Messages

Seems to pop up in almost (but not quite) every game.

It's always in the same place:

Spoiler

Top floor of the military tower.

[0.8]

-- AliensRL (0.8 (BETA 2)) Post Mortem -------------------------------

  Name     : Scrood
  Class    : Scout
  Rank     : Elite
  Result   : Killed the alien Queen and escaped

  Total Experience : 35595
  Experience left  : 4595
  Game length      : 21117 truns

  Armor   : Power armor [4]
  Sidearm : M4A3 pistol (11/12)
  Primary : M41-A pulse rifle (60/60)
  Heavy   : M56 smartgun (50/50)
  Medpacks: 5

-- Graveyard ---------------------------------------------------------

  .|.......#..#*.A.#.....
  .#.......#..|....#./...
  .#.......#..#....|....|
  .#.......#..#....#.....
  .#.......#..#....#....+
  .#..A....#..#....#.....
  .#.......#..#....#.....
  .#.......#..###########
  .#AA.....#..#..........
  .#.......|..#.|.+|.....
  .#.......#..#....%.....
  .#.......#..#......A...
  .#.......#..###########
  .#.......#..#.|........
  .#.......#.%#..........
  .#.......#..#........./
  .#.......#..#..........
  .#.......#..#..........
  .#.......#..#..........
  .#.......#..#....A.....
  .#......A#..#..........
  ##########  ###########

-- Skills ------------------------------------------------------------
  Sidearms      : master
  Light weapons : expert
  Heavy weapons : expert
  Technical     : expert
  Medical       : expert
  Fitness       : expert
  Perception    : expert

-- Ammunition --------------------------------------------------------

  9mm ammo      : 395/400
  .44 ammo      : 150/150
  M309 ammo     : 285/500
  M250 ammo     : 380/500
  60mm gren.    : 40/40
  12g. shells   : 200/200
  frag grenade  : 5/3
  inc grenade   : 0/3
  krak grenade  : 3/3

-- Kills (3362) ------------------------------------------------------

  1248 juveniles
  69 workers
  774 warriors
  948 hunters
  322 elites
  1 queen

-- Messages ----------------------------------------------------------

 Nash is dead. Head to the top of the
 Main Tower to kill the alien queen.
 Good Luck.
 You enter the corridor. Entering
 Civilian Tower, level 1...


I hope AliensRL will get some love soon :). Thanks for the bug report!

Does this mean that there's a new version on the way?

I'd long ago given up hope...

i shoot people with the magnum and they take "light damage"...

Depends where you hit them, right?

When it says I "barely scratch" or "lightly hit" an alien, I take it to mean that my shot has just nicked them. When you "perfectly" or "critically" hit something, I take that to mean drilled right through the chest or head. To more reliably get better shots in you need to buy better weapons skill levels.

i want to blast stuff all over the place, not just shoot hopelessly!

That comes later in the game when you have high skills or heavy weaponry, or both :)

AliensRL is very much about combat tactics. It's all about working out the most efficient way to deal with your enemies. Often that means manoevering them how you want them, or even not fighting them at all (doors are like your 4th weapon). You also need to know the different types of alien well as there are big differences in how you should approach fighting each type.

- do not allow Aliens to get to you at point blank range (general rule);

Actually I find that when using a pulse rifle with low weapons skill level, waiting until aliens are at point blank range is the best tactic for anything except a worker or elite, as it makes almost certain that one burst will kill them. Usually you shouldn't let them get that close, but you shouldn't shoot from too far away either, as it wastes ammo.

[boolean]

I said deal with it, not with me.

As you wish:

I didn't use 3d term: lighting system, but rather called it light-system which describes what I ment. (...) Maybe, actually, ridiculous was your thought assuming that it was in attempt of imitation something from 'bigger screen', because name matches..

No, I don't think so, because that's what you described. Areas lighting up and barrels casting shadows with gunfire? You were talking about an FPS, whether you meant to or not.

Let's talk instead about changing the boolean visibility of a tile according to how much light is falling on it. That is, we are not just changing its brightness, we are changing whether it is "visible" or "outside vision". Aliens RL already uses this principle in a limited way to do the "dark" environment of the storage tower, by decreasing the vision radius. But we could take it further than that and generally calculate for every tile not just whether it is visible from the player's position, but if there is enough light falling on it from any nearby sources for them to actually see what is there. Thus in a dark area with a few lights, the player might have a large vision radius but still be unable to see most of their surroundings. (In fact, I think that somebody - possibly me - already suggested elsewhere the idea of having flare pickups in Aliens RL, which could be used to permanently light up areas in the storage tower.)

