Dev Update : 0.6.5 Release

The 0.6.5 version of GRA should be available somewhere between Sunday and Monday. I could release it right now, but I am tweaking the new dungeon and debugging a few errors I found adding this stuff. Anyway, here is what's going to happen in this release and the few next ones.

Dev Update : AI going rogue

I've let run the latest development build a whole day in the fastest "real-time" mode available. And here are the results. This post will also explain various major changes which are going to happen in the next versions.

Also, I know there's a few coders reading this blog, so I guess you'd love reading about this "new" path-finding algorithms (read it, seriously) which have the same advantages as the good old A* with a 10x speed factor. That's something I may give a try as my pathfinder algorithm is basically my biggest bottleneck in terms of performances. The second one is especially interesting given how easy it is to implement, but it can't manage a weight for each node (meaning that it's a no-go for GRA but others should find it very very useful). The first one could be a winner, but it requires way more changes in my current code. Don't forget to read the PDF linked by the article as they are the real stuff.

Anyway, let's talk about GRA !

Dev Update : Dungeon Editor

The 0.6.5 release should out as soon as the various bugs, introduced by said version, have been fixed. It shouldn't take too long. The main new feature is the Dungeon Editor.

Dev Update : Next Goals

With the first "dungeon" nearly ready for release, even if a few things are still missing in that domain, I think it's time to explain what I am going to do next. As you will see Monday, the dungeon part in 0.6 is purely hard-coded (not moddable), so, as a result the next release will introduce ways to add / customize dungeons using the in-game modding tools. But when I am done with that (which should be relatively trivial as the whole logic behind the dungeon system is more or less ready to be integrated), I am going to explore new areas. Here is a very long post regarding this subject.

Version 0.6.0 Preview

Version 0.6.0 is nearly ready, it should be available during this weekend. Sorry for the delay. This is a major release introducing the first dungeon, a highly defended military base, several new NPC jobs, and a hell lot of bug-fixes. The major gameplay related new features are the new military faction, the dungeon system, the ability for the engine to split large buildings into several rooms, and a new game-mode called "Gang War" were the police faction is removed.

version 0.58 should be out during the week

As you can see in the screenshot, destructible terrain is now included, as the ability to target a specific tile instead of a NPC. This version should have been released yesterday, but I am encountering some minor problems when modifying the user interface code to incorporate the ability to attack a specific tile without adding another keyboard shortcut. Rushing the issue would only lead to a buggy release, so a little patience is needed here.

Feature-wise, hit chance calculations have been sightly modified. When a shot is missed, instead of doing nothing, it will hit a nearby tile with all the consequences such an action could have, like killing a friendly target (or even yourself when using an area of effect weapon). Weapons and tiles have a piercing/material strength setting used to determine if a specific weapon can destroy a wall or not. Also the DeanApocalypse theme become the default one and the other is removed from the release as maintaining both will double the time wasted on creating tiles. And, as mentioned in the first paragraph, the combat related user interface will be altered. Pressing the attack key will select the last/nearest target, using the keypad or the mouse will allow to select another target, and pressing the attack key again will validate the shot. In a similar fashion that ToME4 currently does. The middle mouse button will be used to directly attack any tile or target without a confirmation click.

The way citizen and police officers react to fights will also be improved in this release. Policemen and gang members won't ignore the fact that you are gunning down friendlies right under there nose as much as they do now.

GRA Dev Update

The development has resumed, so do the (more or less) regular development posts on this website. I am going to detail in this post the incoming changes and additions regarding in the next versions of GRA, which can mainly be summed up with "destructible terrain", "user interface update" and "combat". 

This is going to be a fairly long post, so before delving into it and probably loosing 99% of the reader-base, I would love to have some comments regarding the current user interface, hotkeys and so on. Basically how the GUI should behave according to you. My current goal is to have something very similar to ToME 4 (great rogue-like, try it, seriously). I am not interested in "bind this action to this key instead of this one" posts as those will be configurable in a near future anyway.  Most menus (shopping, inventory) will stay mouse driven, but original ideas to add and/or errors to avoid are more than welcome.

Update monday/tuesday

Hey !

I'll publish a new version Monday or Tuesday. It will feature real smoke (natural spread, block vision, reduced accuracy  according to smoke level) and fire (here again it will spread in a relatively realistic fashion). Throw weapons will be available too (Smoke / HE grenades, Cocktail Molotov). The user interface has been improved and a full screen mode (sort of) has been added. Code-wise a few steps have been written toward a destructible terrain and pushable objects.

