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General Discussion / Slade and Amulets and Armor

« on: February 22, 2016, 04:19:18 PM »

Lysle, can I interest you in working with the author of Slade to get it to fully support AA? I emailed him, and he seems open to adding FULL support including level editing, which is something I doubt DB/GZDB will act to support on their own. And he already has .RES support. You can find him here: http://slade.mancubus.net/index.php?page=contact Naturally, you'd be the better representative here than I.

The editor is under active development, is crossplatform free open source software, supports both map and resource file editing, and should require few changes to get basic AA support up and running; mainly support for editing thing flags as unsigned short, and handling doomednums >32767 properly. I would recommend minimizing actor definition in editor-specific formats and instead provide that through the form of (potentially stub) decorate definitions, which with the right //$ keys can be as fully functioned as doing it in DB/Slade-specific formats, while being usable in both. Only the categories need to be defined in editor format. And I'm considering handling the decorate stubs end of things myself if someone else makes the editor-exe-side stuff happen. That way switching back and forth between Slade, DB, and any other editor with a compliant decorate parser will be comparatively easy.

If you can get the 2 key features into 3.1.1, that would be ideal, as it is much easier to merely edit the configs (which are stored in a pk3) to finish the job than it is to recompile the exe and work with a beta build longterm.

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General Discussion / Got suggestions for new/revised A&A content?

« on: February 14, 2016, 12:19:07 PM »

I'm thinking about doing some A&A development in the quest department, and I'm curious what anyone who's still around would want to see in a new quest, or what they might want to see altered in existing ones. Ideally things that do not involve any new graphics/sound, just actual level design content and the scripting that goes with it. I'm not a big fan of overdetailing, either, so I'm not really game for making existing quests "look prettier", I'm much more interested in gameplay concerns. Things that are broken, things that make gameplay smoother and more fun, things that make the game more accessible to first-timers, that sort of thing.

Chances are if I make a new quest it's gonna be heavy on secrets (my idtech1 levels always are,) bonus loot, and devious, difficult optional puzzles. Actually progressing through it will be kept relatively simple and easy, though, as long as you're not too underlevel and use everything you have. My rule of thumb is that you should always be able to finish a quest without resorting to spoilers - but stupidly hard optional secrets are just fine. I'll be trying to keep in mind rogues being able to sneak around and not necessarily wanting to slaughter everything they see - probably more hidden/locked up/placed past a big jump scrolls of experience than typical. And archers needing open spaces and bolts. Coop compatibility is also a big concern of mine, and people interested in playtesting whatever I make in coop would be welcome. Generally speaking, coop is more likely to break things than singleplayer, since you have to make sure multiple players can navigate through, and place enough items that they can all play.