Rick

Exciting! Can't wait to see the results.

How is the progress on this zaphos? Is this still an idea you are going after?

It's been awhile since I've played with RakNet so thanks for this refresher. I'm about to make a DLL that uses RakNet for using with Lua for my game and if I'm able to make it generic enough I'll release how I did it for others to do. I don't think I can release the actual DLL as the RakNet guy frowns on that I guess.

I love the music. Reminds me of some PBS stuff

And so starts another language war C++/BMax/Lua - These are the officially supported languages of LE. C++ being what the new engine is being written in, BMax is what the current version is written in. Josh has said porting Lua for mobile devices would be easy for the new LE and it's generally thought as the easier language of the 3 so it might be good to invest time in Lua.

RakNet supports cross platform including mobile devices. Just saying Also Lazlo has a .NET network library I think he'll be releasing soon that should work across some of the mobile devices.

Cool. I put this in with my GvB game. It looks nice. Thanks!

That sounds like a great first game idea! It even sounds like something that could be extended later to incorporate other aspects that will help with your RPG. I don't think I mentioned getting 3D World Studio but it's worth it too I think in order to make levels like in half-life or basic buildings or whatever like in most RTS games. It's easy for non artist to use and gets results fast, which is why I recommend it.

I would say don't waste your time on finding an artist just yet. An artist isn't going to want to team up with someone who doesn't know anything about game development. That's not a slam on you, it's just the reality of people just starting out. You most likely wouldn't want the artist that would go with a new programmer anyway. Teams is a different dynamic that is a different skill than making a game. That's more about management and rarely works out. 1) Buy models from Dexsoft. They are nice and cheap with animations. 2) Buy UU3D. This is used to convert models from other formats to LE's format of GMF. It's a very handy tool and is cheap also. 3) Scarp your idea of online play at this point. You are totally green to game development and you will not want to introduce online gameplay right now. Make a singleplayer RPG first so you can learn all the tricks and ideas of how a game works. Then an only then start in on online play. This comes with it's own amazingly complex issues that starting in on it right away will almost for sure cause you to give up. You may not think that now, and even people who are in the middle of doing that still might think that, but even a singleplayer game takes a long time to make and after months of hardly getting much progress you'll most likely give up. 4) You want to try and avoid yourself from giving up! If you start working out and set your goal of losing 10lbs a week, after 2 weeks your chances of giving up on working out is about 99% because you wouldn't even have come close to losing 20 lbs. You would probably have lost 3 lbs if you're lucky. The point of the story is set realistic goals that you can reach both short and long term. The reality is for an indie person just starting out and wanting to make an online RPG, you are looking at probably 5+ years and that's even if you ever finish anything at all. This is a hard concept for new people to understand because it feels so out of reach and they feel so confident in their skills that they just refuse to believe it. Many people here and at other game engines have been doing this for 5+, 10+ years and have little to nothing to show for it in terms of completed, polished games. People like me, love people like you because we want to tell you to do things the "right" way and learn from our mistakes. Make a pac-man clone or tetris first. You'd be amazed at how complex even that really is and how valuable it really is. At my point in the game I know the basics and some advances so it's amazingly difficult to focus myself on making a pac-man type game because all the elements are somewhat basic to me now, but I've spent way more time getting to that point on working on to large of projects so it wasn't efficient use of my time. So my person last advise in which you can take it or leave it is: Make a smaller more manageable game first! If you can finish and polish a game on par with pac-man, then you will already be ahead of most everyone here (me included) and on other game dev sites. That's the reality. It's a hard one to swallow for most (me included), and I'm sure I'll get replies hating on my post, but it's truth.

Is your exe in the same dir as your dll's? Are all your resources in the right spot?

I agree with this and the key is getting your creation to those people. That's probably more challenging than making the creation. The best thing an indie can hope for is their game going viral like Minecraft did. You want it to become the hot topic of the month because you can capitalize big time on that. I think in order to do that your product must be cheaper in price, and present a big enough difference from anything else out there to get all those "I'll pay $10 to try something new" people. If you do the things that are out there already today but just change a few aspects, then you won't go viral and won't get paid, but have a decent chance of making a more steady income but smaller. If you do something different then what's currently out there today (note you can do retro stuff still), then you have a chance to make nothing because it's to strange for people, or going viral and make it big.

I think that's some of Josh's point. The Android market is so fragmented and you never know what kind of Hardware you are going to get. I don't think it's a huge deal because games are really just not considered at this time to be the main reason people have these smart phones so most vendors probably aren't caring all that much about it. I think at this time most vendors want to spend the time making sure the basic apps work great. I mean how many people would refuse to buy a phone just because it didn't play a video game all that well? Probably a pretty small market at this point in time. People realize these things aren't portable consoles, they are phones. I think phone games are the flavor of the month (OK maybe it'll end up being decade), but your input options at this point are so limited that the types of games you generally can make are pretty boring. Even what is considered "great" by mobile standards is still pretty crappy compared to PC or Console standards as far as gameplay goes. I mean Angry Birds? On the PC that's a free flash type of game that you play for maybe a few days and forget about. On the mobile platform people are going crazy over it most likely because, shocker, it was free! I would love to actually see some of these video game numbers because I have a suspicion people aren't making all that much. If anything it seems like these developers are just making a ton of crappy games in hopes people are just more willing to try a game for $1.99 sot he more games you have the more chances you have to make money as opposed to actually making a good game.

