I would repsond that a video game doesn't necessarily have to allow the player to direct the plot, provided that you provide the illusion of freedom. As such, it may be interesting to procedurally generate a finite world with distinct objectives and have the player go through a plot that's determined once when they start the game.
My question is what kind of form this story would take. I'm assuming the story generation algorithm wouldn't be able to pass a turing test so, as you said, dialogue is out. The idea of "beats" as presented in those links would work fairly well, although I suspect you'd have to follow a somewhat different story structure. In the case of a roguelike, you might want to take a look at various fantasy and game plot tropes.
Probably the most appropriate plot for a roguelike is to defeat some huge bad guy, so you could use that as a starting point and then randomly pick a motivation for the main character doing so. Maybe they're saving the world, maybe they're rescuing someone, etc. Then figure out what steps are going to be required to defeat this person (or monster). Maybe you need to travel to various dungeons and collect a set of artifacts. Perhaps you need to defeat this guy's underlings first. Maybe you need to enlist the aid of a person or group of people, and in order to do that you have to help them or (if they're from a warrior culture) defeat them in battle.
I guess what I'm getting at is that in this sort of story, the "beats" should vary as well. That is, you'll probably want to randomly generate the story outline before generating the details about the parts that make it up. If you follow the exact same set of "beats" every time, you'll probably end up with stories that feel too similar structurally. (This isn't so much of an issue if you're a human writer, but it's a lot easier to pick up on these sorts of patterns when a computer is doing the writing.)
At the moment, I don't know of any game that generates random plots well, although I can think of a few that sort of attempt it.
The Sims simulates personal desires, which might result in something resembling a plot, although it's hampered by the fact that any sort of character development (romance, getting a job, etc) seems to require human initiaitve.
Dwarf Fortress probably does some sort of simulation of how the dwarves feel, but I don't know if cohesive stories form on thier own.
Skyrim can generate random quests for the player by sending them to various places to pick up various items or defeat bandits or whatever, but the main story is of course scripted, and the random quests can feel kind of fill-in-the-blank if you do enough of them.
Do you mind pasting your map drawing code on pastebin so I can take a look at it?
Your map tiles look like they're a) smaller than the tile image, which is 130x130, and b) not square. Without seeing your code, my first suggestion is to set up opengl to use an orthographic camera, with the viewport such that 1 unit = 1 pixel on the screen.
Also, to make things easier, you should probably consider using sprite sizes that are powers of two, although I don't think that's your problem here.
(1) The "preferred form for making modifications" part of the GPL (with respect to art) is at best vague and at worst completely unenforceable. For example, let's say someone makes a midi file and uploads it to the site. Someone else (who may not have access to mixing software or even a computer at the time of recording) takes the midi file and records themselves playing an accompaniment to it. So now you have an audio file that's a live instrument with the midi playing in the background. What's the preferred form for making modifications? Can the GPL be construed to prevent this sort of modification?
If the GPL prevents these sorts of modifications, it's not a great license for art. If it doesn't prevent modifications like this, then the clause about preserving a perferred form for modifications just gives the original rights holder a false sense of security. In either case, this sort of ambiguity makes the GPL a non-optimal choice as an art license.
(2) That isn't a mistake, just poor phrasing on my part. What I was getting at is that if someone wants to license their work under the MIT license, which isn't an available selection, just select the GPL and then note in the comments that they're also releasing the work under the MIT license.
Blender is definitely worth the time to learn. And frankly, it's a lot easier now than it was 5 years ago since they revamped the interface. For a while, it felt like they were just haphazardly tossing buttons in wherever they fit, so it was pretty haphazard. Now once you learn what all the little icons mean, things make sense.
It's still got kind of a hefty learning curve, but it's not too bad if you follow the tutorial videos.
The lineart version would look better if it weren't so squiggly.
What you're seeing there is the Freestyle renderer, which Blender uses to do outlines. It's extremely configurable. I've attached another two examples with slightly different line styles.
At any rate, this seems like a cool way that someone with an novice to intermediate skill level (like myself) could make some cool and highly stylized game backgrounds.
I didn't, but given the way the textures are set up, what will happen is that the texture patterns will remain stationary while the objects and lighting move. Could be a neat effect. I might try making a video out of it.