In fact we can make it a "fuzzy" boolean. If a tile is less than 100% lit, but greater than 0%, then the tile itself is drawn - in a darker colour, if possible - but there is a <100% chance of drawing any object at that location which the player has not already seen. That chance would depend on the amount of light, and also how easy the object is to see. Small and immobile objects (like pistol clips) would be much more difficult to see than large and mobile ones (like aliens). Light-emitting objects (such as, well, lights) are the easiest to see of all. In general: light, motion and size determine whether one thing is perceived by the visual senses of another. In a stealth-oriented game, this would all apply to the enemies as much as to the player.

Of course, this is all interesting as an intellectual exercise, but it needs to add gameplay to be worth doing (particularly since it will multiply the number of LOS tests that need to be done). In AliensRL, the player can't sneak up on the aliens, and the aliens already wait motionless until they are "seen" before they attack. This already means that in the dark environment of the storage tower they get to ambush the player, and if the player goes poking about in the corners of rooms looking for extra pistol clips then they might find an alien instead. As it stands there's not much benefit to having the system I describe above. It just introduces some extra randomness to the edges of the visible area, which is the player is not able to influence.

However, consider if the aliens are given a larger vision range than the player (at least in darkness) and if they only wait to be seen before advancing if the player is moving away from them. Now the player faces the possibility of entering a room through a door in the middle of one wall, moving into the room in one direction, and then finding that aliens have advanced behind them and are between them and the door. If they have flares, they can reduce this possibility by chucking a flare to one side of the room when they enter. In dark areas in general, assuming that flares are in plentiful supply, using a flare could save the player a lot of bullets. Of course, we don't need a full light-based visibility system to get this effect; we only need flares, and some minor changes to alien behaviour...

There is nothing to chill. I said what I said. Deal with that, not with my supposed emotions. Whatever emotions may be, I use reason anyway. So what you got from me is straight point and respect.

Fine. I also said what I said. You assert that it is a problem with my way of thinking if I read meaning into your words which you didn't mean to put there. That is a ridiculous assertion, because how am I supposed to know what you are thinking, except through your words? But I'm happy to let that stand. By the same reasoning, it is also a problem with your way of thinking if you misinterpret what I say. You deal with it. One attempt to explain myself more clearly to you is all you get.

To summarise the facts (feel free to dispute them, but don't expect a response):
-Your shaded lighting scheme won't work, due to technical limitations.
-Your shaded lighting scheme amounts to a crude imitation in roguelike form of what radiance systems in CGI do, which is to make objects lighter or darker according to the amount of light that is supposed to be reflected from them. That's what you drew in your picture and described in the first part of your post afterwards. Maybe that's not what you had in your mind, but that's what was in your words, and we can't read your mind.
-Your shaded lighting scheme is a cosmetic enhancement, albeit a nice one.
-I think it is somewhat pointless to concentrate on cosmetic enhancements to a roguelike. You're entitled to your own opinion on the matter.

The ideas you put forward in your "assassin" post are much more interesting, and similar to something I am working on.

I didn't use 3d term: lighting system, but rather called it light-system which describes what I ment. Would you reply If I used different word (for example: brightness adjusting), so it couldn't conjure anything you could compare to, and judge ? What you find ridiculous about it ? I rather find it inspiring. Maybe, actually, ridiculous was your thought assuming that it was in attempt of imitation something from 'bigger screen', because name matches.. So you are laughing/smiling at your own thoughts and announce it to everyone (who can read btwn the lines), because you actually believe that situation is exactly as it looks in your mind, which gives you motivation to speak and point silly things out. And since this idea/judgment was created in your mind, it is clear it is conditioned to create silly looking things which you project on outside objects, and by doing so you only speak about your tendencies and way of seeing world. None of this view has actually anything to do with what is going on (in other peoples minds) and doesn't describe anything that is happening. It is in your mind only. Notice how your view changes when affected by condition to create judgment/compare.

Chill, mate. You are also reading (or mis-reading) too much into my specific wording. There is a big difference between saying something is plain "ridiculous" and "a bit ridiculous", and I didn't mean to ridicule your ideas, merely point out a fundamental contradiction which I noticed at that point. Perhaps I was too brief and flippant.

We were talking about a Roguelike game, and the minimalist, functional graphics of Roguelikes is one of their main defining features. To me, the point of a Roguelike is that the creative energy of the maker(s) is focused on the gameplay and having a complex "inner" game world, without the drain on creative resources of producing a sophisticated "outer" representation, namely graphics and sound. Therefore, I think it's fair to say that to spend much creative energy on talking about or making purely cosmetic enhancements to a roguelike "defeats the purpose" of the game using the roguelike form to begin with.

