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Sad face! All my followers disappeared I was kinda hoping someone might be still be following my progress!

Well, even though nobody cares anymore <sniff!> work continues on Solodor! I have several new areas and questlines up and running now, with lots more items and collectibles, and several new abilities. I'm working on the Skillpoint system, by which you can purchase new abilities from NPC's, as well as the "spellbook" or ability tree, so that you have a list of your abilities and a place from which to drag your abilities onto the action bar.

I love questions, comments, praise, criticisms and death threats, so please let me know what you think of the game!

I have your latest version downloaded, I just haven't had time to play it. The problem is that it looks similar to a game I want to make, and so if I play yours, I am going to want to start making mine, and I can't until I get a graphic person.

I started without a graphics person. Solodor had fully functioning netcode and player movement code before any graphics were implemented at all: everything was coloured boxes for the first month of development

you post your progress on like gamedev and indie game sites? Probably get lots of interest there =)

do [ youtube] YOUTUBE CODE HERE [ /youtube] (Without the spaces)

and [ img] IMAGE URL HERE [ /img] (Again without the spaces)

For the images and videos. It will help alot.

Not the type of game I play since I am not a fan of this sub-genre, but I had to download it to see how it all runs, what works well and what does not. I must say it works really good.

I could just say that and go off leaving you with not much of an idea of what people like me are thinking when they try your game, but to be specific I will write up feedback to keep you aware.

It is nice to have an install program and I am glad I did not need to register an account or anything like that, since at this point the game is not complete, not enough excitement to stir my emotions to want to register yet. Could do with setting the players name to the login name though, when I tested two players they had the same name.

You cannot just load it and log straight into an online server and expect to play with some people, but this will hopefully change for you in the near future. Issues with MMO games in the early stage include the fact that without some means to enjoy single player action, there is nothing that stimulates you to play in an empty server, especially someone with no interest in games development.

I like the effects used in the background of the main menu, it's like something I would have done; usually the game menus produced on this site have a logo and some text on a static screen, but it is nice to see an animated backdrop. I wish the rest of the game could look as good as that.

The transitions between menus, zones and scenes are nicely polished.

The music is good so far, better than what I was expecting. Who made the music? It has strings, full depth stereo and even a choir. After 15 minutes it gets repetitive listening to the same song though.

The event logging and hint system is a smart feature to add, I was never lost thinking about what to do and where to go. Looks similar to World of Warcraft art but it is good anyway.

You can tell this was not made by an ignorant idiot who expects everyone to grasp everything he/she is able to do after years of gaming experience in a sub-genre of a sub-genre in a genre; I say this because the interface is user friendly. I did not at first figure out what the chat button was, maybe I missed that section in the readme, but slash worked; although I would have thought slash was more for infrequently used commands than chat messages; well in a lot of games there are a few shortcut chat trigger buttons for different scopes without having to type in the command.

As for the action, it has what you would expect; although I cannot properly read the overlapping damage counters. A few AI to Player and Player to AI knockbacks, maneuvers and countermeasures would make it more exciting than just standing still and clicking some buttons, but this comment is coming from someone who does not like Final Fantasy games... For me, I enjoy running and dodging aswell as attacking.

I wish you had a team of artists, the means for more flashy character art, it really deserves the flair; particularly a unique theme rather than a common one. Perhaps some Anime artists could help in future, unless you took animation up yourself. I like the Naruto look myself; although I do not watch cartoons.

Overall the graphics do not look bad, just too familiar. Finally in terms of graphics, you are probably considering adding some shadowing, when you and if you add shadows, I think the game-world would look alot better. Some tree and terrain variation with some grainy dirt aswell.

Your logo looks good; if you feel it is good enough for your audience then ignore this comment, you know them better than me; if it is still a WIP then I say this comment as a professional graphic designer; if it is gold, it needs more reflection, at the moment it's a bit like plastic, the light is penetrating the material; but with metals as dense as gold, the light bounces off of it. The cheapest way to create this effect is to use a multi-toned gradient blend in Photoshop, or in a 3D program use the procedural generators.


