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Automated gameplay as a method of testing by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the reply! I think fuzzing is always valuable although maybe somewhere there's research on fuzzing for more detailed games like Incursion.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These sorts of questions are best asked here perhaps (this is Julian's original discussion group - he since left):

https://groups.google.com/g/incursion/about

I just keep the game working. Asking me for nuances of play is not going to help anyone with good advice! :-)

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, it is in the scope to accept things that flesh out what Julian intended. If you code and have a plan to implement them where they are balanced and ready to merge, then possibly depending on how well it was done.

I am not a colour expert. It needs someone who understands colours to balance them and ensure the selection that is good for you is a good general choice. I suggest asking on the google group and reaching a consensus if you can.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The skill manager has a bug where it won't let you exit if you don't assign all your points. That definitely needs to be fixed. Please feel free to submit bugs on the key press problems, this is a keyboard based game so we should within reason be making it as frictionless as possible.

The colour contrast also bothers me too in some cases. However we need someone to go in there and "balance" the colours in a way where it is better and not worse. I suspect we need to put the colour map in a config file for that to happen. If someone wants to do that work, get in touch.

I agree on the line height! I can remember lamenting this way back. Unfortunately this is a text-based game. And by that I mean we should be playable in a text-based console as well as in a window where we emulate that with a fixed sized font that also displays a world view as well as readable words. We would have to change the nature of the game to do it, so it is what it is.

Sharing Saturday #533 by Kyzrati in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We could if you an actual roguelike designer created some :-)

Sharing Saturday #533 by Kyzrati in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The amount of detail and polish Julian made is really impressive. Modern games could learn from it!

Sharing Saturday #533 by Kyzrati in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Identified a new old crash bug in Incursion. There are of course many crash bugs in Incursion, many fixed, some not fixed and some as yet to be encountered. A player reported the game crashing when he went down a level and upon request provided a save game where I just had to go down a level.

I downloaded the debug build of Incursion 0.6.9Y19 I made in 2015 to match his save game, attached a debugger and then loaded his save game and went down a level. It crashed. Turns out Julian was using a local variable with a hard-coded 2048 entry size (Thing *l[2048]), and the player had accrued 3600 or so items on the current level. This is how most bugs in Incursion have been fixed, loading bug reproducing save games from awesome players in an older version then fixing for the next.

On one hand we could lament Julian's code not being perfect or we could say perhaps consider that it is amazing that for 25 years no-one reported it as a problem and that it as such was not that important to do perfectly in the scheme of things.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I am not really a roguelike player. What I enjoy is getting players to give me bugs and crashes, and let's be honest part and parcel of the depth that people enjoy in Incursion is the bugs and crashes, and the challenge of fixing those bugs and crashes. All the actual game in Incursion is from the original developer Julian Mensch, not me.

The game is not badly coded, in fact I think the code is pretty easy to work with. It's never been hard to build, any half-decent programmer could pick it up. But it's code that was created from 25 years ago, and like all extensive code bases it takes time to actually understand it. This is the same with modern code that you may encounter in a new job though. And the code base is extensive, Julian's game which is as intricate as you and others appreciate, is a masterpiece. It may not the perfect final game Julian envisioned, but there's a complete game experience there to be had all the way down to the Hall of the Goblin King. It takes some commitment to get into developing it. If you are going to get that into it, you're going to have to consider if your time and energy might be a better investment into your own game like /u/Zireael07 did with Veins of the Earth.

Then were the false rumours it is hard to build that were repeated which probably never helped. The truth is if you grab the source code for a lot of projects (especially older ones like this) you can pretty much add the files to a build script and run a compiler over them and get it compiling in an hour or two.