Up to the point where you talked about lighting up an area with gunfire, the system you were describing seemed to be intended as a purely cosmetic enhancement that would only make tiles lighter or darker. Certainly the mockup you drew shows such a system. It would be quite different to talk about changing the visibility of tiles according to the light on them, which is not purely cosmetic, and entirely within the "spirit of the roguelike" as I see it.

Of course you are right that roguelikes often have stuff added to them now, such as optional tilesets, or sound and music, which are there only to provide "atmosphere" and are purely cosmetic. It's not like Roguelikes can't have enhancements added to them, and if the light gradient system that you drew in your picture were possible I'm sure it would add atmosphere to AliensRL too, as I said. If AliensRL had tileset support then it might be worth implementing a set of tiles that mimic the ASCII graphics but provide a greater range of colours in order to implement shading like that in your mockup; it would be much less effort than a set of proper artwork.

The idea of a roguelike system where the visibility of a tile depends on the light from many possible sources, not just one source centred on the player is an interesting one.

I haven't read your post about "Assassin" yet, it's long and I have to log off now for Earth Hour...

Ah.

I hate to rain on this parade, but I've just noticed that that scheme won't work... The windows console only has 2 shades of green, light and dark. That's all.

(In fact it only has 2 shades of any colour...)

So to do what you've drawn in that image would require a tileset. Without one, you could compromise by having an inner circle of brightness and an outer circle of dark colours, but you wouldn't get that nice gradient.

Come to think of it, there's something a bit ridiculous about the idea of a Roguelike with dynamic lighting and shadowing effects... Maybe it needs normal mapping and bloom as well? :)

Unfortunately, it's been quiet here for a time, so people have to gather again -_-

HEAR THAT, YOU LURKERS? :P

Still here, just waiting for a new version or an announcement :P
(And downloading again on another PC)

Don't say it gives no claustrophobia..

Very nice!
That look seems just perfect for the game.

Something else I noticed when playing another game (I'll post YAVP later, don't have it on this machine right now) is what seems to be minor bug with the radiation. When it lowers your max health, your max health displayed at the top right of the screen doesn't change.

Also, the new radiation turns out to be not really very evil at all :-/... Because you're using medkits regularly anyway, the damage is always healed before it becomes noticeable. I searched a whole irradiated floor without a rad suit and was never under any real threat from the radiation damage.

Another almost inconsequential bug that you can see in my YAVP above, is that the extra grenade capacity from the Fitness skill isn't shown in the mortem.

I've been in a few game-making teams, and it's disheartening to see people arguing about whether someone is a better coder because they work on graphical 3D games or roguelikes.

This topic is about someone's qualities as a coder? I mistook it for a discussion about the difficulties of coding RLs. My bad.

My bad, although it did seem to have degenerated into "who is more l33t" at one point.

Anyway... I think I agree with most posters on this thread except for Karry. Roguelikes have their own set of difficulties and not all of them are to do with programming. Lone wolf developers who produce anything good are worth a lot of respect, especially so if they give it away for free and develop a community around it. And procedural content generation is a technical and design Holy Grail for games, which most commercial developers shy away from due to its difficulty, even while they are putting complex graphics and physics engines into their projects... so a Roguelike isn't just a "hello world" project by a long shot. However I do think that the poster above who pointed out that roguelikes arrange content procedurally more than they generate it has an excellent point. I don't know whether I agree with that or not, I would say it depends where you draw the line to say what is "content".

Also, to me "coder" is just a shorter way to write "programmer" :) "Developer" is more all-encompassing though.

I've been in a few game-making teams, and it's disheartening to see people arguing about whether someone is a better coder because they work on graphical 3D games or roguelikes. To me, a good coder is the one who gets good work done. Some are more experienced than others, some write code at a faster rate, some write cleaner and more readable code, some write more stable code, some have better problem solving skills, some have more mathematical knowledge, some have more knowledge of advanced algorithms, some are better at working near the hardware level, some are better at making critical engineering decisions - all these things and more are factors. For modern AAA games one good coder is not enough, even if it's John Carmack, and even if you have the Unreal 3 engine to work with. You need a whole team of good to great coders, who work well together, or you won't get a good result in a realistic time.

Programming a fully playable standalone game in under 7 days tells me that Kornel is at least a good coder, maybe a great one. But that doesn't really matter, it's the design skill that goes into his games (well... AliensRL at least) that make me play them, and thus join this forum. Which is as it should be, IMO. After all aren't Roguelikes supposed to be all about the design, by imposing very simple and restricted graphics to work with?

