Anyone remember Moria?

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Jul 04, 2010 7:45

I remember the Amiga version of Moria and it will be a nice experience to play it on your FB version now.
The gfx is cute and does the job, far better then importing, for example, the Angband tiles in my opinion.

Sleep well now and good luck with coding when you wake up :)

Screenshots looks great!

Merick · Post by **Merick** » Jul 04, 2010 11:26

In the help screens with the descriptions of the races, for Half-Orc there's an unneeded apostrophe in the word "priest's"

just a little thing I know, but it really bugs me when I see extra apostrophes where they're not needed.

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Jul 05, 2010 4:00

Jocke The Beast wrote:I remember the Amiga version of Moria and it will be a nice experience to play it on your FB version now.
The gfx is cute and does the job, far better then importing, for example, the Angband tiles in my opinion.

Sleep well now and good luck with coding when you wake up :)

Screenshots looks great!

It's funny that you mention Angband. I've been trying to find the Amiga guy who wrote Amiga version to get his permisssion to use his graphics.

I just look at Angband. Nice graphics. I hope when I do a high res version of Moria, mine will be half as good. But I looked at their 8bit by 8bit graphics, and you know what I saw? The Amiga Graphics! Not all of them, but a lot of them are there. More than half for sure.

Anyway, I'll put the Amiga guy in my end game credits, and hopefully he doesn't complain! If he does, maybe he'll settle for a game shirt. Oh wait, I don't have any game shirts! DAMN!

I got good news, more good news, then bad news, more bad news, and then some great news.

Good news 1, the only error I had my conversion to graphics was a SLEEP statement I had left in early testing. I forgot it was there DOH

Good news 2, I got all of the Amiga Graphics imported, and I created rough missing graphics for creatures that are not in the Amiga version. I noticed the Amiga version has a few creatures the UB version did not, I'll add those into 5.1 Along with Druid characters.

Bad news 1, there just are not enough graphics for weapons, and traps. So I'm going to have to create about 30-40 sprites, and code my system for them. That will be at least another 4 hours of work.

Bad news 2, Beta 2 delayed again, until tomorrow. I got the graphics done for traps now, in the morning I'll work on the weapons. Once I'm done, I'll release beta 2.

Sorry for the delays, this graphic add on is taking far longer than I had hoped.

Toimrrow my versoin of Moria WILL be released with more graphics than the Amiga version had. He some of mine are pretty crappy, others... I like my Gargoyle, Minitaur, and Hell Horse. Hell hound sucks... So does this rock creature, and this giant lizard think Baslick of some such.

Graphic artist, I need a graphic artist! Anyone want to help?

Moria 6.0 will need a real artist!

Thanks....

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Jul 05, 2010 4:01

Merick wrote:In the help screens with the descriptions of the races, for Half-Orc there's an unneeded apostrophe in the word "priest's"

just a little thing I know, but it really bugs me when I see extra apostrophes where they're not needed.

Sometimes the simplist little thing can ruin it. Thar particular bug goes all the way back from the Buffalo release. I have done and docs yet...

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Jul 05, 2010 16:38

Beta 2 has been put online! Go grab it eveyone.

As far as I know all graphics are working. I haven't fully tested it all, so if you ever see a ? please use the L command and tell me what it is. You can also hit Control O an turn off the Amiga graphics and see what it is that way. Hopefully it won't be a BALROG!

Let me know if anyone has any problems!

http://games.tcshouston.net/

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Jul 06, 2010 0:22

Wow!
Just downloaded the new beta release and toyed around with it for some minutes. You work fast, really good progress so far!
The graphic is working smothly so far, no bugs founded...yet.
Tomorrow I'll dive in deeper and see if I can help you find more bugs.
GOOD WORK!

Ps. Thanks for the credit, I hope I can do some "real" testing for you soon!

Ps2. Any source-release to come?

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Jul 09, 2010 20:54

Moria development has been a little slow this week. But I have gotten background music working in Moria. I've got credit music, and I have title screen music. I'm not 100% sold on the title screen music yet.

I also got a great cave background loop sound. No bats or anything, just a light wind sound.

You choose no background music, the cave loop, or music folders.

The gist is this, in the Moria directory is a sound folder. Underneath that is a music folder. In the music folder you can create up to 50 folders, and put 200 songs into each folder. The game will let you choose all music, or just one folder name as your background music.

