Re: CRPGs, Perl, Gtk2, and my vision

[castaway]

It sounds like a fun idea, but also one that will take a year or three.. :)

From experience, I know that just coding an engine (no graphics, just the game logic) takes an extraordinary amount of time, and is hard to get right. (Though I guess if you're using an existing set of rules, you'll have less need to balance things). It sounds like a good idea for a community project though, people to keep each other going, give ideas and so on.

My first suggestion would be, make a community site for it, a wiki will do to start with. Add ideas as they occur to you, writing things down helps them become clearer, and others can ask pointed questions, or come up with their own ways of doing things, to be discussed.

(I say this because I'm currently also fiddling with a largish project, and writing things down certainly does make a difference.. Even more so if its somewhere that others can see)

C.

[japhy]

Voila: Dungeon Construction Kit wiki.

[Tanktalus]

japhy,

I highly discourage you from using the AD&D 3.5e rules. To do that will require licensing from Wizards of the Coast. Instead, check the WotC website looking for their Open Gaming system. Use that instead. It's almost identical to AD&D 3(.5)e, except that all trademarks have been removed. Of course, that means few prestige classes, and no defaults for Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance or Eberron, but that's ok. As long as you make it easy for the end-developer to add new spells, ignore existing spells, add prestige classes, set the map up however they want, etc., then they can go get the license for these things from WotC, allowing DCK to continue to be free (or not, but it can be free).

If you get that far, then you can look at creating a trademarked DCK, sort of like how the PCGen team formed Code Monkey Publishing to do exactly that - sell trademarked data sets to users of PCGen.

In my ideal world, DCK and PCGen would share data formats. Unfortunately, PCGen uses an abomination of a format which I would not want to implement a new parser for. PCGen does plan on going to XML one day, but by then you might be somewhat entrenched in your own XML format. The advantage to sharing, of course, is that you'd not have to type up all the open gaming content that WotC has released, and could get to work almost directly on the engine to use it.

Just my two cents (CDN). :-)

[japhy]

Ok, I should rewind a bit. The first thing I want to accomplish is to be able to mimic the old gold box games. Now, it's like I didn't know AD&D has advanced a lot since then, but after looking at the Open Gaming information (the many RTF files), there's so much more than I really feel is necessary for an old-school computer RPG.

I'm talking about a simpler time...