Noxico

Should Noxico go graphical? If so, in what way?

• 25 of 43 responses say that it should be kept as it is now. That is, Unicode text in truecolor on a nonstandard console size. With 58% of the votes, this is the clearly winning opinion. Still, I’d like to get back to you all on that later.
• Three say that it should be 16-color ASCII like it was way back when I started.
• Eight say it should be graphical with low-detail sprites, and seven say it should be highly detailed.

Audio?

• 29 responses agree that Roguelikes shouldn’t need music. What I’d neglected to say originally (because it’d been a thing since forever) was that not installing Music.mix, hiding the FMOD DLL, and/or setting the volume to zero completely disables the music anyway if you don’t want it. Still, at 67% this opinion wins and I have to do nothing.
• Six of you think dynamic music is a good idea, despite having all of the same problems the other options have.
• On sound effects, 27 of responses, 63%, think sound doesn’t need to be in either. 11, 26%, think minor MegaZeux-style sounds would be good. If I forego music, maybe getting sound effects without FMOD would be a nice challenge on the side…

Sex systems

• 38 responses, 88%, think the new sex system should be continued on. That’s great, thanks guys.

Now, the interesting part: world map generation.

Noxico used to generate a complete world map and place towns and dungeon entrances on it. This took a fair amount of time and involved a lot of useless wandering through the wilderness to get from town A to town B. So I removed all that and added Expectations, where each town and surroundings would be generated on demand and you get from A to B through a travel screen that simply listed all known locations. If you pick a location that doesn’t exist yet, it’s expected to be visited at some time, and generated according to those expectations.

• 20 of 43 responses, 47%, say that time and file size aren’t an issue.
• 16, 37%, say Travel Mode is sufficient.
• Five agree with the 20, but with the request to speed up the initial generation.

So I pulled an old copy of the game from source control and reimplemented the old world generator, adjusted to match all these interesting changes since then. For example, there are fewer biomes and instead of a grid, boards now connect as graphs.

And then there’s this guy, who is willing to help make it better and hopefully faster.

So that’s it for the survey. Thank you for your opinions. I’ll get back to you all about that graphics thing later.

(This post had no text. It was tagged #i18n #efforts #dutch #mix merge)

Between all the recent work on TML (pure token trees without XML wrapping), wordwrap rewrites, and checking if cacti inside of rocks are still a thing (they shouldn’t), why did I ever do this?

X DISCUSS: Time compression
• Walltime events (night, Fri 13, full moon…) (see girlkawa – time.txt)
• Robe and Wizard Hat items
X Timed swimming so you can cross bodies of water
X Has Gills token, allows unlimited swimming
• Aquatic TF, comes with gills
• Doesn’t Breathe token, for slimes and such
X Slimes can’t enter the water for fear of dilution, to balance Doesn’t Breathe and Has Gills
• An in-game story about a cursed king who’s always in the rain, dark, or sunlight
* Better Him/Her/It considerations (see girlkawa – heherit.txt)
X Support for nipple-less breasts
* Remove concrete babies, add a temple where the midwife dæmon takes them instead
* Replace sex scene system with new design
• Add swaffel support
* Detect item stacks, use action menu to pick one
• Make corpses a kind of container so you can loot from them instead of scattering shit all over

Where • is not done, * is in progress and X is pretty much done.

I don’t know what to work on. There’s too many options! What do?

I’d been pondering the use of XML in Noxico and feeling inspired by YAML and BML, I converted the item database, which is basically a series of token trees wrapped in XML containers, to pure tokens. If I give TokenCarrier.Path() the ability to search for specific values, allow HTML-style Unicode entities both for loading and saving, and hack in the merge feature, I might be able to drop XML entirely.

I haven’t actually put this in the game proper, but here’s the proposed new format in a practical example, compared to the original XML version.

Good idea?

My laptop is fully repaired and cleaned out. I’m picking it up tomorrow morning.

The replacement part is finally here. It’ll most likely be installed this Friday. Then, comfortable development can continue.

I’ll likely focus on Chelsie for a bit though, or some of the other items on the list like showing a list of items on a given tile to pick up instead of taking the first one detected. I don’t want the pants, stupid game, I want the sword!

I’m afraid I can’t be arsed to continue development on Noxico for a while. I’m pretty much devoid of motivation and one of my arrow keys is busted, due to be replaced some time late next week.

Noxico development will continue later. I just can’t promise it’s any time soon.

I was alerted on Twitter of a 100% CPU usage on Linux. So I took a look at it myself.

Noxico 0.1.2.1 on Windows 7 with .Net: CPU usage at 20-something.

The exact same binary on Linux Mint (on a VM) with Mono: CPU usage at around 85%.

Different ways of expressing the usage aside, I’m really starting to feel Mono compatibility is not worth the effort. If it’s not recent versions of MacOS X breaking the keyboard input, it’s inexplicably high CPU usage and lowered framerates. At least the broken graphics after I reimplemented PNG mode made a modicum of sense.

So by now I’ve pretty much had it up to here with Mono compatibility.

And the best part is, if I were to rewrite the game in something that can run natively on both Windows and Linux (let’s assume multiple binaries sharing a single set of data files)… I’d have to rewrite the entire game.

Which I’ve been working on since November 2011.

Is Mono compatibility worth the effort?

After some deliberation with a certain other Kawa, I’ve removed the need for food from Noxico. Foodstuffs now only serve as healing items, with minor TF effects.

They already did that, but there’s no more need to sate your hunger.

Instead, screens can run out of enemies. That way you have to keep moving if you want to keep getting better.

Perhaps I’ll add a thing where newly-spawned enemies get the items dropped by earlier-killed ones?