Finally got a chance to play through the new version. YAVP below :)

Firstly, congrats on the excellent update :) With one exception, the new features all work really well. If there is any instability then I didn't find it. The balance is also pretty good, and I didn't find the game any harder or easier than the previous version. The incendiary grenades ROCK, but their awesome power is balanced by the reduced carrying capacity for grenades overall.

Here are my observations and suggestions so far:

-The new aim cursor is really a problem. It almost got me killed several times by automatically jumping to an alien miles away instead of the one that was in my face. It should always preferentially target an alien right next to you, most dangerous first. It would also be nice if the aim cursor never automatically started on a Worker that hadn't seen you. It's damn annoying to accidentally shoot a worker who was previously no threat :(

-Grenades should go off properly even if they're targeted on an empty space. Why should the player have to throw a grenade directly at an alien for it to work? This was not too great an annoyance with the old grenades, but with the inc grenades it can be really galling. I threw an inc grenade next to a group of aliens expecting to wipe them all out in the ensuing inferno, but nothing happened :(

-Shooting range shouldn't be limited by visual range. If the player knows where something is, even if it's beyond their light radius, they should be able to shoot at it with reduced accuracy. It's annoying in the storage tower where the only safe way to set those barrels off is with grenades (unless there's another way that I missed).

-Fuel barrels shouldn't be visible outside the light radius. If the player wants to safely shoot barrels in the storage tower, they should have to first go into the room, and then remember exactly where the barrels are when they retreat :)

-When entering look mode and no aliens are in visual range, but some items or objects are, the look cursor should automatically jump to the nearest item or object that is in visual range.

Code Select Expand

-- AliensRL (0.8 (BETA 2)) Post Mortem -------------------------------

  Name     : Apone
  Class    : Marine
  Rank     : Veteran
  Result   : Killed the alien Queen and escaped

  Total Experience : 11275
  Experience left  : 335
  Game length      : 70281 truns

  Armor   : Plasteel armor [3]
  Sidearm : M4A3 pistol (11/12)
  Primary : M41-A pulse rifle (60/60)
  Medpacks: 5

-- Graveyard ---------------------------------------------------------

  .............#-########
  #######-###............
  ..........#..##########
  ...%...|..#..#.........
  ..........#..#.........
  ..|.......#..#...|.....
  ###########..#.........
  #....#....#..##########
  #....#....#..#A........
  #....#....#..#........%
  #....#....#..#.].......
  |....|....#..|...A.....
  #....#....#..#.........
  #....#..A%#..#...%.....
  #....#....#..#######-##
  #....#....#..#...A.....
  #-#########..#.........
  ..A..A....#..#.........
  ..........#..#.....A...
  ..........#..#.........
  ..........#..#.........
  ###########  ##########

-- Skills ------------------------------------------------------------
  Sidearms      : advanced
  Light weapons : basic
  Heavy weapons : untrained
  Technical     : basic
  Medical       : advanced
  Fitness       : expert
  Perception    : advanced

-- Ammunition --------------------------------------------------------

  9mm ammo      : 273/400
  .44 ammo      : 14/150
  M309 ammo     : 245/500
  M250 ammo     : 450/500
  60mm gren.    : 36/40
  12g. shells   : 200/200
  frag grenade  : 4/3
  inc grenade   : 2/3
  krak grenade  : 2/3

-- Kills (620) -------------------------------------------------------

  226 juveniles
  7 workers
  123 warriors
  173 hunters
  90 elites
  1 queen

-- Messages ----------------------------------------------------------

 Choose direction to open/close or
 activate... You close the door.
 You open the door.
 Choose direction to open/close or
 activate... You close the door.
 You open the door.
 Choose direction to open/close or
 activate... You close the door.
 You enter the corridor. Entering
 Civilian Tower, level 1...



Yes, even more of them :)
Feel free to ignore them for now if you've had enough!

Here they are:

-Acid splash.
 AFAIK there's no indication yet of whether the aliens of AliensRL have "acid for blood" like the aliens of the films, but let's assume for a minute that they do :) As happened to several characters in the film "Aliens", if the player kills an alien at point blank range, they may be splashed by the acid. This may result in a severe health loss over several turns, or it might damage or destroy the player's currently worn armour. Obviously this would make the game a lot more difficult, and even near-impossible on the "exit run" where aliens can pop up at point blank range, so some kind of balancing feature might be needed to allow the player to get away from faster aliens that have closed them down, without killing them - the flash grenades that I suggested in another thread would be good for this.

