[MOD][WIP] FTL: Overdrive

[camaron43]

So im guessing this is going to take a VERY long time then?

[kartoFlane]

camaron43
People are working on this in their spare time, so I'd say yes, it'll take some time.

@topic
Regarding door tunnels... It'll work well if the doors are aligned, but what if the rooms are in completely different places around the ship? Or one of the linked doors is horizontal and the other is vertical? Programming the game to resolve this automatically would be somewhat difficult and unreliable.
It might be possible to implement some kind of node system to instruct the engine how to draw the tunnels (so that it's possible to navigate around rooms etc) but I feel like it'd be wasted effort for a feature that is purely cosmetic.
That said, I don't really have any alternative to suggest...

[rhaining]

I'm also eagerly awaiting this project, first time making a suggestion. Sorry, this topic is 31 pages, I can't tell if this suggestion has been made yet or not.

I'd love it if Overdrive had tighter control of random generation, such that everything was either generated up front when the game was first started, or, everything was derived in a consistent way from the initial seed value. The point would be to allow one person to generate a game then share that file so that many people could play the exact same map and compare notes and strategies. Or better yet, allow players to see the seed value for the game they are playing, and allow players to enter a specific seed value when starting a game if they wanted to play a specific map.

This opens up a lot of really fun community interactions.

#1: Players could share seed values of favorite maps, and experience the same exact maps/events.

#2: It could enable mini-competitions to see who could do the best on a given map, or just to compare strategies / play styles while holding the map constant. E.g., seed value is 12398712, everyone has 1 day to post their highest score possible, on their honor that they are only playing the game exactly once. Or, the competition could be open to letting everyone play the map as often as they wanted before submitting entries to the challenge.

#3: A player could hack a starting save file to make a specific constraint or challenge and share that save file with others. E.g., play ship X but remove the shield system, or change the crew type, etc. etc..

It doesn't need to be perfect to be awesome. E.g., what a specific ship does in a specific battle can be random, so long as that ship and that event are always at a specific location.

More info about how the real FTL game handles random generation here:
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15648

[Vhati]

DiEvAl, have you set up a repo yet?

I'm curious to see what you've written, as a TWL demo at the very least.
I've only tinkered with that lib once.

But I could also start porting game state classes from the editor...

[Vhati]

I've forked and made automatic dat finding cross-platform.
TODO: Prompting the user with a minimally-themed TWL dialog (no dat resources available, obviously) and storing the chosen path.

Since TWL uses URLs for everything, I'm working on a custom protocol handler so themes' xml can reference images within dats, without the need for extraction.

[vacantmind]

I am very excited to see this project progressing, keep up the good work guys.

[Vhati]

Okay. Got my fork of the main menu demo running with the ftldat: protocol. (Pull Request)

Code: Select all

../resource.dat/img/main_menus/main_base2.png
becomes
ftldat://resource.dat/img/main_menus/main_base2.png

You an also use this in source code...
InputStream is = new java.net.URL("...").openStream();

The Theme Editor needs to recognize it too. So I wrote a bootstrapper class to find/parse the dats, then invoke the editor's main() via reflection.

[John Luke Pack Hard]

Regarding door tunnels again. Even if modder doesn't show it in any way, player can still tell which doors are connected by hovering over one of them:

That's complexity without clarity, which is a bad game design design principle. I'll see if I can get something up and running myself.

EDIT: I manually rigged a merge from Div's branch. Let me get this started and figure out how deep this rabbit hole goes....

[Vhati]

Regarding door tunnels again. Even if modder doesn't show it in any way, player can still tell which doors are connected by hovering over one of them:

That's complexity without clarity, which is a bad game design design principle. I'll see if I can get something up and running myself.

???
Highlighting door pairs, when you're about to click on one, is clarity. And not very complicated.

Drawing spaghetti across the ship is complicated to program, complicated and confusing to look at depending on the quantity/arrangement/orientation of the doors, and is unlikely to look good when without taking the hull's art into consideration. If the lines are part of the hull/floor art, it can be exactly how the modder wants it to look.

[John Luke Pack Hard]

Regarding door tunnels... It'll work well if the doors are aligned, but what if the rooms are in completely different places around the ship? Or one of the linked doors is horizontal and the other is vertical? Programming the game to resolve this automatically would be somewhat difficult and unreliable.
It might be possible to implement some kind of node system to instruct the engine how to draw the tunnels (so that it's possible to navigate around rooms etc) but I feel like it'd be wasted effort for a feature that is purely cosmetic.
That said, I don't really have any alternative to suggest...

Yes, I'm trying to get something working because I believe I spotted a problem in terms of layers of animations

As Div said, he believed the modders themselves should draw in the ship background image to indicate the connectedness of two rooms. However, the background image will be completely covered by the foreground rooms. As such, we'll need a system to cover that.

In addition, this is an engine, not a mod in and of itsself. I believe the correct philosophy here is to give the tools to the modders to make the mod good, not do the work for them.

Somewhere, there needs to be a tool to either make the tunnel or draw it manually. FTL - as it is - can't fully support that functionality.

Highlighting door pairs, when you're about to click on one, is clarity. And not very complicated.

Drawing spaghetti across the ship is complicated to program, complicated and confusing to look at depending on the quantity/arrangement/orientation of the doors, and is unlikely to look good when without taking the hull's art into consideration. If the lines are part of the hull/floor art, it can be exactly how the modder wants it to look.

As I just said to clarify my position, look up. There should be a tool to indicate that manually, not an automatic engine to draw it for them.