Interesting idea, I haven't thought about that. The fact that it's Lua wouldn't have much to do with that though really because if I did implement something like that I would just make an in-game interface for it. There are only so many stats to modify right now, but it could be a cool idea to let players make their own moves, buffs/debuffs. I'll investigate this idea once I get the core gameplay done. Thanks for the interest in the game!

Are the controls just 1 image file or how does that work? How do we handle events? What language is this library you have written in? This looks like so just curious about how you did it.

Thanks VicToMeyeZR. August was really busy so wasn't able to work on this that much, but things are slowing down now and so I'm able to dedicate a decent amount of time on this again. I'm happy that after a couple weeks I can actually get back into the code and follow it again and still feel excited about the game. Normally after not looking at the code for some time I would lose motivation but this game seems to have broken that trend so I'm pumped about that

Metatron you don't know how hard it is not to start an argument with you Anyway, this is exciting news! I really want to have my lua game run on my Samsung tablet to see how it would play on it.

I use mouse picking on the character. I then take the characters x & z location to determine what tile it's on like the way I described above. Then you select the move ability, then you select a tile to move to. I then get that tile row/col the same way. Once I have the starting row/col and destination row/col I do the pathfinding between them which gives me a list of row/col to move to get to the destination. I then take the center points of each square in my path list and I interpolate about 20 points between square to square, then I do PositionEntity() to each point at a given interval to move. I was using MoveEntity to move from point to point and EntityDistance to see if I was close to a center point in which I'd have to see if I have to point to a new tile but it was giving me issues with missing the EntityDistance check and just kept going in the same direction. Mostly this would happen the fps dropped a little while it was doing it's check. I just didn't ever want that possibility to happen so I stuck with PositionEntity and making filling in my own points between squares.

He did fix the bugs so that was nice. The board is 1 solid geometry. I applied the square texture to it and created it in 3D World Studio. Then in code I logically split it out into a grid. I made it easier by placing the top left corner of the board at 0,0,0. Then each square is about 1x1 units so I broke it out that way. Then when you click the board I get the x, y, z but ignore the y value. At this point the x, z is just like a 2D game with a grid. Given the x,z mouse click you can divide each by the tile_width (1 in my case) and just take the integer value of that division to get the row, col of what square was clicked.

Nope, it's not turned based. Every action you can do has a cooldown to it though. The cooldown is in seconds and you can't use that action until the cooldown is up. You can move as far as you want but the cooldown for movement is 1 second per tile you move so even if you move all the way to the other side of the board on the first move you do you'll be sitting there for some time getting a beating most likely for a good 8 some seconds before you can move around again. The strategy is very much moving around and doing the right abilities at the right time to avoid being stuck with a cooldown on an action. Tips for what you are asking would be: 1) Get pathfinding working in Lua. I'm using http://luastar.codeplex.com/

Load the model in the transparent world and have blend=alpha in the mat file and make your texture semi-transparent. Loading in the transparent world: 1) Use SetWorld() passing in the transparent world created for you by the framework 2) Load your model as normal 3) User SetWorld() passing back in the default world

Hey YouGroove. Thanks for the ideas. Just want to be clear that this isn't anything like chess. I know the board really throws that off though. I'm torn on if I should add trees and such because it might be looked at then as a poor RTS of sorts which I don't want it to be looked that way. I really want it to play like a board game where you imagine yourself behind the board giving orders to your live units. Some of this loosely revolves around my time in World of Warcraft. One lesson I learned from playing that game in PvP is that obstacles suck. In that game a person can run around a pillar to stale a match. I wasn't a fan of that at all and so adding things like rocks and trees could start to go down the path of that sort of tactic which I don't want. I want a (pardon my language) "balls out" attack/counter attack style of gameplay. Given that, the singleplayer options seem limiting. Most likely just 1 on 1 matches vs the computer. The multiplayer setting is where I think this game excels. I'm picturing a never ending official ladder tournament. Also letting people make their own tournaments but giving in-game support for brackets and such. I want games to be pretty fast pace and intense. I want the player to be tired (mentally and physically) after playing a 3-5 min match because of all the thinking and moving they had to do. The most enjoyment I get out of games is when I have those short bursts of intense gameplay.

It was my understanding Lua in LE would work on all systems, but maybe that was me being optimistic.

Try casting it to lua_State without bringing in the Lua headers and see what happens. I suspect LE.DLL had to link in Lua so maybe it comes through to our projects. If not then yeah you'll probably have to bring in the headers.

Just throwing this out there but can you cast it?

Using LE.NET a tool like that could be create pretty fast and easy and more Windows tool oriented with Windows GUI and such. The ideal situation with such a tool would be on the fbx file itself (assuming you'll support that format). One for GMF would be cool for this community too though. If you create the modular pieces someone will create the tool I'm sure