@Oxagast

I understand how you feel man. I take pretty much the very same way when peoples criticize Mega man, ghehe. I know, I know the game is repetitive and has not changed much since its release, but hey, megaman is my hero, ghehe.

I don't know what the hype about HL is though. I mean, the game had nice graphics for it's time, but it was a pretty average shooter. Peoples claim how good the story is, but I still don't understand how a voiceless geek who can shoot well with a gun is any sort of story. Jedi Knight had a way cooler story for an older game, IMHO. Quake 2 was also an older game and much cooler overall. Multiplayer-wise, HL was not very impressive either.

I thought most of the problems with HL1 would be fixed with HL2, but still nothing. Freeman still does not say a word (isn't he curious to know what happened to him, to the Mesa facility, to his friends? Not even a word? Come on...). All the guns are still boring and sound ratter un-powered. In the first game, it was better to use the pistol instead of the machine gun, because the machine gun had such a horrible accuracy. It still sucks at HL2, but they also ruined the pistol this time... The gravity gun is fun, but over-hyped as well. It is just there to show the brilliant physics engine. Talking about the physics, it was over-used in the game. Every puzzle had some less-than-intelligent puzzle using the physics engine...

They thought that adding vehicles to HL2 would be a nice addition. It sure would, if they at least controlled properly. Controlling the boat is a nightmare. Other games, such as Halo (older) used vehicles so much better than HL2 did. UT2k4 works greatly with vehicles as well. I could sum up HL2 like this: Average game; boring, innacurate, weak weapons; horrible vehicles controls; disappointing plot; Bug-ware included (Steam); Un-fixed bugs (stuttering, anyone?), lack of multiplayer mode when released (today we have death match, which is nothing new or original. Original game came with CS:S though).

The only positive thing I've to say are the graphics. Still, I found that except for the main characters (Barney, Alyx, etc) they all are re-used models from other levels. All limbs looks exactly the same. Come on, give me a fat guy, a black-fat guy, a blond girl...) Nope. The second positive thing I've to say, are the mods. Plenty of them. HL has a very active community. I still wish CS:S was ported to a better engine such as UT instead: Better anti-cheat softwares and no crappy-ware(Steam). And on the top of it, it would run natively on Linux... But nope, Valve loves DirectX, ATI and MS.

Wow, you must hate me now Oxagast .

I could do sound, preferribly music.
I have a semi-professional studio, study jazz, and know alot of musicians.
Since this won't be anytime soon, you can pm or email me. It looks like I will be on LQ for a longer time, but email is probably safer.

(I won't follow this thread)

I would recommend you start a homepage for this project. I don't know what you really can do, but I guess a 3d open-source game would most likely be done with blender, and probably blender-game-engine. So you will need plenty of people who can work with that - and it will be hard to convince those people if you don't have anything to show yet.

A little draughts game called "Chapaev" [src + win32 exe]
For linux see here.
Features: physics, goddamn you all, flooders.

I'm working on hl2-like gravity gun atm. Got only body pulling so far. Working on holding it. Not easy, I tell you.

PS: Flood must die. Do NOT flood in my thread.

Don't forget Fallout and Fallout 2 as references!

Genius went into those games. For example, try playing the entire game with an intelligence of 0, and see where it gets you...

"Would you like some pie?"

"Ughh ung gugh."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."


Also, Knights of the Old Republic seemed pretty good.

And if it's going to be an MMO, then check out CircleMUD or other MUD codebases. They've got some basic systems that could be implemented in a new game.

I never played Fallout. Somehow I kind of overlooked it at the time. I guess I was too hooked on mods for quake or half-life back then (hooked on some sort of fps. Though I pretty much loathe fpses these days due to how much they are overdone. I mean how many times do they need to reinvent the wheel, clone, and add new trivial gimmicks? Anyway, enough of that rant), but I played Wasteland way way back in the day on my C64. In case anyone doesn't already know, fallout was a sequel to Wasteland in spirit. To this day, I have to say that Wasteland is about the all-time best computer rpg in my book. I really think it was one of the few games that did an rpg the right way on a computer. I wouldn't be surprised if Fallout is every bit as good considering how it too has achieved crpg cult status.