The gameplay seems pretty much complete and well put together as far as I can see; just like the infrastructure, the gameplay is good enough; although it runs slow on my machine; I assume it is just my machine because most games run slow on it.

When you add some dramatic story tension to draw in some crowds; people to play with; it should do well. It is not easy to get people online at the same time, but maybe scheduled events and villain spawns would help.

You created a cool server / client system, although local, it seems like alot of work went into it. I am working on client-server code at this minute and can understand the horror of coding variable after variable for every packet after packet and then more packets, in two sub-programs. My game is not open world, but it does have a game mode with 3 levels of interaction; Server to Host, and host to Client for a massively multiplayer event. Very ugly work.

I tested two clients and your server on the same computer and all worked well. The chat messages seem to stay up a bit long and overlap alot of the scenery, but I do not know if your chat bubbles are variable sized.

Nice work overall.

Thanks for your feedback, Chris. I appreciate every word people say to me about my game - good or bad, as long as it's constructive.

I really like the installer that I have set up. It's smooth, fast and easy to use for the end user (though it takes about an hour for me to create each time I release a build!). I am a fan of little polish touches like that. There's no account registration yet, though obviously in the final version you'll have to create an account to keep track of your characters and stats. It's not time for that yet, though.

All players do have the same name at the moment, because due to the absence of accounts and character tracking, there's just one character saved, and its name is SolodorPlayer You can, in the released build, use "/name <whatever>" to change your character's name and that will show up on other clients.

It's very hard to get a community set up so that you can always log in to a common server and there will be people there. In the beginning, the number of interested people is very small (so small that you'd practically never see a single other person online with you at any random point in time). I'd really love to get even a small group of people who play semi-regularly. Communities build from those grounds. Still, we're not at that stage yet - I'm still merely demonstrating my engine.

I'm glad you like my main menu. It was a surprising amount of work to get the various menu transitions working as well as the animated backdrop (which I also think looks awesome). I like the end effect very much.

The music is all free stuff from around the internet. From memory, I actually don't think I placed appropriate credits in the current release, which I really should have done. Thanks for reminding me. Most of the music comes from Incompetech and Jamendo with a few random cues from other locations. Some of the music I have put together (that isn't in the current release) is of my own creation (I make a lot of my own music in my spare time as another hobby besides coding). We'll hear some of this stuff in the next release. I am still thinking of a system to use to prevent music repetition. World of Warcraft uses a system that I like, I just haven't got around to coding it yet: play a cue once, all the way through, starting when you first enter an area, then wait a couple of minutes before playing it again. It results in periods of no music, but that's ok because when it starts up again it feels like a brand new cue.

I'm pleased you like the event logging and hint system (which I call the Quest Log). I wasn't altogether sure my implementation was the best way, but it's great to know that someone from outside the genre fanbase liked it.

As to the action, most RPG's work this way - walk up to the enemy and then you stand in front of one another while you hit the appropriate strategic combination of abilities to win. However, in Solodor the whole movement system was designed with the idea of ducking and weaving in mind. It's not implemented yet, but I always intended from the get-go that battle would involve movement. As the game stands now, evident in PvP battles, you can dodge incoming spells fired at you from an enemy player. If you're quick, you can also duck back out of the way of his sword swing, too. I intend for fights with NPC's to work the same way. Right now they just run at you and stand there swinging their weapon like most RPG's, but in the future they'll move around and make themselves hard to hit with spells or swords, and you'll have to "enter the melee", so to speak, instead of just standing there, if you want to win. The movements during battle will be kind of akin to FPS, with strafing and dodging and perhaps frantic motion around the area while doing battle. I, too, think it'll be more exciting this way!

The Chat key is just Enter. If you type a slash it'll open up the chatbox with the slash ready to go for your system command. If you press Enter, the chatbox comes up without the slash, ready for a chat message.

