Dungeon Master Forum

Hi all,

A few years ago I wrote an engine in javascript which mimicked the basic features of dungeon master..
http://joesblog.me.uk/dungeon-master-javascript

After recent interest from another blogger I've decided to resume the project and am hoping to gauge the level of interest...

What I'm proposing is an engine in a-kin to the persistence of mozilla's browser quest. Having the game hosted on-line, giving players the ability to craft own their own dungeon-space; customize the graphics and events etc...

The basic principles would be:

• Web-socket application allowing multi player interaction.
• Customisable graphics such as walls, creatures etc..
• Basic api for NPC/creatures.
• Public dungeons where other players can congregate possibly PvP.
• Group quests and possible resource gathering/crafting.

I work as a web/software developer so I can handle the coding and the logic, the graphics may taker longer but I would hope for user content to become more prolific.
However a timescale of development is irratic as it would for the moment be a one man band job.

I have a basic landing page here if people would like to register there interests.
http://www.myoubliette.com

I look forward to any comments or criticisms...

Thanks! ,

Joe.

Thank you very much for your work Taghor

Is this a stand alone project so we can play it without internet connection , and has it a full screen option ?

In theory it could be stand-alone, though it would run within a browser and operate solely from javascript, full screen would be do-able depending on the amount of resources it would require.

I would like to keep it purely javascript/dom so that it has cross compatibility and possible use for mobile devices..

I like the idea. Never played browser quest or anything related, but this does sound quite neat. The game plays well in the browser. It would be fun to play DM in coop mode, so looking forward to seeing how it develops

Quickly played with it earlier, it does seem to run well!

Hi all, it's been a long time since i posted on this!

Over the last week or so I've been playing around WebGL and have built a basic alpha concept of what i aimed to start a few years ago!

You can find the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zKUhT51aWw

I have other features I'm currently writing and will put a playable demo up every now and again!

Thanks!

Joe.

Looking good. Impressive that this is running in a browser, I look forward to progress

Wow, well done! Keep us informed on your progress!

Thank you for your kind replies! I had a tinker last night and added a few extra things to it.

You can also see the FPS keeping up which is something I'm quite happy about!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flh7WwX ... e=youtu.be

A Quick update to those who are interested.

A screenshot demonstrating a 'castle' style environment with a night time 'skysphere'



Thanks,

Joe

Oh, very good!

Is this Rodin's The Thinker statue by the way? Nice! I also noticed a comupter in one of your older demos - was this the Amiga?

Indeed it is, i wanted to put in a low poly model and found that. The Amiga was an Amiga 1000 where the statue was, it was to test my COLLADA import class.

I'm having difficulties merging geometries at the moment.. I got my friend to run that demo on his computer and the performance was about 20 FPS. It looks like

I also am not too sure where else to post this or if to post it somewhere else to get attention for it?

A web-based dungeon master would be a great thing...
looks really cool: will you be looking to recreate the full Dungeon Master experience from scratch, leverage some existing established formats (DSB / RTC etc) or is this something new and much more social/online?

Sorry for the late reply! been hectic with my real job

Hi Dave,

Hopefully it will have a similar feel to Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, and certainly the dungeons of both games could be recreated from the experiments I have done though I would like it to be something new and social.

Having connecting towns to dungeons and other environments is something I like the idea of. I have already written some procedural algorithms to create towns and dungeons, tying them up should be no bigger deal. The assets such as terrain and things are however going to be a stumbling block, I'm currently using stock images and textures but that's not a long term solution.

The idea of Co-Op 'dungeoneering' is something I have been experimenting with, the main logic problem has been how do you effectively have combat in such an environment.

The solution I have come up with so far is that you can have a set of NPC's or PC's that you set as friends or aligned to. Which means you can pass them in the same square and in combat can attack in the same direction as them without causing damage. Graphically I need to figure out how this is represented though I don't see that being a major problem.

A few quick links to play around with from the videos. They have not been optimized so I don't know how they will run on peoples computers.

My gaming rig handles them at a constant 60fps.. though My laptop drops down quite a bit. I have managed to fix this in the current version I'm working on by grouping every geometry by its material, this makes a drastic improvement as it cuts the amount of shaders down by a very high magnitude.

http://myoubliette.com/dev/dev12.aspx?mapid=1
http://myoubliette.com/dev/dev13.aspx?mapid=1

In the above examples, you can move around the map with the pc gamers WASD controls.

http://www.myoubliette.com/dev/loadertest.html optimization example, use mouse and drag to rotate etc... I think there are 700 wall sections displaying there with quite a few 1000 faces...

At the moment I'm not working on the exciting stuff, mainly the backbone of the multi player core, websockets are quite devilish to get right!. I will keep people posted if they're interested!

Thanks,

Joe.

I just realised, those links would most likely not have worked due to some caching issues!

They should now.

These are really amazing! dev12 works a dream and can see something in this!
Baffled by the dev, wowed by the demo.

Really cool: multiplayer, social DM... all sounds amazing!

Nice work!

I have a Windows 7 64 bit machine, running at 1920x1080 with a Radeon HD 6800 GPU, 8GB RAM and an AMD 2 core processor from 2010.

Dev 12 runs at 60fps and feels very fast. There is some slowdown near the Thinker statue.
Dev 13 runs around 40-45fps and feels much, much slower. It takes much longer to move from tile to tile.

I know this is early work, but the lighting is a bit weird at the moment... Also, does the wall texture in Dev 12 have some sort of cricular light effect baked in?