible, as FF is paste-unfriendly, crops finished glyphs and otherwise makes my life miserable.
You can see some of the ‘symbols’ designed for CataDDA on my behalf, tuned for the rest of the modern roguelikes of the present/future. Expect a couple more, add suggestions if you wish anytime now and look forward for the WikiCommons upload, cause it is what this is aimed for.
…only hope that the two extended-latin ranges will suffice, I’m not omitting anything from the original tileset.

[Mattamue]

[quote=“HRose, post:337, topic:1854”]It took a while but I found the original thread where I took that tileset from:
http://csdb.dk/forums/?roomid=13&topicid=97045&showallposts=1&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer7229f&utm_medium=twitter

If you scroll down there’s a bigger tileset.

The problem is that it’s really too tiny to be readable since it’s 8x8. It could be easily made into 16x16, but then it becomes rather big if you don’t have a big display.

I thought that maybe with a little work I could use some of the background tiles like roads, ground and grass and port them into my ASCII tile, but these are mostly done with single pixels while ASCII relies all on double pixel to make everything easy to see.

Or maybe I could make a compromise and go 9x9, so something between 8x8 and 10x10 (the ASCII I’m using).

How do you guys like this?

[/quote]

All kinds of yes

[Malcom]

Seriously guys. Fucking kittens. So fucking rad.

[Malcom]

!!! KITTENS !!!

[Zaweri_Runewright]

Nice job, Kevin and Kevin! ^5

[noego]

[quote=“HRose, post:327, topic:1854”]Vehicles fixed and overlay support for multiple objects seem working in tile mode. I guess the only major thing left is support for the (V)iew menu that right now isn’t working.

By the way, does anyone know the name of the font being used here? I just can’t seem to figure out.

[/quote]

Dear god. This is beautiful. It brings me back to Ultima IV and V. A genuine nostalgia tear just rolled down my left cheek.

[Pthalocy]

Ekarus do not engage

I don’t normally care for tilesets, not for games where most of the description is up to the reader/viewer - this however, is …still hugely symbol based in appearance, and I find myself liking it!

[Klomvp]

For the record, even without the exiled nutjob guy butt-hurting all over the kickstarter, I totally called it that they wouldn’t be getting all the features done in the promised time. It was a lot of stuff promised in the kickstarter, and all the mass of volunteers was outputting almost on par with a fulltime dev as it was. But big re-writes got done faster with the fulltime dev than the splintered volunteer devs, and that’s more or less what I chipped in for.

Anyway, I’m taking a break from this until we have the Z-level re-write usable and have a mass of content for the mod manager. Set my alarm for… Christmas maybe? January?

It’s still slow going. We need to hire more full time devs.

[moist_zombie]

(FIRSTLY!! This isn’t directed at you or anyone specifically, Klomvp, just something I’ve been wanting to post in here for a bit now…)

(From the kickstarter): “Our initial goal is just $7,000 dollars, which allow Sean to dedicate three months of effort to the project. Along with the “time”, there are a few other feature obligations that are going to come along with this. The bulk of these three months are going to spent developing the following features…”

That’s what the kickstarter was for, to hire a dev to dedicate three months of effort. Not to gold-star 100% complete all the listed features, but to work towards them. “The bulk of these three months are going to be spent DEVELOPING the following features…”, developing, not completing The only stretch goal that was even achieved was for scenarios and its planned and will be along in its own good time…

Anyone familiar at all with coding or “indie game” development should know that things never go as swiftly as planned, and if they do then that swift pace is usually offset by bug-ridden conflicts that neutralize the haste in the end anyway

In nine days Galen will have been working on things for four months, so he’s already passed the Kickstarter-required time (3 and a half months)… And I imagine four months from now he’ll still be around, contributing. Maybe I’m wrong there, but I somehow doubt it

(from the Kickstarter): “Moving forward, other challenges include features taking longer than planned and us encountering various unexpected articles in design or implementation. If that happens, we’ll do our best to stretch out the money and insure the work gets done regardless…” That “we’ll do our best” means nobody gets to howl or complain if things don’t pan out the way you wanted (well, nobody should howl or complain AT ALL if you didn’t donate to the project anyway).

As far as Z-levels go there is a lot of work entailed there, that could (basically) never be achieved in three months by a team of three or four devs (ladders, better falling calculation, handling burning/collapsing buildings and their contents, enemy and vehicle behavior concerning flying, new map code for creating natural landmasses and biomes and building multi-floor structures, the way the player character sees these new terrains, leaping and climbing, new functionality to construction to allow upward/downward building, new maps/rooms for all buildings that need a 2nd floor, trees growing taller than one tile, and a hundred other things I can’t even think of plus the hundred million tiny bugs that are sure to emerge as progress is made)… Seems pretty foolish to think this could even happen in a short time period if z-levels covered half of those features I just listed (which, in time, they probably will)…

In short (after going long) the Kickstarter campaign stated very clearly that work will be done toward completion of the mentioned goals, and all of them have had some amount of work put towards them. Kickstarter fulfilled! The rest is just icing on the cake that no one should complain about unless their whining sounds very forward-focused and constructive (instead of repetitive and destructive). The Kickstarter in general caused Cataclysm to bloom in popularity and growth, and its still happening right now (ask GitHub!)… Just be happy that talented contributors/fans/players are dedicated to adding depth to our Cataclysmic lives!

PEACE! LOVE! PROGRESS! STUFF!!

[Klomvp]

Hence we need to hire more fulltime devs. I’d donate quadruple if it gets us that much more progress. Cata really really needs a full dedicated dev team to crack open the foundational new stuff. I can only imagine how this would be moving along if we could scrape together for a studio sized full-time team like you see with full-sized kickstarter game projects.

It’s this and Dwarf Fortress that desperately need a real studio working on it, though Tarn wouldn’t accept “help” short of gunpoint, at least the Cata project is structured more to benefit from it.

[djrodw]

I kind of like the way DF is developed, sure it takes one person a long time to make significant changes to mechanics, but it has been an ever changing beast with a tremendously consistent update regime. Df is ever changing, be it slow and methodical but still consistent. CDDA has that vibe to it as well, and lately the updates have been streaming in faster than I can keep up sometimes. Eventually those updates will slow up but with the way things look now, I would not be surprised to still get updates when windows 20 rolls around to violate more of our privacy rights.

I couldn’t complain if I wanted to because alas, I didn’t get the chance to pitch in on the kickstarter, and as for those who do complain, tell them to stop complaining and add what they want themselves. As community driven as this whole thing is, it stands to be around for a long long time so those of us who still think coding is some sort of hoodoo magic will eventually get what we want. so just tell 'em shut up, the game is free, the game is good, and its being worked on by people who want nothing more than to see it get better!