Start of a Dungeon Playground

[jdarling]

I got board the other night and started looking through some of my old projects. One that I had was a "dungeon playground" that I had planned on setting up so you could test out different generation schemes and different random number generators.

Thought others might get a kick out of it, so I'm posting the exe up here. Might post the source later if I can find all of it and it still compiles LOL.

Basically its doing a RogueLike rendering, shadow casting, and uses Prims Algo to generate the "dungeion" by selection only a limited number of rooms from the actual rooms. For large numbers of rooms this could take a while LOL.

Really fun part is the flickering light.

http://www.eonclash.com/PGD/dplayground.exe

[paul_nicholls]

Thanks for sharing :)

cheers,
Paul

[WILL]

This is neat :) I'll have to check it out sometime. I'm working on a generic HeroQuest style game. Should give me some ideas perhaps

[jdarling]

Well, I now know that the source builds just fine, and I do remember enough about it to make minor changes (so far). I've put in the ability to be "killed" and to "kill". No reward and you can see your stats in the top left corner easily enough. Odd how quick it was to take this from a very basic setup to a "game" in no time.

A little bit of a script engine and it would be VERY easy to turn this into a real game LOL. Anyways, the exe above has been updated if you care to download it and give it a "play".

- Jeremy

[chronozphere]

Not sure how to use it. I guess ToolButton2 is for generating a new dungeon.
What supprised me is that the dungeon doesn't seem to have any corridors. I'd expect a nice maze with different rooms etc, but it's just one big room.
Is it supposed to be like that?

[jdarling]

Not sure how to use it. I guess ToolButton2 is for generating a new dungeon.
What supprised me is that the dungeon doesn't seem to have any corridors. I'd expect a nice maze with different rooms etc, but it's just one big room.
Is it supposed to be like that?


Yeah, the actual "dungeon generation" code isn't very smart or good (got into it a bit last night). Instead of a full Prims Algo looks like I took some basic ideas and implemented a partial system. Thus it doesn't generate a real dungeon. Plan on looking at that code and a bit more tonight/tomorrow and seeing what I can do with it. Might have to try and build a small game out of this just to see how difficult it is :)

- Jeremy

[WILL]

You should check out Sascha Willem's whole article on Dungeon Generation. Here it is: http://www.saschawillems.de/?p=439

He details how he made his own dungeon generator in the article. It's pretty neat how he did it.

[jdarling]

I'll have to look at the differences between that implementation and the ones I currently have. Actually, I've been collecting/writing dungeon generators for quite some time now. One of the projects that this was eventually suppose to become was a multiclient online game. Where you could connect with a Telnet client, custom text (Roguelike) client, 2D client, or 3D client.

Might have to pick the project back up if I start having more time, but for now this is just one of those "finds" on my massive storage area of projects that never got complete.

I've just about completed integrating a better dungeon generator I found as well, and cleaning up the code. If nothing else should really catalog my projects and write tutorials off of my findings LOL

- Jeremy

[paul_nicholls]

You might find this rogue-like site handy for this kind of thing:

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Especially:

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Articles

You can drill down to whatever article, like dungeon generation, etc. :)

cheers,
Paul

[jdarling]

Yep, got roguebasin and several others in my Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/user/jdarling/roguelike and http://www.diigo.com/user/jdarling/rogue) collection. Great sites to keep around, that's also where I read up on the Shadow Casting implementation I converted from C to Pascal. My implementation isn't perfect (doesn't use ellipsoidal casting and instead opts for rectangular) but it works for me :)

- Jeremy

[farcodev]

keep up the good work ! ;)

[farcodev]

i just tested it, and i really like the visible area effect/flickering light.
It could be cool if you should make a full rogue rpg w/ this :)

[jdarling]

i just tested it, and i really like the visible area effect/flickering light.
It could be cool if you should make a full rogue rpg w/ this :)


Some day, when I have time and am not working on learning games for the kids, I plan on it :)

[farcodev]

Some day, when I have time and am not working on learning games for the kids, I plan on it :)


cool, it's a mass of work but it's really worth it. Suffice to see the current gems in rogue world (like dwarves fortress)

[mikade]

lol, dwarf fortress. :D

Just thought I'd post to say I tried this and thought the flickering lights were neat. Many mobs were slain. Many, many mobs. ;D

I have some kind of odd, inherent and irrational hatred for learning games. That said, I woke up one morning to find myself studying Education. If it's not a bother, I'd be interested to hear what kind of learning games you're working on?

[djcityscapes]

I played around with this and killed a few mobs. I can appreciate the math behind what's viewable and what's out of site. Nice job.