I also wish I had a team of artists. I want to replace almost every piece of art in the game - it's all placeholder art at the moment. Tilesets, characters, icons, interface, the whole lot. It's all borrowed from other places (as you picked, all the icons are borrowed from World of Warcraft. Everything else is similarly pilfered for the time being). I am expecting to have to pay an artist or two for this work to be completed, but I don't have a budget for this game (it's just a hobby project at this stage) so until it approaches completion and I have a community of followers to guarantee the games' launch, I can't justify allocating mortgage money to a hobby just yet.

Thanks for the stylistic advice. I think I'd like to add shadowing, but I haven't decided yet in what manner to implement them. Perhaps having the artist draw them directly into the sprites, or I could procedurally generate them if my engine remains efficient and I can spare the mainloop cycles at a minimum of CPU cost. The "Solodor" logo is my own creation. I really don't have any artistic expertise; the logo is merely a stylised font with a metallic photoshop filter and perspective skew, but I kinda like it!

The engine is not quite as efficient as I'd like it to be. One mainloop cycle requires about 33ms on my modest machine, which allows for my target of 30 frames per second. I'd like to get that down to around 25ms so that I have some spare processing time for visual effects like particles and various animations. Optimisation is difficult work sometimes, but an optimised engine allows for lesser machines to run the game and a wider target audience!

I am working on the story at the moment. I have a couple of ideas but I'm not entirely happy with any of them and still need a bit of work. We'll probably be seeing the quest chain demonstrated in the current release appear not quite at the start of the final game, but somewhat later, still close to the beginning of the game. The path I take storywise will determine what the opening quests will be like.

You mentioned scheduled events and villain spawns - I have plans for a feature I call simply the Events System, which I described fairly in depth in an earlier post. The whole idea of the Events System would be to create common goals for everyone in a region to do at the same time, to create an atmosphere of everyone being in it together instead of each player being sequestered in their own individual quest log and doing their own thing at different times, not caring whether or not there are other people online or not. I haven't seen anything like this in other RPG's and I hope this system will motivate people to play together and promote social activity ingame.

The client/server system is very complicated, as you've noted, and really difficult to get working correctly. I surprised myself - I was winging it for a long time, without a plan for my C/S structure, and when it became sufficiently complex and developed I knew that at some point I was going to have to go through the entire system and make sure everything was correct without overlap or redundancy. When I eventually forced myself to perform this tedious task (it took several entire days to get through the entire gamut of netcode) I set out expecting to find dozens of errors and overlaps. When I was finished combing through the sum entirety of all the netcode, the grand total of errors I found was zero. I hereby claim a brag point from the programming gods - I successfully created a full fledged client server netcode model on the fly without a plan of any kind, that turned out efficient, clean and correct, without bug or error - and for a fully developed MMORPG, no less. I think I get to take a bow for that

As an aside: The client/server model isn't local at all, as I think I'm reading your comment. It is fully functional over a network or the internet, as long as you enter the appropriate IP.

The chat bubbles are not variable in size, and they do stay up for too long They are both items on the to-do list.

Thanks again for your comments, I always enjoy hearing them!

*bows down at your feet*
Have a few on meic:beer]

Looks like it'll be fun when it's done, can't wait.

Cool



It's better than alot I have seen



Lol. I pressed every other button except enter; I assumed enter was for UI buttons; but it does make sense to use it for interaction.



Solodor is great program that people could play right now, but unfortunately the art, the aspect that has the placeholders, seems to be the most dominant impression of it; not fair really.

Reminds me of my team project a few years ago, art was not only the big problem, it was the only problem. For years, we could not find volunteer artists because of the time it takes to create nice graphics. They find you untrustworthy or just do not have time and have bills to pay. People have their own ideas they want to follow before yours. At least when you get funding, then they will follow the money; even if they do not like your idea.

People don't really care what goes in, just what they get out, aslong as it looks good it is good, no matter how it was created, legally. Without good art it just produces a negative impact on web traffic and downloads. Now when I talk about good art, I do not mean realistic art; just an original and interesting imitation of a certain world; like Minecraft to a degree... not realistic but original.

Is it not worth devoting more time towards obtaining or creating art now that the game is playable? Or will you leave the responsibility for someone who may happen to join in the future?