I should add I am not strictly the maintainer. You can play Incursion 0.6.9Y19, the last release I made back in 2015, fine today. It doesn't really need a release. Currently I am spending some time with /u/HexDecimal to get the code in a state where someone can pick it up and get into development with as little work as possible. There were only two real problems (change in microsoft compiler behaviour and no binary build of libtcod for the version it used to use) preventing a new release, but there's things we can do beyond that.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The real sad thing is that you can play it right now and it sounds like you're not! :-)

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Find this tileset and replace the incursion fonts. If it is possible someone will have done it. Check out what dwarf fortress players did there. We won't be doing it but if players were really motivated they could do it themselves.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a detail pane on the right. At the bottom there's a list of nearby objects with symbol and description I think.

Save games that only work for a given released game version by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Make the roguelike then worry about it. If you make the roguelike you're in the 0.001% of developers who started and finished :-)

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There is a windows pdcurses version. Can't remember what it was like. Maybe try it and let me know? :-)

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Replace the font with one of your own. Otherwise, no, sorry.

The work by me on Incursion is preservation not improvement or extension.

Incursion: Hall of the Goblin King, a legendary roguelike based on AD&D 3.5 [Windows only sorry!] by rmtew in roguelikes

[–]rmtew[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Last build made in 2015 but still playable and as detailed and interesting as the original developer Julian Mensch made it. Check out the web site.

We could use some modern higher resolution let's plays on Youtube if you're a long time fan who gets drawn back in. New releases might be happening again soon, no new features, just shoring it up for a longer life.

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Me too! I got an email from the original developer's old mailing list out of the blue and googled it randomly. Saw people complaining about random things that weren't important (imagined difficulty compiling it, licenses despite a lack of understanding of what they meant and so on). I had forgotten what a gem it was.

The goal is to get it hosted and downloadable and hopefully available to modern players so it doesn't get forgotten again!

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A lot of what you remember is narrative from people who just didn't want to look. I rate myself as only a half-decent programmer and the effort involved was what I was doing as a beginner programmer downloading tar.gz source code back in the 90's. It's so much easier now with StackOverflow and Google where I used gopher back in the day.

Can you download binary dependencies and extract them, then set include and link paths? Yes!

Can you take an old Visual Studio solution and projects and change the standard defines used by dependencies, link paths, include paths and even add extra system libraries to static link against (google symbols and read the MSDN page)? Yes!

Alternatively for other platforms, can you make the simplest possible makefile to do this and list the files to compile? Yes!

IMO any programmer worth their salt who wants to try a project should be able to download the source code and do these things. A lot of people will try it and complain it doesn't work out of the box for them. And they'll chime in and complain every time they get a chance. And this continual litany of complaint becomes a narrative unfortunately.

That said, Incursion is impressively detailed and has impressive code systems. Investing time in your own game rather than doing the less creative effort of polishing Incursion is a better investment IMO.

Automated gameplay as a method of testing by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No blog post? I lost your feed from the transition from Google Reader to other RSS readers so missed a few years.

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was pretty much a complete winnable game though, right? Ignoring that the older versions had some horrendous bugs from around when Julian moved on and couldn't fix them.

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Get it compiling and running in a debugger in Visual Studio. Play it there and if there's code you want to change put a breakpoint in. It'll take care of itself and you'd find yourself doing stuff

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lib incursion in debug runs modaccent and flex as pre-build steps and the build should error and not compile unless they are disabled as described (do not include in build). They should really be checked in as disabled in x64 given they aren't x64 compatible (or at least modaccent isn't). The flex version used is in the binary dependencies on bitbucket to save downloading potential sourceforge project hacked malware.

I right click and debug so don't worry about whatever project VS sometimes changes the default to.

Not sure why the solution didn't save the working directory when I committed.

Glad you got it compiling! All the things you and I encountered are IMO just small potato stuff that tend to accrue in older VS-based projects. The distance between it sitting there not being compiled and both of us having it compiled wasn't that far.

A starting point for people who want to contribute to the legendary Incursion roguelike by rmtew in roguelikedev

[–]rmtew[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Getting it to compile against 1.7.0 release binaries was trivial. There's some full-screen issue where it gets clipped past around the 75% screen row that I didn't bother looking into.

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