WIP dungeon crawl (image heavy & demo download)

UPDATE - (original post in codebox below)

Hello,
I've made some changes, according to the feedback received, and also some bug-fixes. For those of you who downloaded the game earlier and it would not run, it should run fine now, I'd be interested to read from you whether it works now (97% confident that it should).

The new download link is (19.6MB) shown below.
I've not updated the screenshots but the graphics in the version below differ a fair amount.

For those who haven't tried it already and don't know how it plays the basic premise is as follows:

Run the game - select from 1 - 6 heroes to fight with through the dungeon, select a dungeon to fight in. When the game first loads you can simply press play and it will default to the 1 dungeon included so far and all 6 characters.

In the game - take a turn with each of your characters in moving (press cursor keys to move to the next grid square, moving into a door will open it, moving into treasure will pick it up.) Press TAB or the "X" button in the lower right to end that character's turn. Left clicking on an enemy when next to them (not diagonally) will activate a melee attack (wizard has no melee attack). Left clicking on an enemy when not adjacent will activate a ranged attack (paladin, monk, barbarian do not have ranged attacks). Each character's actions are shown as icons, they may be used a certain number of times per turn and recharge at varying rates. A description of the action will appear in the bottom right console window when the mouse is placed over the action icon.

The objective is to find the big bad boss monster and kill him, usually by fighting through a number of lesser enemies first.


Known Issue:If you have difficulty activating an attack by left clicking try right clicking once then left clicking on your target.

As the characters kill monsters and collect treasure their experience increases, at certain points they will 'level up' giving them added combat ability, increased health and usually some new abilities.
Abilities marked with two ^ arrows are 'upgrades' that cause permanent changes to the character, usually better combat performance.

New features included in this version are:

Display all enemies visible to the characters by holding down "Enter" on the keyboard - any that are obscured because standing too close to a wall will become visible.

Save Feature - press Escape in game to bring up the in game menu, you can save the game, and give it a specific name. Games can be loaded from the front menu.

Save & Watch Replay - if you wish to record a game then you can do so once the game is over. They can be reloaded at the main menu. This may have bugs in it - if you find creatures behaving in an unusual way then something may have gone wrong with the replay feature. I'm not 100% sure what causes this but have some ideas.

Lighting - each of the characters has a light radius which is simply a visual effect, torches on the walls do so as well. Spell effects also have a light radius, for example the fireballs emit light as they move from start to finish.

Screenshots can be taken by pressing F5 in the game itself. (will save as bitmap, until I work out how to save as JPEG).


Please note, although the graphics have improved there is still a long way to go.

Download link here: 19.6MB

http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/%7ETmalcolm/tom/ADG_B.zip

]Hello again,

I've been working on a game for the last few weeks and thought I'd show where I'm at with it.

The game is a turn based game.  It is NOT an RPG.  It is more of a fantasy tactical game although the 
characters do gain skills with experience.  Each gameplay experience is a short half hour to one hour
affair through an environment filled with monsters & treasure.  The objective is to eliminate the 'boss' monster,
who is identified by the glowing red cloud billowing about his feet.

There is a lot of place holder graphics & sounds in this version.  The icons in the menus and in-game especially placeholder.

**	If anyone wants to help me by creating some decent icons for the menus/in game icons then I may be interested  		**

I've included some screenshots below.
I've also included the link the a download of a ZIP file containing a playable game.  Instructions are included in a text file
within (should be fairly easy to find).  

Download is 18MB.

**	I feel a little lost when it comes to completing game projects, I'd love to hear from anyone who has completed a game, and I 
know there are a few of you on this site, how you can tell when your game is complete as well as what essential features there are
for a game to be considered complete.  	**





The level included with the game is able to be completed, I'd be interested to hear if you found it too easy/too difficult. Instructions in ZIP file.


Download Link

http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/%7Etmalcolm/tom/ADG_B.zip (18MB)

I normally despise turn-based games but this one becomes more addictive the further you get into it, which I usually find the opposite with games. Great sprites and animations.

Bugs:

-Was able to highlight all the creatures on my screen sometimes
-Can't see npcs off the screen that are able to hit me. (Or is there a way to scroll it?)

Suggestions:

-Fast forward movements of npcs you cant even see
-Better gui (which you are already working on im sure), and a much better menu system for help, save game, load game, etc.
-Option for ai/movement speed.



Great game, love the leveling up. You should also maybe add tooltip-style descriptions when mousing over the abilities though, and add more interaction for abilities as sometimes i'm clicking on an ability and wondering if it's either a glitch or I just ran out of uses.

Time

I have always thought it was good. I have always been surprised at the lack of interest in it.

pretty nice!

From the screenshots, the magic looks sexy. I'm not sure about the buttons though... but, in summary, it looks very nice!

EDIT: Just read your comment about the in-game icons. :)

aha! now this is my sort of thing, i dont usually comment on the showcase but this looks good, trying now......

excellent

HHMMMMMMM

I chose a character and a dungeon and I get a error when I press start game

do I have to chose a particular character?