For my project the graphics is no longer the problem because I forced myself to learn how to do everything myself; for the time being. I cannot let anything slow down my progress. I feel better now knowing that I have animated characters and props ready before I even started the code.



I wish I could say the same about my online driving game; it is choppy at the moment.



It's probably difficult with sprites; I do not like using sprites, too laggy. I prefer using 3d planes or just 3D in general along with FX shaders. I think drawing the shadows onto the art is the least time consuming method, the artist can just reuse templates; but you will think of something.



Is it the sprites causing the drop in frame-rate?



I will be using something similar to how soundtracks are used in movies. There is usually 3 or 4 melodies used to help identify the film, with lots of versions of the same melodies mixed with changing tempos according to the mood of the scene.

Laters

Well, the game is indeed at the stage where it requires proper art. Still, the game doesn't have a budget so I cannot afford to pay an artist to do the job (and it'll be a lot of work). Artists are people with bills to pay and they have to take work that pays, so it's not easy finding someone to join the team for this purpose. I have next to no artistic ability (applying photoshop filters is about it) so I cannot do it myself. I'm not sure how to get around this problem; it's a common problem for us programmers.

Not sure if you're aware, but in DBPro, sprites are 3D planes, which are automatically rotated to face the camera at all times.

The biggest CPU consumption is caused by rendering of the tilemap to the screen. I am thinking of ways to optimise, but it's a pretty cut and dry process that doesn't lend itself well to optimisation. It'd be nice if I could come up with something on that front.

Indeed I am aware, but 1000 sprites are more intensive to synchronize than one 3d object with 1000 faces.

Once you assign UV coordinates and set the vertex data; surely having one native 3d object filling the background is going to out perform loads of sprites. Heck one 3d object with limbs with tiles assigned to faces; the sky is the limit. Even particle systems could be used for water and grass etc.

Sceneric and character sprites could still sit above the plane[s], the work to align the mesh correctly and manage its UV coordinates may be worth the trade off; you could easily use FX shaders on surfaces such as water or clouds.

I assume you may already be using Advanced2d and/or the ImageKit, did they not help? I'm not sure what else you could do to speed things up with sprites.

You will find a solution.



Indeed, as I said they but the best I can do is encourage you not to be afraid to give it a try; believe me, I too could not do it; but with even photoshop filters and images alone, I just half finished a game logo which looks like a city yesterday.



Without a budget and no artists joining after all this time; unless you got an idea of how you will get the art, DIY may be your only option.

Sprites from 3d animation could be used. Going through Blender video tutorials over the next month or so might be another idea. I hated 3D modelling before I learned how to do it. There are ready made character TGC model packs and stuff at TurboSquid.

Maybe some pixel gui tutorials could be used. I feel that the character art you already have is more attractive than the level art; but you may disagree.

With a little tutorial here and there, at least by the end of the year, without a budget, if you do not have new artists; you will have new graphics.

Or offer like $5 or $10 per art piece you need, shouldn't take too long to get enough people helping you.

hey, i downloaded the latest version but i cantplay it properly
i was just wondering if you could add triple monitor support? the desktop width() function picks up the resolution fine... i dont think screen width() does...
If its too much work because of images or whatever then thats fine

also, i was wondering if you were giving out the server because i wanted to see what it was like but i dont know an ip

the menu looks pretty awesome though

Why can't you play it properly? What's the issue you're having?

The server program is included with the download. You have to connect to a server to play, so run one locally and connect to it using the option at the main menu.

I hadn't had any real intention of adding support for more than one monitor. I'm not sure exactly what you want drawn on the extra monitors. It's really a one-monitor game.

with the triple monitors i just meant because i cant play it, as it is streched over 3

Try using the -win commandline switch. Use the 32bit shortcuts included with the installer as a baseline for how to set up a shortcut with commandline switches.

The -win switch forces the game to open in a window, instead of at fullscreen. That way you'll be able to position and resize the window to your own liking on a single monitor.

Quick update, since I haven't been around over Christmas...