I'll release a few Soundtracks that you can put in the Music folder. These soundtracks will be optional, so those concerned about bandwidth can use your own MP3. Or just use the cave loop, or no music setting. I guess I could CD music support too... Hmmm...

You can create a folder yourself, call it My Numb Skull Numbing Music, and put your mp3's in there.

I've got to check on ogg files, and if I can pull their length properly, I'll add ogg file support too.

You can change all of your music options from the Options screen, now a option i) takes you to music and sound options. There you can set it whatever your want.

Cool thing is in the Game you can hit ^O aka Control O, to bring up the options menu. And make changes. So you get tired of the cave sound, you can go to options and change it none, or your music.

Even better yet, you can hit F7, to lower the Music volume, F8 to raise it. F11 or ^] goes to the previous track, and F12 or ^\ the next track. I wanted the use ^[ and ^], butg turns out ^[ is the same as the ESC key.

F5, and F6 adjust the game fx sound up and down.

Only catch, F5,F6,F7,F8,F11, anf F12 only work on the main Moria screen. For example hit w and got wear. Function keys don't work.

Anyway audio is progressing well. But I've got a lot sound effect to pick and choose. I'll start with the player. Then I'll start on crearures.

296 creatures, they have movement sounds, sleeping sounds? Maybe..., attacks sounds (several have multiple - It bites, it claws, ...), then there are creature spells (It breathes fire on you).... Then there are pain sounds when hit the creature.

You hit the creature with a magic missile. It screams in agony. Will be a bit different when you can here it!

I maybe taking a slight detour on Moria 5.1. I'm debating on updating Imoria 4.85 instead. Both of our respective codes are based on the older pascal source codes. Right now conversion of Imoria to Windows would be fairly easy. Maybe a week or two.

Imoria, except on Linux, had never been played on a PC. So us Windows users, this will be a first for us.

It might end up a paralllel develeopment. Moria 5.0, Imoria 5.0. Moria 5.1, Imoria 5.1, Moria 6.0, Imoria 6.0...

Imoria has some really neat things in it. Water levels, expand town level, quests.

Looks to be about 180,000 bytes of new code. Looks 80% of my code is the same. So right now while the conversion process is fresh in my mind, make the mose sense to take the detour.

Anyway, beta 3 will be out next weekend, I hope. Just depends on how much time doing the sound takes....

In the meantime, have fun gaming!

rdc · Post by **rdc** » Jul 09, 2010 21:10

Sounds great man. When I get my wikibook done I'll devote some time to this.

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Jul 15, 2010 17:03

Any news and progress?
Havn't seen a update at your site for awhile.
Happy coding!

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Jul 16, 2010 15:07

Jocke The Beast wrote:Any news and progress?
Havn't seen a update at your site for awhile.
Happy coding!

I'll do an update this weekend to my log. Beta3 is still a week or two away. Music, and Music player is done. Sound mechinism is done. And ... Speech mechinism is pretty much done. Yep SPEECH.

Finding a way to do legal speech, that sounds ok, is pretty damn hard to do. So many SAPI voices have distribution limits. AT&T voices are really nice, really expensive, and almost impossible to distribute. Cepestral voices are just as bad in terms of distribution. Under no circumstances can you release a public version of a Cepestral voice. What a joke. Spend $30, and all you can do it use in on your own PC.

There are lots of demo Text to Speech sites, but they almost all have restrictions on distribution, and/or being altered, or included in any PUBLIC game or program.

I've only been able to secure a few voices I can use for public distribution, and MorphVOX will allow me to create additional voices. It's a $40 program, but I can use it for Moria, and even my Star Trek game. So what the heck, I'll buy it. Plus you can use the output files for ANY purpose whatsever. Mine kind of license!

I mean I'm not against buying a few voices, but DAMN $1500 just to be able to distribute them. IS THAT A JOKE OR WHAT! Even if the game is free! No wonder so few games have speech, unless you record your own, it's really expensive to do.

Speech is what stopped my Star Trek game. And now I see why I stopped work on it, until I figured out the legal issues. Real pain in the ass.

Speech, background music will be optional downloads. And you can turn off the Dungeon Master, Player, or Shopkeeper speech individually. All three will be seperate optional downloads. But worth the download!

You can also replace the voices with your own if you feel like it. Use the AT&T demo to create really nice character voices! I wish I could use them, but sadly, not at $1500! But that's not stopping the users from doing it themselves. I'll include the script for the speech with the Beta3.

But I will have 21 shopkeeper voices. Male and Female voices for the main character races. Plus the Dungeon Master. My voices will be ok to good in quality.