64MB intel gfx card 256MB of RAM

Mem access violation when clicking start.
Same as Jeremy Paxman - Yeeeeeeeees.

Looks Awesome!
I just love Dungeon Crawls.
Thats actually where WERDNA is from.

I can't actually download it, because I'm on dial up and download slow.
But it certainly looks impressive, kind of like Diablo actually.

Just make sure to throw in lots of different spells and abilities, because
that always makes dungeon crawls fun:)

And maybe traps too, if you don't already have them.

Good luck,

WERDNA the Wizard(Boss Of Floor 9)

werdna you are from wizardry 3 and 4?

Thanks for the feedback.

Strange with the crashes - they seem to happen on machines with onboard video, yet I just use standard blitz3d commands, will look into it.

GUI will get updated, I'd like to find someone who can do the graphics for that at some point.

Thanks for the tip about the AI out of view taking it's time -I'll speed that up.

There are some glitches I know.

For those of you who experience a crash - was it an intel on board card you had?

i have an nvidia geforce 7000,dual core amd 1.90 ghz. and win vista home premium. and it crashes too

After seeing those screenshots, monks are clearly overpowered. He is doing way more damage than the other characters. ;)

I like the look of this. Downloading it now and trying it.

Looking at the screen shots though, I could think of one possible suggestion: to use single sided walls so that you can see from behind them. that way the action won't be blocked out of view. Just IMO.

Only at first I believe, and monk has very low max hp. Try running your monk out into heavy combat and see how far you get after it dies =P.

Yes. Intel.That is my card.

The Monk does sufficient damage in the earlier stages of the game, but does not gain sufficient increases in combat ability to make him powerful against the mid game and late game enemies. Compare his combat ability against the Fighter or Barbarian, or even the Paladin at later stages of the game.

Hmm It would not run on my computer using Vista and Ati Radeon Xpress.

Jeremy Paxman,
I'm from Wizardry 1 and 4.

2 of the greatest dungeon crawls ever made.


Also Matty, although my computer downloads at the speed of a snail,
I'll try to download your game anyways. It truly does look awesome.

WERDNA The Wizard(The Lord Of Wizardry)

I'm not 100% certain why it runs on some PCs and not others. I've found that on PCs with onboard video it doesn't work sometimes. Possibly on the weekend (don't have internet at home at the moment) I'll upload an updated EXE which will output a log file saying where the program got up to before it crashed.

I do a lot of writepixelfasts directly to textures, and have the VRAM flag set on them, maybe that is what it is? Anyway I'll look into it.

Your suggestions are being looked at and some have been implemented.

Matty,

I have tested it on 2 machines. the First was a Vista PC and would not start at all (memory access violation) very likely something to do with whatever you load in at the beginning - I think there is a slight difference in the file system to vista that is not normally noticable, but I have seen it affect certain apps. It is definitely different from XP home, because it uses folder permissions properly.

When I tested on an XP machine, it loaded and began to play fine until I killed my first bad guy. Then I got the memory access violation again. Just IMO it was probably trying to play a sound it failed to load or was looking for a variable that was missing (i.e. a custom type not declare properly).

Hope this helps.

I would recommend using some flags when loading things such as sounds, models, textures, images etc, as you can use them in your code to determine what failed to load and report that to a log file or close with an error message explaining what went wrong. I often implement this idea early on in my programs, saves a lot of time and head scratching when things go wrong.

.... But I like it so far. :)

Quite possibly. AFAIK it's not possible to modify a texture in VRam, so I would suggest that the machines on which its working are silently copying back into system ram and modifying it there. Given that it's going to happen anyway, you might just as well drop the VRam flag and keep it in system memory.

Anyway, looks very good. It's always nice to see a turn-based game every now and then.

No problems here, after running it over 24 hours (no save feature =(). Hope you can find a fix for the others soon though. I look forward to any updates made to this game.

The most addictive I have tried from the showcase section, unexpectedly.

Please Please fix this as soon as you can.

I finally got it downloaded(Took several hours), and I get the memory
access violation error message. On both my computers!

I have a Windows XP DeskTop Thats several years old, but then I also
have a Toshiba Tecra M5 Laptop, with an Intel Graphics Card.

I was able to get to the opening screen before I got the error message,
and I think it looks pretty good.

Good Luck With Your Game,

The Mighty WERDNA(Still The Boss Of Floor 9)

Hello everyone again.

