Re: [Adonthell-devel] Introduction and Comments

[David White]

On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 00:33, Kai Sterker wrote:
> On 14 Dec 2002 23:16:28 +1100 David White wrote:
> 
...
> 
> 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.

ok, sounds like good reasoning.

...
> 
> 
> > - 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.

No, I'm afraid it wasn't reproducible :-/

>  
>  
> > - 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.

No, I didn't configure with --enable-tools: I didn't even know about
this option. I guess I should have read the README :)

Still, I'm not sure why a Makefile is generated that's incorrect...

>  
> 
> > 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. 

I see; it's just that I think for each of the tools, there should be at
least one sample file, so one can see what the tool is meant to produce
without having to do it themselves. I saw the screen shot of the dialog
editor on the web site, and thought 'that looks pretty cool', so I
wanted to try it, and see how the Waste's Edge dialogs were built; I was
disappointed when I couldn't.

> 
> 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.

Ok. That makes 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). 

Ok, sounds interesting; I'll look into working on that. I do have a
number of questions on it though:

- What exactly is a 'character'? I assume it includes the main
character, and NPCs you talk to, and possibly recruit into your party.
What about enemies that you fight? If so, is it possible for an enemy to
be other than a human, half-elf, elf, or dwarf? (btw congratulations on
reducing the number of possible races to something reasonable, rather
than the insane number of variations many games seem to like :)
- How are graphics stored? Is there documentation on it?
- I noticed that schedule scripts have to be hand-written in python. Do
you think it would be a good/sensible idea to provide a gui for
generating them? I can see that complex ones might have to be
hand-coded, but perhaps most of them could be generated using a gui.

It also strikes me that perhaps the dialog editor and the character
editor should be integrated: As far as I can see, there is always a 1:1
mapping between character files and dialog files. Because of this, I
think it'd be easier if it was all just one tool.

In fact, I was thinking about it, and I tend to think that it'd be much
easier, especially for non-programmers (Windows users especially :) if
all the editing tools were eventually integrated into one tool. Any
thoughts on this?

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

Yes I noticed; the design in this respect looks pretty cool.

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

I assume that you're using some kind of polymorphic class hierarchy to
control how objects work. I assume there would be a generic 'item'
class, and then a 'weapon' class, an 'armour' class, and so forth?

I'd be interested in participating in discussions/design/implementation
of this, but naturally I'm very new to the project, so please take my
ideas with a grain of salt :)

Cheers,

-David.

> 
> 
> Kai
> 
> 
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