Regarding the mission system, and other stuff delayed by my leave. As I said in the last post, I want to focus on the pure gameplay / engine first. Currently the fighting and interaction mechanisms are way too basic for my taste. So, for a while I am going to expand those areas (so the player can sneak around enemies, destroy buildings with explosives and so on). I don't have an ETA for when it's going to be done, calendars are my worst enemies. But it shouldn't take too long. Meanwhile NPC and City-Sim stuff will still be added.

Okay, problems fixed !

So, I have corrected all the previously explained issues. and I can continue onward with GRA. Yeepee.. I am currently modernizing the GUI, adding some sound FX. Items will probably become weighted and the player inventory will be limited by weight (based on strength) instead of slots. And misc other additions. That's for relatively soon.

So, WTF happened ?!

Yeah, I should apologize for the lack of update, so here we go : Sorry (on the other hand it's not like you've paid for the game or anything)! Not sincere? Yeah, you're right, what you deserve is an explanation of the "why". In fact, several things happened roughly at the same time. Let's summarize:

First, from late September to early October it was "vacation time" for me. Most of this time I wasn't even in front of a computer to explain what was going on. I also decided to buy a shiny new PC and upgrade from WinXP32 to Seven64 to take advantage of it. That is when everything went awfully wrong.

After the installation (and playing a few games, of course), I sadly discovered that the version of Delphi (it's the language used to write GRA) I was using  wasn't even compatible with this 64bit OS at all. So, never mind, I'm a programer, I have to keep up with the technology and all that jazz, so I bought the (ridiculously costly) upgrade to Delphi XE2. But, of course, given the sad state of the delphi/pascal community, several libraries I am using were totally incompatible with this new version (especially the graphical one). Being unable to fix those libraries myself (I know nothing about them, and it's very far from my area of expertise), all I was able to do was to wait. So I waited approximately one month before the said library was stable enough to be used again. Woot! GRA source code can be compiled again ! But, Ooooww... It crashes on startup. It's late November now. I read and debug the code, and it seems that when I create a L-shaped building the game crashes completely because, somehow, setting a variable X to 1 has a result of X being equal to -1875, which basically means that *somewhere* in the 30k lines of code there's an undetected issue that doesn't trigger any kind of warning beforehand, yeepee ! Of course none of that nonsense happened before the update.

At that point in time I was so fed up with GRA that I spent most of my free time in Skyrim robbing and killing everything that was not nailed to the environment or immortal. A thing that I also did in Saint Row 3, btw. But let's stay on topic. Well, I did not spent ALL my free time playing games, I also wrote tons and tons of technical documents regarding the missions, dialogs and dungeon systems but it's kinda useless until the game can be fixed.

Anyway, now I am looking at the GRA source code again, and to be honest, I am not 100% sure to be able to fix all the critical bugs introduced by the new version of Delphi (sic), because there is dozens of them and the debugger offer little to no help to locate them (as they are apparently deeply hidden in the lowest layers of my code and it only warns me when it's way too late). But, on the other hand, I am kinda proud of the engine I built behind the game itself so discarding all that and starting from scratch again is not really an option either.

So what's going to happen now is this: During the next weeks I am going to thoroughly read all my source code (and god, it will take more time and less enjoyment than reading the Robot and Foundation cycles from Asimov) and asset if I can (or not) continue onward with GRA. If so, you can expect 32 and 64 bits releases of the game and new regular updates. If not, which is, at the moment, the most probable, I will discontinue the GRA roguelike, and start anew (sort of, as I will be using large parts of the engine) with a more focused game.

Cheers,
SK.

Progress Update (2011, June 25)

Yeah I am out of unique titles, so I will use generic ones from now on ^^.

Anyway, you will have to wait for another week or so until the next version is released. Implementing real buildings with several floors is much trickier than I initially thought. The game wasn't programmed to handle this feature in the first place and as a result I am forced to alter / rewrite large parts of both the general and the AI code. Moreover, adding optional floors to buildings raises several critical performance issues in such a NPC heavy game. I have some ideas to alleviate the additional processing power required but testing those ideas takes time. I will keep you posted.

Current Progress (and other stuff)

A corner street, with the Deonapocalypse skin from Deon

Well, as said in the previous post, next release should be available during the weekend (Sunday is the most probable day). I am done with the initial part of the new city generator. A basic grammar system is included allowing different kind  of N/S, E/W, crossroads and corners roads. It's already possible for the modder to change how those roads will look and add/remove variants using the provided files.

