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Castle Paradox
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chronoboy
Into the past with a splash
Joined: 04 Jun 2010
Posts: 162
Location: Canada
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 Posted: Tue Oct 05, 2010 8:28 pm Post subject: O.H.R.RPG.C.E. 2? |
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I know this is a very odd question/post... But it was going to be asked sooner or later, or has already been asked.
Yes, a Version 2 would be a complete re-write of the Engine which would more than likely not be compatible with the older engine. However, it will correct many wrongs and issues which plague the current build of OHR.
The best part would be, that since now after developing OHR for so many years, the developers experience is so much greater, that creating a completely new engine from scratch wouldn't as difficult as it was in the past. Considering all the new libraries available now, much of the work is already done. SDL has full sprite support for example, which back in the day needed to be coded by hand.
Think of all the quick advancements done in OHR since the move from QB to FB? Support for MIDI/OGG was added very quickly. I am sure some of the code could be re-used, mainly the plotscripting engine would make a return.
Battle scripting could be easily added during the development of the new battle system.
Another broad idea would be what IRE(It-He RPG Engine) did. Basically, the engine is just that, a plain old engine. Absolutely everything is driven from a script, the UI, the character movements, map drawing, etc...
All that could be done, is convert the plotscripting engine to a standalone program. An RPG template for the engine would contain vast amounts of plotscripts for controlling an RPG game, the plotscript engine takes care of everything.
Link to It-He RPG Engine: http://ire.sourceforge.net/
If the entire engine was programmatic in nature, porting it would be much simpler than porting what OHR is currently. Just port the plotscript engine, and your done, the plotscript virtual machine will be-able to execute the game code.
What It-He is bad at? Well, launch it, and see how long it takes to load a game. This is due to the fact that the scripts are not compiled, and probably bad programming...
All in all, the community was interested in porting the current battle system into pure plotscript code, why not take it a step further and convert the entire engine to plotscript.
Editing your game you ask? Well, just use your favorite text editor for NPC dialogs, and a good paint program for tiles and such. It-He's only editor is the map editor, which is top-notch and works rather well.
Having the engine made like a Java Virtual Machine opens the doors to endless possibilities for an RPG game.
The very fact that I am rather tempted to take apart game.exe and split it into modules which can be called from plotscript directly makes me want to go about doing this, and see the results.
Let me of your ideas and if you are interested in helping me split all the game elements and make everything callable and creatable from plotscript.
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Current project: Chronoboy Adventures
Website: http://www.chronoboy.com/ |
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Posts: 2526
Location: Hamster Republic (Southern California Enclave)
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| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 11:20 am Post subject: Re: O.H.R.RPG.C.E. 2? |
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| chronoboy wrote: | | Yes, a Version 2 would be a complete re-write of the Engine which would more than likely not be compatible with the older engine. However, it will correct many wrongs and issues which plague the current build of OHR. |
If it was not compatible with the OHRRPGCE 1 then I wouldn't want it to be called OHRRPGCE 2.
Also, before starting out on trying to create a new engine without the limitations of the OHR, it might be worth checking out some other game engines in-progress that don't have the OHR's limitations, and see if any of them are appropriate for extending for your purposes. (and if you find any cool ones, definitely add them to the 'Alternatives' page. Also, It-He would be a good addition to that page) |
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chronoboy
Into the past with a splash
Joined: 04 Jun 2010
Posts: 162
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 1:10 pm Post subject: Re: O.H.R.RPG.C.E. 2? |
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| James Paige wrote: | | If it was not compatible with the OHRRPGCE 1 then I wouldn't want it to be called OHRRPGCE 2. |
RPG Maker does this all the time, and so is Windows Phone 7. imao
| James Paige wrote: | | Also, before starting out on trying to create a new engine without the limitations of the OHR, it might be worth checking out some other game engines in-progress that don't have the OHR's limitations, and see if any of them are appropriate for extending for your purposes. (and if you find any cool ones, definitely add them to the 'Alternatives' page. Also, It-He would be a good addition to that page) |
I very much love OHR over the many alternatives I have used. Extending the engine seems to be the only limitation which I see is there. For the 10 years, I've been playing with many engines and just keep coming back to OHR(I'm quite glad your not really dead frankly).
For the most part, I am doing almost everything I can through plotscript, and using CUSTOM for gfx/sound/importing/maps.
Even my textboxes for NPCs are all done in plotscript! I have a few textboxes with the {$S?} tags and set the strings in plotscript and display away. For the most part, this allows me to get by most limits of the current engine's model.