Working on a larger world, crafting, more spells and abilities, and a proper skillpoint system!

Anybody got a server running somewhere? Who's been playing?

So!

I know it's been months since I've posted, but fear not! Solodor isn't dead...

During an electrical storm recently my computer suffered some a damage resulting in a complete failure, and all the data for the Solodor project, including source code and assets, were lost. I was unable to work on Solodor or anything else for quite a while. I've recently built a new machine, however, and recovered backups of the project. Those backups are in the hands of a friend at the moment (where I left them for safe keeping) and this weekend I'll be getting the whole project back off him. In total I've lost about a week's work or so, but that's no biggy.

Now that I have my new machine, as soon as I get my hands back on the source code and assets I'll be back at work on Solodor!

I'm looking for new ideas and concepts, stories, spells and abilities, items, and quest and world event suggestions! Please, to any of my followers who are still around, watching this thread and hoping Solodor isn't dead, submit your ideas and let's see about getting this game back into full flow! She was almost finished when she died, and I've only been set back a week, so we're still very close to a new alpha release.

Please everyone, download and play the game (the most recent download link is still, as ever, in the first post at the top of the thread) and let me know what you think! Suggestions and constructive criticism always invited!

The thing I want to see most in MMOs is the ability for players to change the game. For example, if a player can change the allegiance of a town, or destroy/repair a critical bridge, etc. When the players can see the impact they are having on the game world, they strive to make more impacts. Plus it keeps the game from getting stale and allows them change things to how they want (but the bad guys can always change it back in time). This is especially true if many players have to band together to achieve this as it encourages teamwork and still has the same visible reward.

Unfortunately I have played too many MMOs where this is not the case and they all ended up getting uninstalled in time as my friends and I get bored really fast.

I have a tech question. What do you use to display the game world?
( built-in dbpro sprite commands, paste image commands, advanced2d plugin or a2d or something else? )

Miso: At the moment Solodor is using built-it DBPro sprite commands (including PASTE IMAGE). I'm considering bringing in an external library (probably Advanced2D) to improve the render speed but it will require an extensive rewrite of a lot of already completed code. It fits in the same category as when I did the rewrite of the core netcode - in other words, when I'm so incredibly frustrated with it that I force myself to do it


GIDustin: We'll get to that. I have plans for two separate systems which I may or may not end up implementing; they're both a huge amount of work and it's still in the air as to what my engine is capable of. I've described both systems in this thread before.

The first is Events system, which makes things happen in the world in which everyone in the area will need to participate to resolve. The outcome of the event can change the world in that a town can change ownership with the result of a battle, or whole zones can be unlocked or sealed or any of a slew of other possibilities.

The other is the construction system, which is the one I'm unsure whether or not is possible. It's the system I described earlier about earning a plot of land, harvesting the materials on it and then building a house, and then later, other buildings for conducting trade.

It's certainly possible to do this in an instanced fashion, where everybody's plot of land is in the same physical location in the main game world, but only you can see your land and nobody can visit it. It's easy to implement this, and then have players build their compound independently of the rest of the world. With this system nobody can visit your home and without that, a lot of the cool stuff will be missing (automated trade, base raids on other players, etc).

What I want is for people to be able to build wherever they want, and for others to be able to interact with it, steal it or destroy it. This will allow people to build their home or compound and store their stuff there, but if they want it to still be there when they come back for it they'll have to hire NPC guards to protect it. They can hire traders to automatically sell stuff given to them by their employers, allowing for the hubbing of business. This system could allow for entire trade villages, towns and cities to be built by the players themselves, forming a kind of guild or faction of their own. It would also inspire raids and attacks between villages as some players try to gain control of rival's stuff.