I love these sorts of discussions. :)
I would repsond that a video game doesn't necessarily have to allow the player to direct the plot, provided that you provide the illusion of freedom. As such, it may be interesting to procedurally generate a finite world with distinct objectives and have the player go through a plot that's determined once when they start the game.
My question is what kind of form this story would take. I'm assuming the story generation algorithm wouldn't be able to pass a turing test so, as you said, dialogue is out. The idea of "beats" as presented in those links would work fairly well, although I suspect you'd have to follow a somewhat different story structure. In the case of a roguelike, you might want to take a look at various fantasy and game plot tropes.
Probably the most appropriate plot for a roguelike is to defeat some huge bad guy, so you could use that as a starting point and then randomly pick a motivation for the main character doing so. Maybe they're saving the world, maybe they're rescuing someone, etc. Then figure out what steps are going to be required to defeat this person (or monster). Maybe you need to travel to various dungeons and collect a set of artifacts. Perhaps you need to defeat this guy's underlings first. Maybe you need to enlist the aid of a person or group of people, and in order to do that you have to help them or (if they're from a warrior culture) defeat them in battle.
I guess what I'm getting at is that in this sort of story, the "beats" should vary as well. That is, you'll probably want to randomly generate the story outline before generating the details about the parts that make it up. If you follow the exact same set of "beats" every time, you'll probably end up with stories that feel too similar structurally. (This isn't so much of an issue if you're a human writer, but it's a lot easier to pick up on these sorts of patterns when a computer is doing the writing.)
At the moment, I don't know of any game that generates random plots well, although I can think of a few that sort of attempt it.
Do you mind pasting your map drawing code on pastebin so I can take a look at it?
Your map tiles look like they're a) smaller than the tile image, which is 130x130, and b) not square. Without seeing your code, my first suggestion is to set up opengl to use an orthographic camera, with the viewport such that 1 unit = 1 pixel on the screen.
Also, to make things easier, you should probably consider using sprite sizes that are powers of two, although I don't think that's your problem here.
(1) The "preferred form for making modifications" part of the GPL (with respect to art) is at best vague and at worst completely unenforceable. For example, let's say someone makes a midi file and uploads it to the site. Someone else (who may not have access to mixing software or even a computer at the time of recording) takes the midi file and records themselves playing an accompaniment to it. So now you have an audio file that's a live instrument with the midi playing in the background. What's the preferred form for making modifications? Can the GPL be construed to prevent this sort of modification?
If the GPL prevents these sorts of modifications, it's not a great license for art. If it doesn't prevent modifications like this, then the clause about preserving a perferred form for modifications just gives the original rights holder a false sense of security. In either case, this sort of ambiguity makes the GPL a non-optimal choice as an art license.
(2) That isn't a mistake, just poor phrasing on my part. What I was getting at is that if someone wants to license their work under the MIT license, which isn't an available selection, just select the GPL and then note in the comments that they're also releasing the work under the MIT license.
From what you said so far, it could be any number of things, so:
Design is somewhat borrowed from my avatar pic.
On the other hand, with wings3d, you're not likely to be able to achieve this sort of render.
Blender is definitely worth the time to learn. And frankly, it's a lot easier now than it was 5 years ago since they revamped the interface. For a while, it felt like they were just haphazardly tossing buttons in wherever they fit, so it was pretty haphazard. Now once you learn what all the little icons mean, things make sense.
It's still got kind of a hefty learning curve, but it's not too bad if you follow the tutorial videos.
The lineart version would look better if it weren't so squiggly.
What you're seeing there is the Freestyle renderer, which Blender uses to do outlines. It's extremely configurable. I've attached another two examples with slightly different line styles.
At any rate, this seems like a cool way that someone with an novice to intermediate skill level (like myself) could make some cool and highly stylized game backgrounds.
Took a while for Blender to render it, although it didn't require a whole lot of attention from me. :)
Here's the video on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTLVbK90SQI
I didn't, but given the way the textures are set up, what will happen is that the texture patterns will remain stationary while the objects and lighting move. Could be a neat effect. I might try making a video out of it.
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