Still working on finding sounds for all of the various creatures. And I need to write the code to support this yet. Last major piece to write.

Oh my god the Stomach grumble sounds I got so gross sounding. Funny thing, I had just eaten, and after working on the sounds, I was getting hungry again!

I've also started the preliminary work on Imoria conversion. Going to be a little tougher than Moria was. They used Pascal data pointers. Which I'm going to have to go back and read about, and see if they are similar to the pointers in Free Basic. If not, then I have tear apart there data structure, and create my own.

It will be at least a month or two after I get Beta3 out the door before I release Imoria. But based on just the constants, and variables Imoria is going to be very fun to play!

It will be interesting to see what I do to Moria after I get done with Imoria.

So far I'm surprised the documentation in Imoria is actually better than it was in Moria. Which had amazing documentation. In fact I have a better understanding of the variables in Moria, just from looking at Imoria.

But I'm not spending much time on Imoria. Just curiousity! I've only converted the Constants module, and started the type module.

But Moria beta 3, should be pretty damn cool to play. I played it for a few minutes last night, and there's still so little sound in the game, that when it happens is very surprising.

I also need to find out why I can't save some of my wave files in OGG format. So right now file size is a concern for the sound. music, etc.

But OGG looks like the way to go. Much better quality and smaller size than MP3.

There will be a lot of suprises in the game.... So stay tuned! "dun dun... Warrior you are about to die...." Where have I heard that before???

Stay tuned...

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Jul 16, 2010 15:35

Sweet.
You havn't considered adding all of those sfx later on when everything else is added to the game? Will be funny to hear the outcome even if myself seldom play rogeulikes with sound.
Keep at it!

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Aug 17, 2010 21:16

Just a little friendly *bump*
Any news you can share about the progress?

elsairon · Post by **elsairon** » Sep 11, 2010 0:13

Looking forward to this one.

CommanderRaven · Post by **CommanderRaven** » Sep 24, 2010 4:06

Still making some progress. I actually did a little minor coding the last couple of days. Nothing major. But more to come this weekend.

So far I have not found too many bugs since Beta 2, so I'm hoping you guy "DON'T" find any either.

I've had every problem known to man in the last few months. Took about 4 weeks off to take care of my wife.

I've got a friend over for the next three weeks. They will help my wife, so I've got time to work on Moria again. Plus not working every weekend at the office, that helps too!

I'm hoping for Beta 3 to come out in Novemember. I figure with the Thanksgiving holiday, I should have lots of time to work on the game.

By the time Beta 3 comes out, all game features should be in the game. I'll need a lot play testers to pound on the game for bugs.

I'm hoping RC1 out early December, and the 5.0 Final Version by Christmas.

The 5.1 release now that get's more and more interesting as I come up more and more ideas on what to do the game. The gloves come out so to speak. Next year will be fun...

But for now tyring to keep the 5.0 release as close to the original VMS code as possible.

Added a few more screen shots over at my site
http://games.tcshouston.net

Beta 2 is over there. And it's quite playable. The handful of bugs I have fixed since Beta 2, are all minor. None should make prevent the game from being played.

Some things that I'm doing with sound will be interesting. For example you are running away from a creature down a long hallway. You want to know if it's still following you. Well you'll be able to hear it's footsteps, slither, or whatever sound it makes when it moves from down the hallway. The volume of the sound will be louder the closer it is to you... Of course if your a wizard, you can then toss a fireball down the hall, since you know it's coming!

There are so many events that happen in the game around you, that without sound you don't know they are happening. You can walk past a hidden door, with a creature trying to bash the door down. Right now you have no way of knowing it is happening, until the door comes flying open.

I think sound, speech, it all makes the game richer. Granted I'm so tired of hearing the shop keeper speech, but when I do play the game, it's just interesting to hear the bartering. Very few games speak, and I know why know.

But I'm hoping that there are few bugs left in the game.

Let me know if you find any... Remember visit my site, and the Dev Log, I update it constantly as I work. So you'll know I'm still working on it.

Have fun!

Jocke The Beast · Post by **Jocke The Beast** » Sep 24, 2010 12:37

Hey, nice of you to release the source! Thanks!

It will be great fun to try the next beta, great work so far.
I know you're really into your speech but it seems like a huge work for something many players will disable (at least roguelike lovers who are not experienced with that). However I find soundfx can be very cool if used like you stated above (monsters not seen but they sound). Very cool!

So happy coding and good luck!