New Map Generator Progress and Future Plans

Randomly Generated Road Network

I am still working on the new City Map Generator. I am done with the basics and i have a working map where I can move around, but NPCs and factions have been temporarily disabled as I need to review their respective AI. I had to rewrite the zone editor, and it's only temporary as it will be replaced by a building editor that will allow to set multiple levels, select specific walls/floor types and other features. Here are a few work-in-progress screenshots and comments to give you a hint about what's going on:

What's next ?

Now that the general idea of localized damages, armors and damage types is out, I will dig into this a bit more in the next version.

I definitively need to implement splash damages and thrown weapons (grenades, molotovs). With this, I need to add optional graphics for special effects and allow them to be linked to a specific tile. With that, cool weapons that cause tiles to catch fire (molotov, rpg launcher), dealing small continuous damages on whoever is on it, should be relatively easy to implement.

Also, effects still need to be implemented on armors, and I would like to add a "body" editor. Allowing to give specific body parts to a NPC template. It should allow to add innate protection damage to each body part, specific critical/wounded effects, and set if a part going to 0 health leads to death or not. This editor isn't a top priority, and it may be wiser for me to wait a bit to see what are the features I really want to be easily moddable about it.

This done (+ fixes for the few bugs found in the 0.3.8) and we should be ready to start implementing a mission framework, dialogs and this kind of things.

Yo dawg, I herd u liek zombies

I also think you like screenshots, especially when they speak for themselves.

There's more information in this screenshot than you may think. 

Running, Tileset Editor, RAM consumption

0.4.0 tiles

The RAM consumption will be divided by at least 3, walk/run toggle implement, and new tiles and editor will be featured in next release. As I made some progress toward 0.4.0 today, I will detail here what's you can expect.

Development Policies

Looking at the recent comments, I think it's best to remind everyone a few facts about the game's development process. 

Grand Rogue Auto, is a pre-alpha software. Gameplay is not representative of the final product at all. You've recently been complaining about the difficulty to open safes, and I caught a few annoying bugs that made  things much harder than they should be, so thanks for that. But keep in mind that most of the game balancing elements are still not in place. The final product will feature trainers in the various skills, alert level reducing  items; player leveling, and such. Even the way cops are responding is not representative of the final product until the Faction tree of the RoadMap is completed. The general idea here is to have a working city first, balancing the player's abilities is not a primary concern for the time being.

A lot of roguelikes follow weird version numbering systems where something like 0.1.7 is some kind of beta/gold product. GRA has a more standardized numbering. 0.25 is, code-wise, basically an 1/4 progress toward the final product. Alpha status will be reached around version 0.7 and Beta status at 0.9.  So I am currently still working on including the general concepts (economy, factions, AI). Alpha stage will be used to polish those new features, and Beta to balance things around the player and fixes remaining bugs.

Also, I am currently creating a GRA Wiki. It will serve as a documentation center related to the game and should be online at the same time as the 0.2.6 release.

Dev Update: OMG Zombies !

Yeah, zombies! I added a new game-mode to demonstrate the flexibility of my little engine (only 30-50 additional lines of code required to include the option). As you can see in the screenshot above, it's a zombie apocalypse scenario. 5% of the population spawn as zombies. People killed by zombies immediately respawn as another mindless undead. They are very tough, and regenerate health quickly. Your starting pistol is no match against them and you'll have to get a shotgun or rifle quickly as they will definitively conquer the whole city in a few hundred turns. On the bright side, money will be laying pretty much everywhere by that time. Before you ask, no I am not gonna do a Rogue Survivor 2.0, it's just a dumb fun survival scenario. It also allowed me to test the combat routines at a large scale and fix a rather large amount of potential bugs which would have arisen with the 'faction' tree of the roadmap.

But that's not all, many other changes were made.
And I have an approximate release date for the next version.

Dev Update : GUI and Industrial Districts

A lot of progress was made today, 'thanks' to the lack of real work this week. I added a vertical button list to the left part of the screen. They link to the most common commands like reload, use, open the map or the inventory. Moreover, five of those buttons are configurable (like the quick-bar in Diablo'likes and MMOs). You can link those to any useable item from your inventory. It's also now possible to lock the aspect ratio of the game so the image doesn't look stretched (especially on 16/9 screens).

Dev Update : economics, Items, and AI

Or the weekly development update I nearly forgot to post.

I'm posting a bit less frequently than usual, mostly because the economic part is a bit tricky and takes a fairly large amount of my time without having much to show for in the meantime. However, I made several improvements related to items/effects and the NPC AI. And I fixed most of the bugs reported so far. It will probably take a little less than a month for a release including a working economy, with another release in between.