[Divunal-author]TR & Divunal Demos

[Tenth]

In an effort to help us all Actually Get Something Done(TM), Glyph and I
have been discussing our game plan and development schedule for Divunal
and TR.

More specifically, our interest in releasing a TR and/or Divunal demo
sometime in the near future. It's pretty accurate to say that our previous
attempt at a demo (The TR Demo center) was, to quote a certain South Park
character, "pretty f@#*!ng weak." Well, it wasn't _that_ bad, and the John
Romero action figure in the gift shop was sort of funny, but it never
really got finished, and the guests who tried it out weren't terribly
impressed, aside from the novelty of trying out an Open Source gaming
project demo that actually uncompressed, ran, and did something other
than dumping core. ;-)

While sort of interesting, the Demo Center wasn't a fantastic
demonstration of what the TR engine can do. And it certainly didn't tell
you jack (nor shit) about Divunal. We've come up with somewhat of a plan,
which should be especially interesting to those of you who have been
asking for something "Meaningful" to do:

1.  Fix the TR Demo:

     This isn't a terribly high priority, as it will be replaced by the
Divunal Demo soon (see #3 below) but if you want to practice making rooms
or puzzles where real live players can interact with them, it can be a
cool place to experiment. For those of you who haven't already heard about
this, if you log in as "guest" with password "guest", you get a temporary
random character and start in the Demo Area, where there are a few rooms
to explore and objects to play with. You get points for solving
puzzles/using objects correctly, but the points currently don't ever quite
get you anything. If you'd like to add onto or finish this area, it would
be good practice. Keep in mind that guests may show up at any time (we
still get a few each day) and that they have a strange habit of trying to
walk off with anything that isn't nailed down, and attempt to damage or
destroy the game world through any means possible, so watch out.  ;-)
This is already %75 complete (by my original plan, anyway) so I'll put up
some general "TR Demo Area Authoring Docs" tonight for anyone who's
curious as to how it currently works.

2. Make a standalone TR Demo, and Release the Source.

     In some ways, this makes for a better engine demo; You can play it on
your own machine, and take it apart to see how it works. This is not
related to Divunal in any way, so we decided to make it a totally
different genre. You may have noticed the "inheritance" directory in the
CVS tree (or you will after we update CVS again); This is where the code
for the demo will be going. It's essentially an adaptation of the small
group module I ran at the last Ravenloft game at Hampshire. It's sort of
an homage to the late H.P. Lovecraft, so, like %65 of his short stories,
it opens with you, the main character, inheriting a strange old house from
your uncle, and driving out to Middle of Nowhere circa mid-1920's Western
Massachusetts to check it out. It is intended mostly as a single player
game, since it runs as a standalone package, but I'm making sure that all
of the verbs give multiplayer-style tellAll feedback so that the people
who read the code get a better idea of how it works. (or in case anyone
tries to make a cooperative mode for it, or something.) It's basically
meant to be a really fancy single player game, easily downloaded and
played on the user's own computer, and to show off as many of the cool
features of our engine as possible. This is already in progress, although
it hasn't gotten too far... EMail or IM me for more information.

3. Make a Divunal Demo.

     This would come after steps 1 and 2... We would essentially be taking
a large portion of what we currently have in the Divunal map, and
trimming, editing, and adding to it to make a good representation of what
playing Divunal would be like. This will most likely be running on our
server and support multiple guest players, like the TR demo, and we will
NOT be releasing the specific code for it, being as it is Divunal-specific
stuff. We were thinking about having the demo contain part of the ruined
city outside the library, and some selected parts of the inside of 
library, so that a player who went from playing the demo to playing the
full game would mostly just see the world get a lot bigger (and more
populated). The planning for this is still sort of up the air, as you may
have noticed from my description, but if you'd like your part of the
library to be included in the demo (or if you would like to make part of
the city, etc.) for it, this is a good time to start planning. We also
need to get the character generator and a few other things working, too,
so this probably won't be for a month or two at the earliest. 


Right. EMail or IM me if you have any questions, or post
ideas/comments/general interest questions to the list... Thank you, and I
hope this list helps to give us all something to do. (It sure gave me a
hell of a lot to do, but, then, I have no life outside of my job, so it's
a nice change.  ;-)

- Tenth