Der Zirkel

[HarryW]

Hello everyone, I expect Fox will be the first to get to this, he's always hanging around on this site

So how's it coming along? I've taken a back seat (and I mean WAAYYYYY back) so far, since Fox has been doing some pretty complex stuff that is a little hard to understand for me, and I have other responsibilities for the moment. Nome has been doing some tiles I think, but not recently. I think she's a little discouraged and doesn't think she's very good at it, for some reason.

Now I see that Fox is not only programming the whole thing but he's been making 3D rendered scenes in 3DSMax! And they're pretty damn good actually. Well anyway, I just thought I'd take advantage of this (so far unused) forum to post a message about what I know about it. Oh and also, I'm working on translating the storyline from German to English, for the English site.

[Fox]

Well You're right, I'm surfing through the posts really often.. However, to your post:

Currently I'm wasting my time thinking about the object management... as you know I want it to be dynamically, so you can put objects in each other and also remove them and so on. WellI already have this part (I think I sent you a demo) but the point are multiple objects...

*uh away for eat*

[Fox]

*back*

Well. what did I say? *reads* right, mutiple objects... ok then, I'll try to explain:

In a normal game (we'll take UO for example) you have some objects with properties like Price, Floating, Damage and so on. Now if you put them in an array (ie. 3 pearls) you can make a count variable and set it to 3. So you have only 1 object in memory, also if the player contains 3 or even 10 of this object.
No problems till here .
But now we come to our game... say the same situation as above... Well, as you know we have no object properties, so every of our 3 pearls contains objects (ie. pearl 1 contains 10 objects 'Damage', pearl 2 contains the same but 1 more magic object, pearl 3 contains 12 damage objects). Well, now we can't store them as 1 pearl because they contain different things...
That would say 200'000 gold means 200'000 more objects... hm, by writing this I came to the idea to make 2 sort of objects, first can't contain objects but is countable, second can contain but isn't countable... *thinks*
That's it!
I'll start to code ASAP! Thanks for your attention .

*applause*

[HarryW]

Eureka!

You mean like in ultima online, where things like gold and fish steals are stackable, but contaners like bags and chests aren't, and neither are things that have different properties, like a sword because it can get worn, right?

[Fox]

-The title says everything -

[Fox]

Yeah, I made this bunch of code and... it works! Yee-hah! *applause again*
Well, I'll sent you the project so you can beta test it

[HarryW]

Nice one

[Fox]

Some review

[HarryW]

Hey Fox, what is there to do once you've made the engine? I'm not very familiar with how you actually make games, so this is a bit of a mystery to me. Is the engine just a set of functions which you then implement to make a game?

You said it was going to be script-based. Is that what there is to do once the engine is complete, put the scripts together for the different events, like Player:OnHit and stuff?

[Fox]

Aye!

Once we made the engine we have to put in our game That means, designing levels, graphics for the levels (tiles), players, items (many items), spells (many, many spells ), animations, quests, NPCs (so scripting alot ), and so on... And don't forget the many updates & patches in cause of the errors *g*

[Cbomb]

Here is where I come with some of the graphics stuff. Yahoo!

----1 min later----

Oh yeah where are these rendered scenes?...they sound cool!

[Edited by Cbomb on 04-28-2000 at 05:09 PM]

[Fox]

A house I made you can see here (right-click -> save as) Enjoy

[Edited by Fox on 06-12-2000 at 07:05 PM]

[Cbomb]

Dude..thats sooo cool! Your using 3DS MAX? Did you buy that or are you 'borrowing' it? (you know what mean ) Well anyway that is really good!

[Fox]

Well I had some money left and though, should I buy some new computers (Nothing special, Dual-PIII Xeon 650 or something ) or 3DSMAXR3?


*g* -Just kidding, I borrowed it from a friend

[Fox]

Hiya!

I just wanted to say that that the obejct management works fine now,
also the graphics management. I just started to code the script system,
but it's really complicated.
I can now use script but not yet load them (There are computed functions
to read in the scripts; hard to debug). However, it's all working fine and it
will really become great!

Following code is an example script from Der Zirkel

Player.OnHit( Remote )
{
   Remove( Me.Energy, Mul( Div( Remote.Strength, 100 ), Mul( Div( 100, Remote.MaxEnergy ), Remote.Energy) ) )
	
   If( Me.Energy < 1 ) Remove( this )
}

[Fox]

Finally it works now with the objects, ie. you can count the contents:

Log( AddText( "Energy left: ", CountContents( Me, "Energy" ) ) )

[HarryW]

Everyone's gone a bit quiet here

Nice one Fox Going well I see.

[Fox]

In the next time I'm very busy and I will not have much time to code, discuss or webdesign However, just for you know...

[kedaman]

here's Like-script vs Case-script performance results app
http://www.geocities.com/kedasu/script.zip
You may find querryperformance counter a useful timer too.

[Fox]

OK I also coded operations like if, while and for...

Player:OnHit
{
   RemoveObjects( This.Energy, Remote.Strength )

   if( Equal( Count( This.Energy ), 0 ) )
   {
      RemoveObject( This )

      Log( "You are death!" )
   }
}

hm.. I think things like = > < + - * / should be implemented too... would be easier to code. well, I'll see what I can do...

[Fox]

Hello everyone!

I know this thread is quite old (before I posted this message it was the very last thread of this forum) but I don't really want to start a new one. I also know the team doesn't even exist any longer, except myself - however.

I'm here to tell you the project has been reborn and that I'm working hard on the MMORPG engine called 'Nocturne'. The original game "der Zirkel" however is still on ice. Instead some friend of me offered to work out a general RPG system as you know it from other online games.

Together we will continue the work on this project and hopefully soon provide the first MMORPG written in VB (combined with MySQL and PHP though).

Finally, if you need some screenshots, you can visit the official website at www.der-zirkel.com - you'll find them under Goodies > Screenshots. Sorry for the site being german; a english translation will follow.

Fox

[BorT]

That looks quiet interesting!

I wish you luck.

[Fox]

Thx, hope I won't need it though