[ian-reeds-games] A big response email

  • From: Ian Reed <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:23:44 -0700

Hi all!

First my apologies for not responding in such a long time.

This week has been so filled with family events and I was back to work after Christmas as well.

Family events will probably continue through new years eve and then I should get back to a more normal schedule.

I expect to release the first version of the fog of war / unseen tiles / unexplored tiles tonight.

Glad to hear Allan's zombie map got a re-release.
It will probably have to keep changing as I'm releasing the initial fog of war stuff and still plan on doing line of sight afterward which I'm sure Allan will want to use.

Hadi, good request for the random sounds, people have suggested it in the past and I've just never gotten around to it.
Still on my list though.
Allan, you bring up a good point about having miss, hit, and critical hit type sounds once randomness is implemented. I think the random sounds will be done by appending numbers to the end and miss and hit type sounds will be similar to how it currently works.
Something like:
warrior_hit.wav
warrior_miss.wav
warrior_critical_hit.wav

and the numbers can still be appended for random sounds. We'll probably have a better idea once randomness is implemented.

Carlos, your idea about placing only on the perimeter is good.
I've added it to my list.
For the time being, Austen's idea sounds like a good work around, it will still be good to implement it as you say though.

Allan, thanks for sharing your experience with purchased sounds. I wonder if those sounds could also legally be used in other map packs with your permission. Since all the map packs are used within the same game it could potentially be considered the same production. I'm not a lawyer though, but I just wondered.

Your workaround for doing drain life is creative, good thinking!
I think I should also implement a way to restore life or deal damage to the caster immediately. This will give a better experience, though they still aren't truly drain life. For instance you might be able to drain 10 mana from a unit who has 0 mana or 10 life from a unit that has 5.
Still, it would come a little closer.

Vojtech, sorry for not doing the correct accent on the e in your name.
I missed the email you sent me as it got put in my spam folder, but I have it now, as well as the one you sent to the list.
The game is written in C#.
Some of the messages are hardcoded into the game and many are taken from the map pack files. As I'm not familiar with gettext let me try to go over some ideas on how we could do the translations.

First off, the map pack files are probably all ascii files which is why you had trouble using the accents in them.
The game engine should not be limited to ascii files.
Again, I'm not a character encoding expert but I'll have a look into it as soon as I get some time. My understanding is that unicode files have some special bytes at the beginning of the file to indicate they should not be parsed as whatever the normal windows format is. So it should be possible to convert the normal map pack text files to have this indicator at the front so the game can interpret them as unicode or whatever encoding we need. That said, I think we should actually keep your translation files separate from the core map pack files.

Here's how I think the process could work:
1 You initially translate a map pack.
I'm thinking you would do this in files that are separate from the normal map pack files. This gives the benefit that someone can always download the latest version of the map pack with all it's fixes and the latest version of the translation and if they are not in sync they will still get the benefit of all the translations you made and it will only use the English version if you don't have a translation for that particular message. It also makes it so that if a map creator only updates the balance of the game or adds units to maps or anything else that does not change messages then your translation is still not out of date. This means the game engine would need to be updated to read in the normal map pack files and then read in the translation files to replace any English messages with translated ones. I am willing to do that. 2 Since it is difficult for a map creator to remember every change they made and inform you of it you would need a good way to compare the last version of the game you translated with the current version to see if any messages changed. There are diff utilities available for download that help to do this. I'm not sure the best one to use but I could look into it if you need help with that.

I'm thinking that's how we would handle the map packs.
For the hardcoded messages I would update them to be pulled from a text file in the game folder. You would make a similar text file but with all the Czech versions of the messages. Then I think both files would be deployed with the game engine and I would have an in game option for choosing which version to use.

I still need to put some more thought into this and obviously spend some time implementing it but I think it's definitely reasonable.
What are your thoughts?

Also, you might want to hold off on translating map packs if we are going to switch to this new setup for translating.
I don't want you to have to do the work twice.

Carlos, I believe you are right about updating skill effects flags while in the unit file. I think I actually realized this when I made it so people could update skill flags in the unit files but it was going to be a lot more work to get the effects flags working so I decided not to worry about it until it became important. I forget the exact reason it was going to be a lot more work, but I'll look again
Anyway, it's on my list now.
As a workaround you could call that attack rabid bite instead and set the rabid bite skill to have the rabies effect in the skill file rather than the unit file.

Thanks to everyone for your interest and work to make the game better!

You should be hearing from me again later tonight.

Ian Reed

On 12/29/2012 2:12 PM, Allan Thompson wrote:
I didn't think effects could be manipulated like that? I thought it was only skills. I better readt he user guide again cause I haven't been able to catch up on it.
al
"The truth will set you free"
Jesus Christ of Nazareth 33A.D.

    ----- Original Message -----
    *From:* Carlos Macintosh <mailto:sleepio1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
    *To:* ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
    *Sent:* Saturday, December 29, 2012 3:16 PM
    *Subject:* [ian-reeds-games] Another weird problem

    SO, in my next tomb robber map there are these rabid hounds that,
    when they attack you, are supposed to also cause you to get a
    rabies effect. But for some reason, the game can’t find the rabies
    effect even though it’s defined correctly. I tried other effects
    that worked and it said it couldn’t find those effects either.
    This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with
    defining effects in a unit file. This occurs  when you define the
    effects flag In a unit file, like
    attack_effects=rabies
    I am pretty sure it’s broken. It may also extend to the remove
    effects, self effects, and self remove effects flags too, but I
    haven’t tried those.
    Try it out sometime. Just make a unit, an effect, and give them
    the attack ability and put in an atack_effects= and then the new
    effect you just made. The game will be clueless.


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