NPCs are created and placed on the map using plotscript as well, this allows me to do much more with dynamic NPCs. Amazingly, this does not slow down the engine at all. I have one map which generates and populates 20 NPCs from scratch, these are also not references, but actually NPCs. The advantage is that in the editor, you don't see any of the actual story elements, I could keep my game unpassworded without it being compromised(besides the gfx/music/sound/maps). I am partly temped on also setting up all stats in plotscript too, to avoid any cheaters out there. :p This will also make it easier to make a Easy/Normal/Hard selector and to more customize the battles depending on game events.
In essence, for the most part, I'm using OHR like It-He, everything is controlled by a plotscript. Except OHR loads much much more faster. Kudos to optimized code.
Heart of OHR game spoiler: The game I am developing for this contest uses this exact method and concept, even though it is an RPG game, it uses plotscripting extensively. When you finally play it, you'll understand more of why I choose this method.
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Current project: Chronoboy Adventures
Website: http://www.chronoboy.com/ |
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Newbie_Power
Joined: 04 Sep 2006
Posts: 1762
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| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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This thread goes against the user friendly nature of the OHR. Plotscripting should be an option, not a requirement.
RPG Maker is also developed by a professional company supported by things like budgets and man power, which would explain why they are able to churn out new engines every few years.
I'd much rather that the OHR continues making baby steps like it is, it's already a viable engine, and the improvements to the battle engine just now help fix a lot of problems.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN? |
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer
Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Posts: 2526
Location: Hamster Republic (Southern California Enclave)
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| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 2:42 pm Post subject: Re: O.H.R.RPG.C.E. 2? |
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| chronoboy wrote: | | James Paige wrote: | | If it was not compatible with the OHRRPGCE 1 then I wouldn't want it to be called OHRRPGCE 2. |
RPG Maker does this all the time, and so is Windows Phone 7. imao |
*shrug* I don't care what other projects want to do in terms of compatibility and naming, but for the OHRRPGCE, I don't think the OHRRPGCE name belongs on anything that isn't compatible with the original.
| chronoboy wrote: |
I very much love OHR over the many alternatives I have used. Extending the engine seems to be the only limitation which I see is there. For the 10 years, I've been playing with many engines and just keep coming back to OHR(I'm quite glad your not really dead frankly). |
Thanks, I am glad too. :)
| chronoboy wrote: |
For the most part, I am doing almost everything I can through plotscript, and using CUSTOM for gfx/sound/importing/maps.
Even my textboxes for NPCs are all done in plotscript! I have a few textboxes with the {$S?} tags and set the strings in plotscript and display away. For the most part, this allows me to get by most limits of the current engine's model.
NPCs are created and placed on the map using plotscript as well, this allows me to do much more with dynamic NPCs. Amazingly, this does not slow down the engine at all. I have one map which generates and populates 20 NPCs from scratch, these are also not references, but actually NPCs. The advantage is that in the editor, you don't see any of the actual story elements, I could keep my game unpassworded without it being compromised(besides the gfx/music/sound/maps). I am partly temped on also setting up all stats in plotscript too, to avoid any cheaters out there. :p This will also make it easier to make a Easy/Normal/Hard selector and to more customize the battles depending on game events.
In essence, for the most part, I'm using OHR like It-He, everything is controlled by a plotscript. Except OHR loads much much more faster. Kudos to optimized code.
Heart of OHR game spoiler: The game I am developing for this contest uses this exact method and concept, even though it is an RPG game, it uses plotscripting extensively. When you finally play it, you'll understand more of why I choose this method. |
I understand this. I also do a lot of plotscript-only games like Don't Eat Soap, Bell of Chaos, and Mr The Hamster's Math class.
I am kinda surprised how good the OHR is at just being a resource management environment for a purely scripted game-- and I expect that the new scripting features TMC has planned will make it even better for that kind of use.
However, the core of the OHRRPGCE is its non-scripted features. You may notice that I am working on fixing a lot of battle engine problems first before I start to work on adding battle scripting.
If you want an engine that is more focused on pure-scripting, I think there are other engines that serve as a better starting point. |
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Moogle1
Scourge of the Seas
Halloween 2006 Creativity Winner
Joined: 15 Jul 2004
Posts: 3377
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Wed Oct 06, 2010 2:51 pm Post subject: Re: O.H.R.RPG.C.E. 2? |
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The Paragraph Police would like to have a word with you about your legibility.
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity
Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
Location: Matakana
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| Posted: Sun Oct 10, 2010 12:46 am Post subject: |
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(This thread doesn't belong in The Soapbox)
| chronoboy wrote: | | creating a completely new engine from scratch wouldn't as difficult as it was in the past. Considering all the new libraries available now, much of the work is already done. |
Consider all the code we have now, much of the work is already done. Either a library replicates something we've already written, or it doesn't, in which case we can make use of it without a rewrite. If I wanted to create an incompatible version 2, I wouldn't rewrite it from scratch.
| chronoboy wrote: | | Think of all the quick advancements done in OHR since the move from QB to FB? Support for MIDI/OGG was added very quickly. I am sure some of the code could be re-used, mainly the plotscripting engine would make a return. |
You've got it back-to-front :). The script interpreter is the next (well... pretty soon) thing to be replaced, and it'll be one of the very few things we've ever rewritten completely from scratch.
