Hm, let me think about that too. Seems sensible. Translations are a very narrow kind of mod anyway (overwrite text only, in most situations). It would certianly make sense to have the engine treat all mods the same way.
Hm I don't know if that's practical. Wouldn't it make load times terrible to have to access that many tiny files? I'm talking about thousands of items and hundreds of powers, potentially.
Seems it would also be painful to edit. Let's say one person wants to go in and translate 1000 items. It's much easier to do that all in one file than to open, edit, save each file individually.
Not quite right but might inspire someone: Seasons Turn? Seasons Dawn? Seasons Wane?
verbalshadow: I like your "Book of Changes" idea quite a lot. I similarly want to take inspiration from Wu Xing. Only thing I'm afraid of is being so unfamiliar with the culture that I'll get it all wrong.
I got to see github in action when we (OGA) participated in the Reddit game jam recently. Git is amazing when there are multiple devs.
So far Flare is mostly single-dev. I sometimes accept well-coded contributions for isolated features.
It gets philisophical from here on...
Switching to Git is a question of what I want Flare to be. To me, Flare is still my hobby project. I get to do things the way I want. I made Flare free (open) because I enjoy freedoms. Not necessarily because I want contributors. I admit I have a strong "not developed here" attitude, and an old school style of coding. But it's gotten me pretty far already -- the demo is sorta enjoyable, the code isn't too hard to figure out.
I get the sense that putting code on GitHub is essentially requesting people to experiment and send me pull requests. That would be great if I wanted to build a community of contributors. But I don't want to manage a team; I just want to write a bit of code every now and then, when it sounds fun.
Maybe my curmudgeon-ness is hindering what Flare could be (some grand free software project?). Thoughts? Opinions?
To help spur ideas, here is a collection of ideas for the plot for my game. I might not actually use all of these. This is just brainstorming.
---
ACT I
The game world is dangerous but at a relative equilibrium/peace. Only the military/guard are allowed to have weapons. The peace is broken when a call-to-arms is issued. An invasion is rumored in a remote area of the civilized kingdom. Knights are forced to abandon many remote villages, leaving them to fend for themselves. The hero can choose to volunteer for the military, or choose to stay and help nearby villages.
It's not an isolated invasion. The hero will discover many areas are already razed. A plague is sweeping the countryside; the peasants have few ways to fight the undead and many are killed or in hiding. If the hero decides to go to the capitol for help, it is already prepared for siege and only the ruling class and military is allowed to stay.
ACT II
A radical faction arises in the capitol that declares all magic is necromancy, and is to blame for the plague and invasion. The hero, who comes from a lineage of people with the spark for magic, becomes a political enemy and wanted person. High-profile mages are hunted by military raiding parties. Bands of mages hide in the wilderness and try to preserve the mystic knowledge before it is all lost.
With trade routes all but shut down, food supplies dwindling, and lack of defenses, the hero is forced to explore the deadly underworld -- ancient crypts, dungeons, cave systems. The hero learns forgotten truths and histories from his exploration, and pieces together that such a plague/unrest has happened before.
ACT III
A secretive cult/organization infiltrated the radical faction of the military. The banning of weapons and magic is part of their long-term plan. The undead "plague" is a result of their soul collection, an offering to their leader. The powerful archmage is binding souls to build his phylactery and is preparing for lich-hood.
Five elemental guardians stand between the archmage and immortal power. The knowledge of these guardians was lost to time. The guardians can be awakened, if the are not already slain or corrupted.
ACT IV
The hero helps uncover the cult agents in the capitol. With the true enemy revealed, the knights gather for an offensive agains the archmage's fortress deep in the underworld.
Hm, let me think about that too. Seems sensible. Translations are a very narrow kind of mod anyway (overwrite text only, in most situations). It would certianly make sense to have the engine treat all mods the same way.
A possible way to do it is to treat the core files as just another mod. Hm...
/mods/fantasycore/
would contain all the current game data.
/mods/index.txt
would list "fantasycore" as the first mod to load. Then it would be quite easy for someone to do a full conversion, as the core is easily extracted.
It would also simplify the code if the core files weren't treated as special cases.