For those of you who had a crash could you test this piece of code. If it works it should just end normally. Run it in debug mode. I've worked out that this is where it seems to fall over on some machines:

graphics3d 800,600,32
AlphaTexture=createTexture(256,256,2+16+32)
setbuffer texturebuffer(AlphaTexture)
lockbuffer
For Y=0 To 255
	For X=0 To 255
		WritePixelFast x,y,0
		If y>180 And y<212 Then 
			If x>112 And x<144 Then
				distance#=Sqr((x-128)^2+(y-196)^2)
				If distance<=10 Then 
					WritePixelFast x,y,127 Shl 24
				Else
					If distance<=16 Then 
						WritePixelFast x,y,63 Shl 24
					Else
						If distance<=18 Then
							WritePixelFast x,y,31 Shl 24
						Else
							WritePixelFast x,y,0
						EndIf 
					EndIf 
				EndIf 
			EndIf 
		EndIf 	
	Next
Next
UnlockBuffer
SetBuffer BackBuffer()

end

Also - if anyone knows why this would fall over let me know. It only does so on some machines. You will need blitz3d to test.

---------------------------
Runtime Error
---------------------------
Buffer does not exist
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

I don't use lockbuffer much so I can't help you with the actual code.
But is this code really neccasary?
can you include something else instead?

The HelpFul WERDNA(Lord of Helpfullness)

Yeah, I also get Buffer does not exist. If I remove the alpha flag ( 2 ) then it works perfectly. It's tricky because you can't work on an image and copyrect it because copyrect doesn't copy the alpha, if I recall correctly.

I don't know what the problem is. Certainly I never used to get this behaviour, but I've not used B3D in a few years now. Possibly a bug in B3D or some recent drivers? I'm using the latest Nvidia drivers with an 8600 GTS.

Same here. I can see the menu and select the characters...
But as soon as I hit the play button.... BAM! error message.
Look below for my system info.

One small advice on selecting the chars, I wasn't sure if I selected them or deselected them, because only the colors changed on the box around it.

Matty, what are your system specs and OS on which this game runs?

Screenshots look really good so far! Hope I can test it on my rig soon.

just download get s "memory access voliation error" after pressing play.. im on vista if that helps.

Thanks for your assistance.

It seems to be the alpha flag on the texture - on some hardware it needs the colour flag to be set as well (flags 1+2+16+32 instead of just 2+16+32).

At some point in the not too distant future I will upload another demo.

Thanks for your assistance.
Matt

Will there be any other features as well in the demo? (hinting at save feature) =P.

Hi Retimer - Save feature will be implemented along with Recording/Playback Replays (needs more testing), lighting and a few other bits and pieces.

Digital Anime - my machine is Windows XP SP2, Laptop with Mobility Radeon 9700 (64MB vRAM) and about a 2Ghz processor - easily sufficient for this.

Sounds Awesome Matty.

I look forward to it.

The Hopeful WERDNA(Hoping that the demo will come out soon)

Hurrah. Awsome. Thanks Matty, i'm looking forward to the update.

I'll help with buttons and icon graphics if you want.

Awesome project amigo. Looks fantastic.
I have only finished a couple of games. One took a year, and the other took 3-4 months.

Every complete game should
1. Not require caviots to play
2. have a title screen, options, etc.
3. Have been tested to ensure it wil function consistently and reliably.
4. A "total" product would have a manual if its too complex to just sit down and play
5. Have all the required elements of a game including graphics, sound, music, and effects

The fact is, producing a "final" game gets to be tedius work at the end. Most of the fun/creative part is done before coding the high score table.

What's a caviot? I want to make sure my game doesn't require them to play.

i think he means that it has no parts that can't be played or are unfinished. he spelled the word wrong but i can't for the life of me think of the correct spelling. i think its caveat.

Yep. Sorry for the misspelling. It just means that the release can stand on its own. No excuses or exceptions. If you have to provide a paragraph apologizing or making excuses for it, then it’s probably not a release. If you can get to the point where you have a real release, great job.

Personally, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t release everything you work on. Sometimes, it’s just the intellectual exercise of figuring out how to make something work that is a reward in itself.

We all have more ideas than time.

Thanks all for the replies, much appreciated.

Ross - I may take you up on that offer, but I may already have someone lined up who lives locally so I will let you know if I still need help in that area at some point. Thanks for the offer.

Thanks Foolish for the advice re: finished products, very helpful.

Hello All -

I've updated the download. New features, Bug Fixes - for those whom it did not work for please try again.

See the first post for the main changes.

Here is the download link:

http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/%7ETmalcolm/tom/ADG_B.zip

Awsome awsome. Will give it ago seomtime this week and let you know if I run into any problems.

Right after testing save/load, I was unable to attack anything with range. It would simply highlight-select the npc and perform nothing when attacks were visibly available.

Prior to saving then loading, I had no problems with ranged attacks.

Hi Retimer - I don't think it is a problem with load/saving. There has been and still is a minor glitch where that happens. The work around is to right click with the character first to deselect any icons that are selected.

Also, I've changed the ranged attacks so that they cannot be used at point blank range.

There is a known issue with the doors (which I've fixed but not released yet) which is that when loading a save game the doors appear as closed even when they were open prior to saving the game however they are in fact in their true state open/closed/locked, the visual appearance is wrong though.

Ah, the door thing was the issue. Continuing on...

Awesome, I'll download as soon as I can.