Another really good recent rpg that I recently enjoyed alot was The Bard's Tale. I'm not talking about the original series crpg here (though, those were pretty good also). I'm talk about the Bard's Tale that was a made a couple of years ago. It was produced/designed by Brian Fargo (The brains behind the original Bard's Tale and Wasteland if iirc). This newer Bard's Tale is nothing like the older ones. It's more of a humorous parody type of rpg. It's sense of humor reminds me of Black Adder. I thought it was a pretty hilarious game and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's humor probably wouldn't appeal to everyone, but I think it's probably bound to appeal to most players that used to play DnD back in the late-70s and early-80s.

The reason that I brought up Bard's Tale (newer one) is that I've heard alot that Fallout has some of the same spirit and humor of Wasteland. Bard's Tale has a similar sense of humor as Wasteland. I think that might be because Brian Fargo was in charge of it. I would like to see him make some more games. There's something so right about most of the games he's had a big part in designing.

Also, wasn't Brian Fargo one of the programmers behind Mail Order Monsters (not an rpg. Was a construction set type of game)? If he was, it makes alot of sense since that one also seems like it has undertones of his style of creativity.

Never played Wasteland and Bard's Tale, but if I get a chance I definitely will.

Here's the kicker...

Do they run in Linux? (Wine? Cedega?)

Because I made a personal vow that I would never ever ever again touch a Windows computer unless:

1. It was for an unavoidable reason, such as work, or
2. It was to install Linux over Windows.

And I've stuck with it (for the most part) for the past two years.

I like my track record.

Wasteland will be able to since it's an old 8-bit game. With it you have a few options.

Many years back Interplay released it to the public and the dos version was included on a CD-ROM for one of the pc game magazines (think it was Computer Gaming World iirc). You can find it on the net though over at HOTU (Home of the underdogs)and many other abandonware sites where you can download it. You'll also want to download it's manual and paragraphs. Paragraphs was a seperate manual that was shipped with the game. They had it because the medium back then wasn't large enough to hold all the text like dialogues and descriptions etc. So at certain points in the game it will tell your to refer to a paragraph. It was an elegant solution for the time. It allowed them to make a deep and rich rpg game in spite of lack of having powerful enough system to be able to distribute all the necessary data in electronic form. After you finish the game, the paragraphs is something to sit down and read for some good laughs. Some of the paragraphs are pretty hilarious (there is alot of bogus paragraphs in there to prevent cheating so that someone can't just go reading through the booklet and spoil the game for themselves. That's why I recommend finishing the game before reading through the whole thing). Let me know if you have trouble finding these. I know some good Wasteland fan sites that have all the resources for the game (everything from FAQs to walkthroughs to docs).

Wasteland was originally released for Apple IIs and shortly later for the Commodore 64 (the dos version actually came out a few years after the C64 version had been released). So for Wasteland, it's really just a question of which emulator you want to use. If you want to play the C64 version (my favorite version due to nostalgia) then your best bet is to use VICE (the open source C64 emulator that runs great on Linux) for instance. It may be a bit more challenging to find the C64 image files for it though. I'm pretty sure that there is probably some good Apple IIe emulators out there for Linux as well (I haven't experimented with any of them though). There again, you may run into some snags trying to find disk images of Wasteland for it too. Then again, that probably comes down to how resourceful you are with scouring the internet.

I had the dos version of Wasteland on this system for awhile. What I did was use dosbox since I don't have any sort of dos or windows installed as a dual boot on this system. There is of course some extra overhead involved with using emulators, but I found that it wasn't an issue even with my PII 300 Mhz since Wasteland is such an old game that harkens back the early VGA PC days when 386s were common and you were gaming in style if you had a 486. So it's not very demanding. I'm sure if you have a even fairly modern system that it will probably run it fast and sleek on any of these emulators. Another options for dos emulation, that I know of, is dosemu which is the GNU dos emulator. I haven't experimented with it any, but I imagine it's probably a pretty good one being that it's GNU FSF. I can say that I was able to get dosbox to run the dos version of Wasteland without any problems aside from sound being poor quality, but sound isn't really that big of a deal since the game doesn't use that many sounds, which I think actually helps keep it's long journey enjoyable by not eventually getting on one's nerves(most of it's resources went into story and design). Also the sound was probably only poor due to this being a PII 300 running it. I didn't bother to experiment with tweaking dosbox to utilize more CPU which probably would have cleared up the sound issue. I believe that dosbox utilizes sound through SDL. So if your system works with sound through SDL well, then it probably should be fine.

