| commentid | objectid | typeid | userid | subject | comment | timestamp | parentid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10990 | QuakeForge | games | 5297 | Great fun ! Thank you. | After installing latest xqf and Q2 from icculus.org and now quakeforge I have enough game fun for the next several months. Great ! | 2003-05-03 03:12:16 | 0 |
| 10991 | Small Precludes | games | 5700 | good stuff | The 3rd scene is really very good. Two & four have some good bits. Worth while d/l and viewing. | 2003-05-03 05:34:27 | 0 |
| 10992 | Quiet Console Town | games | -1 | Very nice idea | Yes, the idea sounds great. Hope this will go far. | 2003-05-03 07:40:22 | 0 |
| 10993 | Quiet Console Town | games | -1 | Hmmm | Somehow I feel like I've seen this <A HREF="http://www.happypenguin.org/show?Majesty">before</A>. Well, unlike a lot of people who hang out here, I don't think there's anything wrong with ripoffs, if done with style -- much of the great "art" of the past is derivative of previous work in one way or another. Heck, Majesty itself is just Dungeon Keeper seen from a different angle. <p> On the other hand, I'm not sure this counts as "with style" -- the poor guy is desperately in need of competent artists, and the game is a real eyesore. It is turn-based, which may or may not be good depending on your point of view, but, along with the 'artwork', does mean that you don't have the same "model train" feeling as with other sim games like Majesty or Simcity. This is really (IMO) one of the primary charms that most of these games have, and without it there's no real reward to the player for building a big, cool town (whee, this number on the side got really big). <p> In addition, the user interface is clunky and (in one important respect) detrimental to gameplay -- there doesn't seem to be any indication of what events are happening in your town (ie, where income is coming from, where it's going), so it's hard to see, for instance, why you got $10 of revenue last week and $200 this week. <p> Finally, after I had played through a few turns, it crashed with a message that INCOMEMULT was not defined. (go languages with no static analysis!) Change INCOMEMULT to constants.INCOMEMULT in specializations.py to fix that. <p> On the third hand, this is a very interesting game concept with plenty of original facets -- although it's clearly inspired by the games I mentioned above, it adds its own twists (see the design documents on the website). The implementation is "proof of concept" level, and I'm not sure if the author is interested in advancing it farther himself, but people who want to make the next cool (free?) game may want to flesh these ideas out in more detail. <p> Daniel | 2003-05-03 08:56:28 | 0 |
| 10994 | Quiet Console Town | games | 4391 | Re: Hmmm | I actually started work on the game before I knew what Majesty was. I recall one day deciding to look up info on it and saying "Wait, it does WHAT?". <br><br> I completely agree with your assessment of my art. I think the graphics do somewhat contribute to the 'console' feeling of the game, but even at 32x32 I'm not that good. All my other games are set in space because I can do passable 3D models of spaceships and planets. In other words, I'll not turn artists away :) As for being turn based, that simply seemed the way it should be to me. I had more of a 'civilization' style city approach in mind at the time. <br><br> Notification of where your money is coming from and going to was in the game spec but got left out due to time. It's one of the first features I plan on putting in the next release. Also mouse support, hopefully this will alleviate some of the pain of constantly moving the cursor around. <br><br> Thanks for the bug report; I've gotten quite a few and will probably whip up a 0.7.1 release in the next few days. I had only myself for testing, so I'm not surprised to see these things. And while I love python dearly, the lack of static analysis does get annoying at times. I seem to recall some sort of lint-like checker for python but it's not coming to mind. The instant I remember, 0.7.2 will likely be on its way :) <br><br> I am interested in continuing work on the game, though not quite as much with the whirlwind pace I've been over the past few months. Any contributions (code, art, Mt. Dew) will be happily accepted. <br><br> Thanks for your comments! | 2003-05-03 09:18:13 | 10993 |
| 10995 | noeGNUd | games | -1 | Re: i wanna opengl 3d display for ADOM | Maybe because there is no source code for ADOM. | 2003-05-03 10:12:21 | 10989 |
| 10996 | noeGNUd | games | -1 | Re: i wanna opengl 3d display for ADOM | Unlike nethack. :) | 2003-05-03 10:12:37 | 10995 |
| 10997 | Majesty | games | 1739 | good commercial strategy game | This is a nice commercial strategy game - something Linux is lacking a good catalogue of. The gameplay is addictive once you slow the game down and get into the peculiarity of how to play. Sadly from graphics, gameplay and enjoyment, its not a Kohan though. | 2003-05-03 11:29:02 | 0 |
| 10999 | Quiet Console Town | games | -1 | Re: Hmmm | Listen.. That guy you replied to: To hell with him. While some of his criticisms were constructive, the rest of his post is useless drivel. There are no shortage of people like him around, ready to insult anyone and everyone. Your game looks like it's going to be quite interesting, and as soon as I get pygame installed I'm going to give it a go. | 2003-05-03 12:51:53 | 10994 |
