Re: [Adonthell-devel] Introduction and Comments

[Kai Sterker]

On 14 Dec 2002 23:16:28 +1100 David White wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've just stumbled across the Adonthell project, and I'm rather
> intrigued by it. I played Waste's Edge through to conclusion, and
> along the way had a number of problems/bugs, which as far as I can
> see, aren't reported elsewhere:

Most of the Silverhair issues are actually problems with the pathfinder.
It's very limited at present (and as we're going to have a new mapengine
in 0.4) there isn't much motivation to enhance it at that point.

The character movements are event-driven: that is, after a certain time,
a callback is called that makes a character move. I think that on some
occasions (especially if the path is blocked, which is quite likely in
Silverhair's room), no new callback is registered, which means that
characters stop moving completely.

But as said above, that code has to be adapted (well, rewritten) for the
0.4 mapengine, so we're going to live with those problems for now ;). 


> - Once when I loaded the saved game in the Lady's room, a conversation
> dialog with Bjorn inexplicably popped up.

Hm. That's weird. Was that reproducable? In that case, I'd like to see
that save game if you still have it around.
 
 
> - In the Makefile for the dlgedit and other tools, the gtk include and
> library directories weren't set properly. I had to change the lines

Did you configure with --enable-tools? In that case they should have
been set correctly. Otherwise they wouldn't.
 

> I apologize if any or all of these are known problems. Also, I assume
> that the dialogs in Waste's Edge were generated using dlgedit. If so,
> I couldn't find the dlgedit data files with the Waste's Edge tarball.
> Are they available?

No. But if you're interested, I can send them over. The only problem is,
if you downloaded Adonthell after Dec 07, dlgedit will be broken. You'll
have to get Adonthell via CVS and revert to the dlgedit code tagged as
"Dlgedit_0-7". Sorry, that's my fault. 

But I'll upload a new package next week that'll fix a crash on BeOS.
There I'll include a working dlgedit.


> I am interested in development of Adonthell. I'm a C++ programmer with
> experience developing both commercial and open source software. I
> noticed that there is no level editor currently available - has any
> work started on one? Would it be useful for me to write one?

Great :). We could really need another developer, especially since we're
quite busy with other things at the moment. You're more than welcome!

Concerning the level editor: as pointed out above, there'll be a new
mapengine. If all wents well, Alex will continue development on that in
January. Before that isn't more or less working, a level editor makes
not that much sense.

What we could need though (if you're interested in working on some
tools) might be some editors for characters or items. There's a little
character editor, (charedit) but it can't do that much. For example, it
can't assign the gfx to a character (and is pretty badly written
anyway). 

In case you're wondering: we've used a python script to generate the
initial game setting, the map and the mapobjects.

Items are currently in planning stage. So before work on some editor can
start, work on items itself has to be done. Feel free ...


Kai