I think the engine right now is changing quicker than it has before, excluding the sudden leap to FreeBASIC.
| chronoboy wrote: | | Another broad idea would be what IRE(It-He RPG Engine) did. Basically, the engine is just that, a plain old engine. Absolutely everything is driven from a script, the UI, the character movements, map drawing, etc... |
Most other RPG engines are like that. The biggest draw of the OHR seems to be that it requires no scripting. I'm totally in favour of making the engine customisable using scripts towards that extreme, but I want to simultaneously see scripting become even less required than it is now (eg. build lots of advanced features into textboxes so that you won't need to script your own).
| chronoboy wrote: | | If the entire engine was programmatic in nature, porting it would be much simpler than porting what OHR is currently. Just port the plotscript engine, and your done, the plotscript virtual machine will be-able to execute the game code. |
This is mistaken, the amount of code the OHR is composed of does not significantly affect how hard it is to port. As long as you don't include "rewrite" as a possible meaning of "port", anyway.
| chronoboy wrote: | | All in all, the community was interested in porting the current battle system into pure plotscript code, why not take it a step further and convert the entire engine to plotscript. |
If it becomes possible to replace builtin components with scripts and drop them in, I'm sure someone will replicate existing components and provide them for use. Doing it ourselves sounds like a lot of work :)
| chronoboy wrote: | | Well, just use your favorite text editor for NPC dialogs, and a good paint program for tiles and such. |
Having builtin editors for all the data in a game (graphics and music are different) is very very important. We have a plan for letting people define their own RELOAD data structures, and James is working on an Editor Editor which might let you create custom editors in Custom for your data, similar to what I saw SDHawk doing in Ika.
| chronoboy wrote: | The very fact that I am rather tempted to take apart game.exe and split it into modules which can be called from plotscript directly makes me want to go about doing this, and see the results.
Let me of your ideas and if you are interested in helping me split all the game elements and make everything callable and creatable from plotscript. |
You're more than welcome to add commands to do things that are currently impossible, and you'll get all the help you want. You should start with the simple stuff, such as door commands, until we get a flexible scripting language. Don't even think of doing your more complex suggestions with the current scripting language. Then we can look into adding script "hooks" into things (eg. calculating damage an attack does, NPC movement decisions for a single NPC), exposing useful internal functions to scripts (eg. the recent npcwall and herowall commands) and splitting some things into clean modules so that a script can specified to do the same job.
In conclusion I prefer James' approach: fix the problems with the engine rather than just give up and make people pave over them with scripts.
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chronoboy
Into the past with a splash
Joined: 04 Jun 2010
Posts: 162
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Mon Oct 11, 2010 6:57 am Post subject: |
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| The Mad Cacti wrote: | | chronoboy wrote: | | Another broad idea would be what IRE(It-He RPG Engine) did. Basically, the engine is just that, a plain old engine. Absolutely everything is driven from a script, the UI, the character movements, map drawing, etc... |
Most other RPG engines are like that. The biggest draw of the OHR seems to be that it requires no scripting. I'm totally in favour of making the engine customisable using scripts towards that extreme, but I want to simultaneously see scripting become even less required than it is now (eg. build lots of advanced features into textboxes so that you won't need to script your own).
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Another approach would be, make everything into a script, but optional to edit. The default scripts that a new game generates would be that of how OHR currently works. The designer can still use CUSTOM for all tasks, but if they wanted to dig a little deeper into customization, they can modify a few plotscripts.
Another idea would be a subclassing system, similar to what you see in most programming languages to extend current classes. Each major component of OHR could be a class in the .HSD file, which the programmer could subclass and modify specific functions of that component. In a sense NPC references are sort of a subclass of the main NPC ID, with separate x,y,exta0..2 variables.
I'm not sure if there any thoughts on moving plotscript to OOP or not. To maintain compatibility, the "classic" plotscript functions could be in the root namespace. We could also go about how JavaScript added OOP and maintain compatibility, but I really hate the prototype system they use, it's very confusing and causes code to become unreadable.
For the most part, the engine as it stands can be completely controlled from plotscript. We have scripts when a new-game is called, keypresses, map inits, and map steps. For the most part, this does work rather well. I would really love to be-able to control NPC movement types, or at least a simple pathfinding system for them. I have another post somewhere about a new request for a pathfinding map editor for NPCs. A custom game loop in a map init script might be-able to control NPCs movements manually to emulate this ability. However this may slow down the game considerably.
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Current project: Chronoboy Adventures
Website: http://www.chronoboy.com/ |
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