| 11001 | Quiet Console Town | games | -1 | Re: Hmmm | <i>I actually started work on the game before I knew what Majesty was. I recall one day deciding to look up info on it and saying "Wait, it does WHAT?".</i> <p> Heh, been there done that. Well, I wasn't good enough at programming (at the time) to implement it, but I came up with the idea of Warcraft a year or so before it came out.. <p> <i>I completely agree with your assessment of my art. I think the graphics do somewhat contribute to the 'console' feeling of the game, but even at 32x32 I'm not that good.</i> <p> One thing you could do to improve your chances of having decent graphics is to make sure you have support in the game engine for more complex graphical effects, even if you don't have any good drawings to plug in. That way, artists who are interested will have more to work with than just 32x32 still images. For instance, dynamic graphical effects (ie, people walking around and stuff, sparkles, etc) For some of this stuff, I suspect that it's easier (for people who can draw: ie, not us) to draw it than to code it, but it'll be easier for people to make good-looking versions of your graphics if they can drop them into a working framework. <p> Two examples of projects that have done this are Freeciv and Freecraft, both of which started with ugly programmer-art, and later replaced that with reasonable-looking graphics by people who can draw. They're also a reason that I'd suggest working on graphical effects BEFORE you have artists -- what graphical effects you choose to support can have deep implications for the rest of your code, and AFAIK neither project's graphics engine has advanced significantly since the artwork began to improve. I suspect the reason is that (A) as I mentioned, changing the graphics engine can require modifications to the rest of the code (for instance, animating some action that was previously not shown can require major modifications to your flow of control [0]), and (B) once the artwork is in place, there's a tendency to not want to throw it out by changing formats and rendering concepts -- after all, it was REALLY HARD to get there in the first place! <p> <i>As for being turn based, that simply seemed the way it should be to me. I had more of a 'civilization' style city approach in mind at the time.</i> <p> I see. I would suggest a real-time game (which is just turn-based with REALLY SHORT turns, programmatically :) ) simply because this is in the "toy" category of games -- the fun is all in watching your city grow and develop, rather than fighting monsters or so on. I think that tends to be more fun in a more "dynamic" environment like a real-time game, but probably you could make it work with turns too. <p> <i>Notification of where your money is coming from and going to was in the game spec but got left out due to time. It's one of the first features I plan on putting in the next release.</i> <p> Yeah, I noticed that after I posted my comment. Again, with real-time stuff you could actually watch people buying items and so on :) <p> <i>Also mouse support, hopefully this will alleviate some of the pain of constantly moving the cursor around. </i> <p> Yes, please! That was the most annoying interface thing about the game. It would be nice, also, if you could see some information about a building by just hovering the mouse over it....although maybe being able to select it with the mouse would make checking up on it a lot less painful. <p> <i>And while I love python dearly, the lack of static analysis does get annoying at times.</i> <p> I feel your pain....I tend to default to writing in Scheme these days, and while you can at least statically check variable names in Scheme, there's no static type system (although I think the PLT guys are working on a type inference engine for it) <p> I have some more general suggestions after playing another time: <p> - A lot of the upgrades (plot point, etc) seem very generic. It would really rock if you could (a) pick names for them (Stolen Family Treasure, Damsel in Distress, Giant Rat Infestation, whatever), and (b) modify the name (or eventually appearence?) of buildings and people who are associated with these. Again, this is all about giving the game more personality (and this one doesn't even require you to draw :) ) <p> - The game map seems really limiting and featureless. It would give it some more personality to add terrain, and I imagine you could dream up some nice stuff to do with terrain features. Also, I'd like to have more space to build. <p> - Is there any way the layout of buildings could be made significant? It seemed like where I built them was pretty arbitrary in the current version of the game. <p> - You probably know this already, but the game is very easy. I was able to get a self-sustaining village on what seemed to be an exponential growth curve (of income) with very little work, and basically quit when I got bored after fifteen minutes or so. <p> - Some of the planned features don't make a great deal of sense to me -- for instance, I like the idea of having some sort of maze around for the heroes, but why would a town build a maze and then fill it with monsters? Or were all those RPG towns really playing both sides of the game? Hmmmm, I should have known they looked a little sketchy... <p> Daniel <p> [0] one of my side projects is actually an attempt to address this issue by providing a framework for creating games with a radically different, and much more maintainable (IMO), control structure from the standard setup that a lot of games have now. I'll shut up now, though, since it's far from being releasable, so advertising is premature :) | 2003-05-03 15:33:45 | 10994 |