This version of the system has many downsides: It's very hard to implement, for one thing, and may not even be possible with the engine as it stands today (without extensive rewriting - but that's also a possibility). Still, I've never been one to shy from a difficult programming challenge, so it's the other downsides that concern me more: allowing free building will require a *much* larger game world, and most of it will have to be blank, empty space to give people room to build without cluttering the existing architecture of the world. That'll make for long, boring journeys around bare countryside while travelling from one place to another, and could compromise the viability of bothering to do anything *other* than building towns. This system will also dramatically increase required network bandwidth: All changes made to a zone by players from the stock default version of a zone (stored locally) will have to be broadcast to all other players who are already in the zone as they are made, and the grand sum total of all changes ever made to a zone will have to be transmitted to any player entering the zone from elsewhere. Serverside problems (most notably a server crash and subsequent rollback) could lead to the loss of construction effort and inventory items consumed to perform that construction.

All of that requires careful consideration before I start to implement. If you have ideas to contribute on these systems, or concepts for other group activity systems or world-altering systems I am always open to suggestion! Solodor has always and will always evolve by itself. There's never been a grand design plan, it all just comes out of my head and into the code, on the fly. If people have ideas, I am all ears!

In other important news, I have recovered all the backup source file material from my friend and I have resumed work on the game. Tonight I've been hard at work reorganising the source assets on my new computer so that they're easy to work with, like it was before my old computer fried. It's been very tedious so I've been spending the rest of the night outside of code and in map design, using Diamond to start filling out some of the unfinished zones (East and West Arcadia, The Dead Expanse and the Soul Cages). Lots of work still to do but it's more relaxing work than in depth code! Over the next week or so I want to dig back into the code and rewrite the work I lost during the crash.

I'll be back to regular updates soon!

So, I ended up going back to my code last night after all, once I'd done a bit of work on the world maps. No gameplay coding, but I created a nice INI-file system for setting options like resolution, depth, windowmode, overworld map visibility and a few other options outside of the game. This will make it easier for people to configure the client to work on their specific system, rather than having to use command line switches.

I also created a powerful error logging system, which will surely come in useful for debugging and troubleshooting. It keeps track of every module in the game, outputting everything that the engine is doing, and can be toggled with an INI-file switch to a very verbose mode, which dumps all console output to the logfile as well (which allows for a far more indepth assessment of what the player was doing ingame at the time of a crash, not just what the engine was trying to do).

Tools like these are useful over the longer term of game development and also after development is complete, and they should streamline the debugging and troubleshooting process from here on out!

Now it's time for sleep, I've been working on this all night! See you all soon

It worked for me. No crashes or anything like that. Seems like a lot of work has gone into it and it seems to work solidly.

Options seemed a bit bewildering, but then I don't really have experience playing this kind of game. I managed to kill a monster by clicking the things in the bottom left, but didn't seem to be "auto swording" monsters like the guide seemed to suggest. Perhaps i'm doing something wrong.

Graphics issues:
game seems to be 4:3, but i'm running it on a widescreen monitor. Not a big deal given the fixed view though - just makes people look shorter.
the main characters eyes seem to be transparent
some "pixel swimming" on the grass etc. possibly due to sampling.

It would be great if you could find a way to reduce the download size and the startup time. You can use the timer to see which are the slow parts for loading. You might find switching from .bmp and .png to .dds helps.

Hey Tank,

Thanks for the feedback. Autoattack triggers simply by moving next to something that's hostile while you have a weapon equipped. Some weapons have longer range than others, so even though an enemy is hitting you, you might not be close enough to hit him back. The abilities in the action bar have a little longer range than most weapons, too. Also check to be sure you have a weapon equipped in the character sheet (press 'C').

The graphics are in 4:3 in the downloadable build, but in the current working build graphics resolution can be manually set, including 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios.

I'm working on the crafting system at the moment - still deciding exactly how it's going to work but I think at this stage I'm going to try the following system: Each craftable item has between two and five components or ingredients. Opening the crafting window shows five empty item slots. You can place items in there and then hit the Craft button. If the items make up the recipe for a craftable item, they will disappear and be replaced by the item they comprise. If the items you've positioned in the crafting window don't form a craftable object, they will be lost and no item will be gained.

This system allows for experimentation to discover new recipes, without making it too easy (by removing your items for a failed attempt). Any comments or suggestions on this system are welcome, as I'm still refining the idea.