-Acid structural damage.
 This is an even more extreme idea based on the effects of the "acid blood" as portrayed in the films. After a few turns, alien corpses would actually burn through the floor and create a pit leading to the floor beneath the current one (though not on the ground floors, obviously). If there is an item on the floor at the location of the pit, it drops through to the lower floor (where it is displaced to one side if there is an item already at the location it drops to). Perhaps lower level-aliens should not cause this structural damage effect, and additionally main corridors be immune to the effect, otherwise they might quickly become impassable due to the number of hunters that you have to kill in them. Pits are visible - if the player falls in a pit then they drop down to the lower floor, sustaining some damage (this could be quite useful on the "exit run"!). Aliens will never walk on a pit tile.

-Automatic Surgeons
 These are fixed-in-place medical units found often in rooms of the medical tower and occasionally in the others. They can heal damage that medkits cannot, such as radiation damage, and the dreaded alien impregnation (see below). The surgeon can be used by activating it in the same way as a door. Following doing this, the player will be asked to confirm that they want to enter the automated surgeon unit for treatment. Using the surgeon takes a significant amount of time. The player is not allowed to use a surgeon if there are any live aliens in the room with it, or if any doors leading into the room are open.

-Facehuggers.
 Currently the aliens in AliensRL don't have a "facehugger"-style stage capable of laying eggs in a host, but Kornel has hinted in another thread that "impregnated" humans might make it into the game. So presumably there is one :)
 Facehuggers would be very fast, very weak enemies. Instead of attacking the player's health when they get close, facehuggers would attempt to leap onto the player's face and force their "affections" onto them ;) Their chance of doing this successfully should depend on the player's Fitness skill (the higher it is, the more chance of them failing). If they fail, they can try again in the next turn if they are still alive.
 If the player does get "implanted", the facehugger dies. The player then has a few hundred turns before they "hatch". In that time, they need to find an automatic surgeon (see above) and use it, which will remove the alien embryo. If they fail to do so in time... well, we all know what happens then!
 While the player is implanted, aliens will not attack unless the player attacks an alien. If they do that, then all aliens who can see the player (except facehuggers) will attack.

-Containment doors.
 These are heavy doors across the central corridors that are very difficult to open once they're shut. The purpose of these is twofold: one, to break up the rather open structure of the towers, and encourage the player to sometimes leave the central corridors for reasons other than heading to or from a lift and searching for items; and two, to provide an alternative way of cutting off approaching aliens in the main corridors. Containment doors would be located near the central crossroads of the main corridors, and possibly near the connection point to neighbouring towers as well.
 The containment doors would have a "panic" button located next to the wall on either side of the door, which closes the door when activated. The player can activate this switch in the same way as a regular door. Once closed, the containment door won't open again unless the player "hacks" the door control switch by activating it again (10% chance of success per level of technical skill, and the attempt takes a relatively long time to execute). The player should be prompted with something like "Attempt to bypass door controls Y/N?" if they indicate this action, to avoid accidentally trying to hack when aliens are bearing down on them, and getting shredded as a result. No aliens can open or break down containment doors, not even Elites.
 Most containment doors are initially open. However, some containment doors are closed, so the player must decide whether to try and go through them or around them. Additionally, some of the closed containment doors have damaged electronics and cannot be opened at all (the player will find out that they are dealing with such a door on their first successful bypass attempt). To avoid generating non-completable maps, there must be an alternative route to go around any permanently closed containment door - that probably means doing a search of the map to check that one side of the door can be reached from the other.
 Optionally a containment door could take a few turns to shut. Anything on top of the door tile when it shuts is displaced randomly to the nearest empty space on one side of it. Out of the initially open containment doors, some randomly chosen ones will malfunction when used and only close partially, meaning aliens and the player can still get "under" them (i.e. the partially closed door tile remains passable). To this end containment doors have 3 states - open, partially closed/closing/opening, and fully closed.

As I'm sure many of you are aware, in the past fan-made tributes to the Aliens franchise have tended to be stomped on heavily at some point by the commercial interests that own the franchise. IMHO, being a non-graphical roguelike may give this game a measure of immunity from such a fate, but I wouldn't count on total immunity if I were you. What do you think are the chances that Fox's lawyers could get to you where you are?

IANL, but I think that if anything is going to get you into trouble, that title logo on the main page will. You should give some thought to redesigning it if there's any chance you might be at risk.

You are probably in violation of copyright with the use of the Tower Assault theme as well (unless you had permission to use it?). However I would expect Team 17 to be less trigger-happy than Fox. Even if they aren't more sympathetic, they are at least less likely to have legions of bored and bloodthirsty lawyers on speed-dial...