Hello, fans of the mind-numbingly unnatural!
As you know, Cyclopean has taken a giant leap forward in aquiring an engine, and much work has now been done toward bringing Scott's vision (and writing) to a monitor near you. To allow the other Great Old Minds at ITS to have some input (and set me straight where necessary) Scott has asked me to do a weekly update for the ITS developers. We are posting the first one publically so you can have a quick glimpse at what is going on behind the scenes. So here, for the very first time & complete and unedited, is last weeks inaugural Cyclopean weekly developer update! <pause for applause>
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Dateline: Oceania, Tue 24/11, 15:17
Hello, and welcome to the first in many weekly updates on the progression of
Cyclopean. Scott asked me to do these to inform you folks on where my efforts stand, record things for posterity (such as if we get weird bugs down the track, someone might say, "hey didn't you say you were going to blah blah blah several months ago? That would do it!") and possibly, his way of making sure I am sober at least once a week. These updates will be posted on a Monday (his time) which is long gone where I am, so just let me start by saying...
Welcome,
TO THE FUTURE!!<cue Twilight Zone music>
Now... prior to getting the engine, I was doing a lot of what I called 'flowcharting', which specifically meant (or ended up meaning) outlining some of the functions I would need to write and how I thought the general structure of parts of the engine would look (the dialogue section, the combat section, the levelup section etc). There were a few false starts as I realised how much of what I had in mind
wouldn't have to be done from scratrch but could be done with the existing functionality of the engine (such as I am able to understand it without full documentation) and along the way I also moved from working on the dialogue side of things (which will involve accessing text files of some sort, which is way outside my comfort zone atm) to the combat side of things (which will involve writing and calling lots of functions and is where my experience lies). I've also been cataloguing, as it were, the various different states a character might be in (asleep, prone, unconscious, bleeding etc etc etc) and which of Scott's many skills and traits affect what, and when exactly to calculate AC / damage / to hit etc etc etc, and what will have to be carried forward to where, and asking Scott lots of obscure questions, and slowly inching forward.
Now we have the engine
So I took a break from all that and started doing the obvious stuff (printing and reading docs and doing the tutorials) and of course messing with the world editor. So far I got a splash screen going when we start (not all that important but eminently satisfying), I have got the camera set at an angle that Scott seems happy with (but which can of course be changed), got 'move by right mouse button' going and also worked out how to bind functions to keys (which is very simple but I actually made one work and since I am using a totally new language in TorqueScript, I'm going to hail it as a major breakthrough). Generally, I've been wrestling the basics of the engine (camera / mouse / keyboard) from its default setup for an FPS to our somewhat-isometric RPG.
I've also been playing the AoD demo a little - very impressive! - so I will take the liberty of explaining my actions by contrast to that, for ease of understanding. (I will also point out that I am trying to follow Scott's instructions but occasionally have my own ideas of doing things, so he is more than within his rights to jump in at any time and say, "No, thats not what I meant! Do this!" and I won't mind at all.)
- Movement and interaction will be left-mouse, changing according to the 'target' (move to terrain, talk to NPC, open door etc). Think I have a pretty good grasp of how to do this - determine the target using vectors, determine its type etc. Will ask for help if I screw up. This differs from AoD's right-mouse move.
- Right-mouse will be for menus of non-standard options: kosh the NPC instead of talk to him, sneak across the terrain instead of walking, lock the door instead of opening it etc. (Differs from AoD).
- Scroll camera independantly with AWSD (currently working on) a la AoD, though Cyclopean will have fog of war.
- Rotate camera pitch independantly using mouse-wheel-button held and mouse (a la AoD?)
- Zoom with mouse wheel (a la AoD?)
And thats what I am working on atm. Hope to have the rest of these basics going very soon
O I've also been fiddling with all sorts of other things in the world editor, from the decal-maker to setting up collision meshes for Scott's models that he has sent me, but I won't go into those til I have them working right.
I seem to have deleted all the pix I sent to Scott of the engine in action, so I've attached a 3rd-person FPS perspective of a few of his models sitting around, and a few default ones, and a default player. Not really indicative of anything I have been doing
RPG