As for Bard's Tale. I played that on my Playstation 2. I'm not sure if they also release that one for the PC also or not. I can't help but think that they may have. Only problem is that I'm sure it's probably a Windows game . If you have a PS2 you can probably find it used or in a bargain bin somewhere for dirt cheap. I bought it about almost a year ago at EB brand new for $17. It's great how alot of console games come down in price fast even after only being out for 6 months. I've found alot of great games by accident from stumbling onto such deals. I think what happens is there sometimes is these games that never really got any hype so they didn't sell too well but were good games none the less. I've actually found that more often than not it's the big hyped games that turn out to be disappointing alot of the time. However, what constitutes a good or bad game is often a matter of taste. Usually it seems that the games I end up liking usually got good reviews, but still for some reason didn't sell so well. I think alot of it is because the heavy fan-boyism in the console market -- how there is alot of people all on the bandwagon to buy the latest super hyped game (i.e. Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts II). While I do think alot of the hyped games are often really good ones, they're often not the grand instant classics that alot of people hype them up to be. Like Final Fantasy is a good series, but it is definitely not the best RPG series that there ever was like so many make it out to be. It's a good rpg series in my opinion. Just not the ultimate one IMHO. Then again, I tend to be an old curmudgeon about games and tend to think that games like Wasteland and Ultima were some of the best RPGs ever made and that most rpgs today pale in comparison. But that's just me.

I keep wishing for the day for there to be a modern rpg as great as some of the great old-school ones. I guess that doesn't happen though since the industry is so focused on eye candy. There's nothing wrong with eye candy, but it probably ends up stealing all of the energy, focus, resources, and time from a development team preventing them from designing and rpg that is great in rpg terms. There's plenty of rpgs that are great in presentation, which is great, but the rpgs elements are usually end up feeling tacked on and not very developed. Too much of the time, with modern rpgs, elements like stats, tactics, plot, and combat system usually end up rather inconsiquential to the experience. For instance, usually skills don't have much effect on how things evolve through the game. In games like Wasteland, the skills had a huge impact the turn of events in the game. While the plot stayed the same each session, it seemed like each time I would play the game, things would happen somewhat different due to which skills I used when. I would like to see this sort of thing happenning in rpgs these days. I think most people probably would as well since the most frequent complaint about any rpg is their linearity and lack of there feeling like things are open ended.

I almost got maggun (magnet gun) working.
It is able now to:
1) pull a body towards the player;
2) hold it.
New test game "Maggun" is coming soon...

I've made a little movie of maggun [7M]:
http://kornerr.alfamoon.com/movies/maggun-0.0.1.mpg_
Look at the physics, not at the models, since I'm not a modeller :P

.mpg_.mp3?

It's neighter mpeg nor mp3.

it is mpeg. rename from "maggun-0.0.1.mpg_" to "maggun-0.0.1.mpg"

oskar, try Linux.
Well, I've got another movie:
http://kornerr.users.kemcity.ru/down...ggun-0.0.2.avi

Currently it was decided to go from the easiest to the hardest.
Task: create Mahjong game.
State: you can play one game.
http://kornerr.alfamoon.com/images/mj-0.1.png
For Windows:
Libraries
Project
Installation: unpack both archives into one directory.


What needs to be done:
1) fix Blender python exporter;
2) paint pretty tiles and play desk.

If anyone is willing to help, I'm glad to hear from you.

I lack the time to be of any help.

Just wanted to let you know about GemRB, which is an open source (GPL) game engine, specifically aimed at RPG's. The main purpose of the project is to implement an open source alternative to the Infinity Engine, used in many games (Baldur's Gate I and II, Planescape, Icewind Dale I and II and probably some others, which are the precursors of Neverwinter Nights), but it can also be used to roll your own game, with your own graphics, storyline and stuff.

You might want to check it, it might be of some use or not, I don't really know. But in any case, maybe it can be a good place to get some ideas from, if nothing else.

http://linux.prinas.si/gemrb/doku.php
http://linux.prinas.si/gemrb/doku.php?id=newgame

In any case, I wish you luck on your project.

OGS Mahjong 0.6

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

Video 1
Video 2
Downloads for Linux and Windows

I would be glad to hear from you how this works on various Linux distros. It was compiled under Debian 5.0 with GLIBC 2.7. Runs fine on Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu.