Skipping intro and front door

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ajira2
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Skipping intro and front door

Post by ajira2 »

How can it be done? Compiling the source code? It seems hard coded.

Can this wonderful engine be used to create commercial games if replacing all graphix and sounds and crediting Sophia?
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Gambit37
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by Gambit37 »

Add this somewhere in your startup:

Code: Select all

function sys_game_intro()
   return true
end
I don't think the licence allows commercial games, but check with Sophia.
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Sophia
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by Sophia »

If you want to actually change the intro, that's hard-coded, but the method Gambit has posted will work to simply disable it. The front door, on the other hand, is generated with Lua code-- the actual function is sys_game_start in base/system.lua but that just calls front_door in base/render.lua.

DSB is not really commercially viable, to be honest. You'd have to remove all of the FTL assets from it, including the ones that are kind of 'embedded' and not that easy to replace, like the font, title screen, mouse pointer, and such things. You'd also have to comply with the FMOD license, which is fairly generous, but it's something to watch out for. Anyway, even if you do all that, the end result is... a pretty old and clunky game engine. It's 640x480 and based on Allegro 4 and DirectDraw, which means you can forget about making use of any features offered by your GPU, and it also uses a deprecated version of FMOD that's apparently rather hard to find nowadays.

Basically, you'd have to be crazy (or just not care about your customers at all, which is even worse!) to try to charge money for something based on DSB. :mrgreen:

(That said, if you have a project with an actual budget that could reuse some DSB code and you're looking for a programmer who is very familiar with it, let's talk!)
ajira2
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by ajira2 »

Thank you very much Gambit and Sophia for your fast responses. I will try them. :mrgreen:

Of the options you said it's the one that I'm crazy :mrgreen: I'll try to explain myself:

I have a personal and nostalgic fetish for Elvira 1 & 2 & Waxworks by Horrorsoft. I always wanted and dreamed to make something resembling it (I even wrote an interactive fiction in spanish about it when I was a teenager).

I even chose a name for the spiritual sucessor: "Morgana" and a font for it:
https://www.dafont.com/burn-the-witch.f ... na&psize=l

I talked with Mrmo Tarius from pixeljoint about his piece: http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/61835.htm

He gave me permission for privately play with the piece and I adapted his work to Waxworks and Elvira sizes and proportions and viewports but I can't show them in public without asking him first, but I can tell you they look very good.

Next step, choosing an engine. I want something retro and fast loading when you click the .exe. Not Unity. No intros. No cutscenes. So I checked and played with RTC but it's too hard coded and closed source and the author has moved on with his life and don't responds to mails yet.

So I found DBS and the customization with Lua is amazing and started playing with it and I liked it.

By the way I found a strange bug. If I use Dungeon=morgana or Dungeon=test dungeon (I don't remember if test dungeon uses space) it works but if I use Dungeon= and choose manually it fails to load some bitmaps even in the test dungeon (more exactly alphahaze).

So now I will try to bend and twist DBS to see if it's suitable for a Waxworks/Elvcutscenes, maybe I will start using Waxworks wallset for the pyramid, maybe.

I don't have any budget, I'm a high school teacher, altough I may pay with my own money or savings to Mrmo or other artists for walls or sprites or things, I don't know yet.

So I can't hire you, I wish I could, but think that maybe there is some market for this, for 80s and 90s nostalgia, a Kickstarter for this with a few good screenshots and a that could raise money for a programmer and a pixel artist.

Look at Shovel Knight, 198x by Hi-Bit Studios, Legend of Grimrock 1 & 2, nostalgia for Infinity Engine with Pillars of Eternity, etc... There's some market for this.

These are my thoughts on this. Please ask what you want and let's debate if you wish.

By the way let me introduce myself, I'm Jaume Alcazo, and I'm a programmer as well and a 3d artist. Please check my site http://www.jaumealcazo.com
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Sophia
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by Sophia »

ajira2 wrote: If I use Dungeon=morgana or Dungeon=test dungeon (I don't remember if test dungeon uses space) it works but if I use Dungeon= and choose manually it fails to load some bitmaps even in the test dungeon (more exactly alphahaze).
That is a strange bug. I can't reproduce it, unfortunately. The only guess I have is that it is having problems because specifying a dungeon directly uses a relative path (e.g., dsb\my_dungeon) while specifying one when the game starts uses an absolute path (e.g., D:\MyStuff\games\dsb\my_dungeon) and something in the path is causing problems-- a really long path, characters that DSB doesn't like, using a network drive, or whatever. What is the full path? Does the bug go away if you move DSB to a local disk with a really short and simple path?
ajira2 wrote:Look at Shovel Knight, 198x by Hi-Bit Studios, Legend of Grimrock 1 & 2, nostalgia for Infinity Engine with Pillars of Eternity, etc... There's some market for this.
I agree with you that there's definitely a market for retro-styled games. I think there's much less of a market for games built on actual retro technology because they fail to take advantage of the capabilities of modern computers. Shovel Knight uses OpenGL, Legend of Grimrock has a modern engine, and Infinity Engine has been ported and expanded because the original is old and limited. Even the very retro Dwarf Fortress just looks like a DOS window.

DSB, on the other hand, is over ten years old, and it shows. It wasn't even state-of-the-art back in 2007, but in an era where people were still using Windows XP and CRT monitors it was acceptable at the time-- by 2018, it's just ancient and not the sort of foundation you want to use for new development without a very significant overhaul.

Anyway, I've tried to talk you out of it. If you still want to use DSB, then go for it, I guess. (Just so it's out there, I will also add that I am in no way responsible or liable for any trouble you might end up getting into if you accidentally fail to to remove all FTL content from DSB)

All I ask is that you credit me for DSB, and call me first if you ever do need to hire a programmer.
ajira2
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by ajira2 »

Hello again Sophia, sorry for the late response:

Oh, it's a long path and I tried moving it to a short path and the same happened, if I remember rightly.

I don't have the path right now (I'm at work), but will check it and send to you.

Thanks for your advice. I'm still not made my mind on the engine, but now I'm leaning more for Tilengine.org. I was thinking in Unity for the CRT filter in Odallus but Tilengine.org has it already.

Thank you for your kind gesture and hiring offering.

> ...tting into if you accidentally fail to to remove all FTL content from DSB)

Of course.

Of course if I end up using this I will credit you and if we ever do a succesful Kickstarter and can hire a programmer I will call you, but it's hard already as it is (one-all guy and one pixel artist), I already paid Mrmo for some content and it looks good.

As I told you, now I'm leaning more to tilengine.org, we will see. I need more time.

But this should not end in me I thinks. Why just me? If you really want to give credited permission why not licensing the whole engine on GPL or MIT or Creative Commons or whatever? Think 5 years from now, 10 years from now. Someone could use your technology and maybe you are retired then, and seems wasteful reinventing the wheel time after time (in this case, for dungeon master-clones).

Listen, when I was 16 or 17 I made an interactive fiction about vampires. They convinced me to release the code (we were chatting in mail listing, not forums those days) and they used my adventure as a "hello world" program for many interactive fiction engines.

There is still a wiki on it: check it: http://wiki.caad.es/Proyecto_Vampiro

I tell you this because I was reluctant to cede de source code in principle, but the results have been good and now I'm proud they used my code to spawn so many demonstrations of interactive fiction engines.

Thanks!
ajira2
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Re: Skipping intro and front door

Post by ajira2 »

Hello back!

In the end I used another engine to make the game :/ (C + tilengine.org + SDL) but programmed the dungeon crawler from stratch.

I think you may like to take a look at its first gameplay demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXQ-a8ZHGaI

This is the page of the project:
https://www.facebook.com/morganadungeoncrawler/

I hope you like it!
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