Hm I don't know if that's practical. Wouldn't it make load times terrible to have to access that many tiny files? I'm talking about thousands of items and hundreds of powers, potentially.
Seems it would also be painful to edit. Let's say one person wants to go in and translate 1000 items. It's much easier to do that all in one file than to open, edit, save each file individually.
Not quite right but might inspire someone: Seasons Turn? Seasons Dawn? Seasons Wane?
verbalshadow: I like your "Book of Changes" idea quite a lot. I similarly want to take inspiration from Wu Xing. Only thing I'm afraid of is being so unfamiliar with the culture that I'll get it all wrong.
eoc: here's an example of 0AD's art. This one is marked CC-BY-SA; maybe all of 0AD's art is the same.
0AD's art is fully 3D, so the pieces you want would have to just be rendered in the correct directions, right?
Do you have guidelines on asset size? What scale are your tiles (pixels per meter perhaps)? What size tiles are acceptable?
Ooh, nice high quality art.
Is it possible to port some assets from other projects, e.g. 0 A.D.? What license is required?
After talking to some of you on IRC, I've decided to give github a spin.
http://clintbellanger.net/rpg/blog/20110603
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare
I will try to be more open to contributions. Don't be afraid to send in pull requests. And please bear with me while I learn to manage a git repo.
I got to see github in action when we (OGA) participated in the Reddit game jam recently. Git is amazing when there are multiple devs.
So far Flare is mostly single-dev. I sometimes accept well-coded contributions for isolated features.
It gets philisophical from here on...
Switching to Git is a question of what I want Flare to be. To me, Flare is still my hobby project. I get to do things the way I want. I made Flare free (open) because I enjoy freedoms. Not necessarily because I want contributors. I admit I have a strong "not developed here" attitude, and an old school style of coding. But it's gotten me pretty far already -- the demo is sorta enjoyable, the code isn't too hard to figure out.
I get the sense that putting code on GitHub is essentially requesting people to experiment and send me pull requests. That would be great if I wanted to build a community of contributors. But I don't want to manage a team; I just want to write a bit of code every now and then, when it sounds fun.
Maybe my curmudgeon-ness is hindering what Flare could be (some grand free software project?). Thoughts? Opinions?
interesting. What code are you working on?
To help spur ideas, here is a collection of ideas for the plot for my game. I might not actually use all of these. This is just brainstorming.
---
ACT I
The game world is dangerous but at a relative equilibrium/peace. Only the military/guard are allowed to have weapons. The peace is broken when a call-to-arms is issued. An invasion is rumored in a remote area of the civilized kingdom. Knights are forced to abandon many remote villages, leaving them to fend for themselves. The hero can choose to volunteer for the military, or choose to stay and help nearby villages.
It's not an isolated invasion. The hero will discover many areas are already razed. A plague is sweeping the countryside; the peasants have few ways to fight the undead and many are killed or in hiding. If the hero decides to go to the capitol for help, it is already prepared for siege and only the ruling class and military is allowed to stay.
ACT II
A radical faction arises in the capitol that declares all magic is necromancy, and is to blame for the plague and invasion. The hero, who comes from a lineage of people with the spark for magic, becomes a political enemy and wanted person. High-profile mages are hunted by military raiding parties. Bands of mages hide in the wilderness and try to preserve the mystic knowledge before it is all lost.
With trade routes all but shut down, food supplies dwindling, and lack of defenses, the hero is forced to explore the deadly underworld -- ancient crypts, dungeons, cave systems. The hero learns forgotten truths and histories from his exploration, and pieces together that such a plague/unrest has happened before.
ACT III
A secretive cult/organization infiltrated the radical faction of the military. The banning of weapons and magic is part of their long-term plan. The undead "plague" is a result of their soul collection, an offering to their leader. The powerful archmage is binding souls to build his phylactery and is preparing for lich-hood.
Five elemental guardians stand between the archmage and immortal power. The knowledge of these guardians was lost to time. The guardians can be awakened, if the are not already slain or corrupted.
ACT IV
The hero helps uncover the cult agents in the capitol. With the true enemy revealed, the knights gather for an offensive agains the archmage's fortress deep in the underworld.
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