Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Engine Update

Hello all this is Daniel the engineer responsible for making the new engine.  Quick note about myself.  I'm a college student studying comptuer sciece right now.  I've never programmed in html5/javascript before, but I'm crazy good at computer science.  If you think that I shouldn't be the one in charge of this project due to my inexperience in html5 or your particular expertise in html5 then email me and I'm sure I can change your mind.  I started working on this game last thursday, and since then I've been working with nuku and a couple writers on the engine.  So a lot of progress has been made since the last update so I thought I would let you all know whats going on so far.

First of all for all you horny masses out there.  Exploration, navigation, and rudimentary combat have been added into the game.  You can explore in certain areas by clicking actions then explore.  You can discovery the mall by a certain event.  Have fun messing around with those, but sorry I'm not much of a writer so i doubt you'll find any of it too interesting.  Everything mostly involves just saying you got raped, which is my attempt at making it seem like the current game with minimal work.

Secondly for all you writers out there.  I'm able to parse all the inform inline statements and run them.  Which means on top of being able to do that, most of the execution logic for all the inform parsing/execution code is in the game i just haven't pieced it together yet.  Also I have the ability to run most of the inform code i just can't parse it in order to execute but baby steps.  As for what you need to do to get your old content into my game, most likely nothing.  I believe the only things that I can't just parse in will be commands that don't have any hyperlinks attached to them and definitions.  99% of the inform code I should be able to parse over but I'll let you know as I go.  My goal for this is to be able to import as much of the old inform code as possible without the writers having to rewrite anything they have already written.

Third for all you coders out there.  I've thrown this project on github here for you to look at and admire.  If anyone is good at html5 and could help with getting the window to auto reconfigure to the screen message me on github or email me or something.  The first time I've touched html5/javascript/css was last Thursday and honestly my time is better spent on the logic.  That's harder, more important, and what I'm better at.  Also If you see anything that I'm doing which is bad convention please let me know because again I'm very inexperienced with these languages.

Finally I have the actual game for you to try out yourself.  If you want to try it out download the game from here. Then just extract and double click on www/index.html and it should run.  Most likely there are some bugs so if you find any please in descending priority: log it on github, email me, or leave a comment here.  I'm sure the bugs are there so happy hunting.  Also If you have any suggestions on the engine so far please comment and I'll try to respond to you.

My next update will hopefully be a huge one.  I feel like I'm close to actually importing the old code, so the next time I post I will probably have all the locations/npcs in the game but what level of interaction I'm not sure yet.