PWMA: shadow, light and joint work

Yay! It seems ‘undefined packet’ on login is beaten at last 🙂 Good job! And it’s great to have custom house doors and STORES 😀 Thanks!

New problem appeared – night in towns. I often get client crushes without any error (in server log it’s just ‘disconnect’). Also main town at night is really glitchy, I’ve prepared video (it’s not published at youtube, accessible only via this link):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6aZMh341k4

It shows ‘walls’ and hide them on the screen without any purpose. I suppose this error could appear because there are too many different objects on the screen, so it’s hard to change their appearence with shadows for game engine.

/rfes:

1) if it’s not possible to fix this shadows glitches asap, maybe as a temporary solution to night problems: add an option to server config file – to turn off day/night changes in towns (because it’s quite critical problem; not possible to play the game when it’s night around – crushes and glitches)

2) add an option to client config file – ‘view’_yellow_light’. Then I’ll be able to turn it on by default in my client distribution; because without it players do not understand is there a light in dungeon corridors

3)

It would be cool to have such feature – to be able to assign any client option at server cfg. I’ve tested it by adding ‘view’_yellow_light = true’ to server config, but it seems it doesn’t work.

—-

And some topics considering development process:

A) Considering upcomming monster’s change and tileset:

You said before that you are planning to rework all monsters in the game and port latest V monster changes there. I’m not fun of V-changes in monsters, but still I kindly invite you to use my tileset as default in PWMA for this job. You said before that you need to make a decision – which tileset to maintain (you are working at 3 of them at once) and which to drop. You are welcome to use Tangaria’s tileset, with all it’s terrain features. It’s got plenty of empty space to bring new monsters (and would give possibility to save from extintion old ones, by moving them somewhere down, I’ll do it for Tangaria). I’ve assigned ‘torch’ light for all regular dungeon terrain features, so now it’s looks much better (the only problem is night at towns). Actually we could work on this tileset together – you just say what do you want to add and where and I’ll make it. We could rework tileset structure, so we both would be happy with it.

Also you are welcome to use my map of the world or any parts of it, eg town or some other locations in default PWMA. Tangaria’s main town is really beautiful and it makes starting location feels pretty special.

B) For the future, maybe it’s good idea to try and port game to SDL2, as Flambard investigated. And there is already a working demo!

SDL2 gives loads of new features, eg possibility to make _animation_ to the game, looks really great (now it’s already works on monsters attacks!). Also SDL2 client possible to port on Android and iOS. We tested it, it works %)

C) Finally, there is an old idea: combine online roguelike developers efforts – to try to find more point of joint work. Server’s code isn’t really compatible it seems, so as a start Flambard suggested – to make unified client for all trinity of online roguelikes. If it’s not possible at this step – maybe at least make new features compatible for all clients? Maybe there could be certain ‘API’-like compatibility?