I just switched from Java to Love2d ... my current project is split, Lua/Love2d for the client and Java on the server side. The main point was that one of my friends refused to install Java and it made me think about a runtime that I can bundle more easily.
So while I work on this, I won't try anything else. I have my own grieves with Lua, along the lines of what Garry posted, plus some of an engineering point of view - testing and debugging. But those are personal and some just come from my background as Java developer, because Lua allows some types of coding mistakes that a language like Java (or C) would detect at compile time.
I'm not a fast moving person. If it wasn't for that one friend who refused to install Java, I still would use Java + LWJGL which did the job just fine for me. Even if Mini Micro has all I would ever need, at the moment I don't want to try something new. Plus I had used Lua as scripting engine myself in a former project, so it was not really new to me either.
Last but not least ... several times I had declared to stop coding game projects (or any hobby projects) and very likely my current return to game development will end very soon. I have seen all from Love2d that I wanted to see, everything works fine. Now I'm past the design stage and it becomes boring (for me) work to advance from a prototype to something that is a real game. Too boring for me. So I'll return to make game-related graphics and leave discussions like these. On the plus side, this prototype made me make quite some new graphics, and I think some of my best ones so far. So it wasn't all wasted (plus I refreshed my Lua knowledge).
How widespread is Mini Micro used? Python is found in many places, so learning Python definitely makes sense. I was told that Lua is also often used, but less exposed to the end user, more in embedded devices (in fact there are microcontrollers which run an Lua interpreter as OS), so learning Lua is useful too.
"Lua has served us really well in Garry's Mod in terms of both speed and speed of implementation. It's worked pretty much flawlessly"
So ... it works flawlessly. Garry doesn't like how some things have to be written in Lua. I must admit I agree on his findings about the + vs .. operators and missing ++ and += operators. But Lua is open source and has been around for 15 years, a long time to build a community.
JavaScript has many users too. The more people use some software, the easier it is to get help.
Love2d is more than Lua though, there are graphics, audio, networking and more APIs included, and very easy to use. I think for game makers that is a very important point.
Other than that I would suppoer the pygame and libtcod suggestion from above. For roguelikes that is probably the easiest way to start.
I've recently discovered Löve2d, a game framework based on Lua. You can produce an *.exe file for Windows with this, but it also runs on Linux and Android. My experiences are good so far, the start was very easy, performance is good and Lua does the job. Object oriented programming in Lua is different from what I had been used to (C++/Java) but not bad at all.
Lua was made for smaller projects, and while I think you can use it for any size, it definitely requires some discipline and planning to do so. On the other hand, the start is very easy and swift.
Thanks, that formula looks very useful! I think I'll use a very similar one, just need to adjust the "charm" part.
@Danimal:
You are right, typing the numbers is cumbersome, a few quick clicks are probaly the most that a player will accept in the long run.
The story idea is nice. Particularly since I wanted to let the player choose from several characters to play as shop keeper, there could even be a few stories for the characters and their goals. At the moment I'm still busy implementing the trade mechanics though, just finished the code for selling items from the shelf. A lot to do there still, have customers actually chose items "reasonably" and not just buy what is on the shelf.
Thanks, that will help to buff the customer selection :)
I'm still struggling with Blender though, must find a good and easy way to get consistent lighting for all the customer models.
I've made a first version of the trade UI, where the shopkeeper and the customer will negotiate item prices. I'm not entirely sure about the logic for the customers though, how they will value their items, and what sorts of overcharge/underpay they will accept. I guess if the keeper keeps overpaying for offers, customers will tend to come back more frequently, while underpaying makes them look for other shops which pay better, unless they are near this shop anyways and the travel to the next shop would be too cumbersome.
I'm not sure about the font ... I tried several and this one looked best so far. Since Java uses diferent fonts on Windows/Linux/MacOS, it seems the only way to avoid text size problems is to bundle a font that will be used on all platforms.
I've been putting the code together with the new shop graphics. I had to change a few things, but it basically works again. The new item boxes are a bit smaller though and the images have to be scaled to fit, that reduces the quality a bit. I think it's still alright though.
I'm wondering if the shopkeeper should have skills like the characters in an RPG usually do. A few that I could imagine:
- Haggling: Make customers pay more, make suppliers ask less money for the goods
- Identify items: Allows to identify unknown secand hand items sold by customers.
- Repair items: Improve the condition of second hand items.
Last summer I suffered from a bad mental breakdown and it took long to recover. Working on Grafics is something that I can do again since some weeks, programming I hope to return to soon again as well.
So I hope I can pick up work on this project some time soon again.
I've been trying to streamline my process to create the shop grafics, so that in future I can import new/im,proved shop grafics more easily into the project. At the moment I have two building types, a log house and a brick built house.
I'm currently working on improved furniture for the shop, next steps will be a book to keep track of the orders (and quests) and a sort of cash register, which is tricky since I'm not quite decided about the era of the game yet.
For those who were lured here by the title "PNG Animation" - there is a companion format to PNG, called MNG, which was supposed to serve as animation format. Unfortunately it never caught on like animated GIFs did:
I just switched from Java to Love2d ... my current project is split, Lua/Love2d for the client and Java on the server side. The main point was that one of my friends refused to install Java and it made me think about a runtime that I can bundle more easily.
So while I work on this, I won't try anything else. I have my own grieves with Lua, along the lines of what Garry posted, plus some of an engineering point of view - testing and debugging. But those are personal and some just come from my background as Java developer, because Lua allows some types of coding mistakes that a language like Java (or C) would detect at compile time.
I'm not a fast moving person. If it wasn't for that one friend who refused to install Java, I still would use Java + LWJGL which did the job just fine for me. Even if Mini Micro has all I would ever need, at the moment I don't want to try something new. Plus I had used Lua as scripting engine myself in a former project, so it was not really new to me either.
Last but not least ... several times I had declared to stop coding game projects (or any hobby projects) and very likely my current return to game development will end very soon. I have seen all from Love2d that I wanted to see, everything works fine. Now I'm past the design stage and it becomes boring (for me) work to advance from a prototype to something that is a real game. Too boring for me. So I'll return to make game-related graphics and leave discussions like these. On the plus side, this prototype made me make quite some new graphics, and I think some of my best ones so far. So it wasn't all wasted (plus I refreshed my Lua knowledge).
How widespread is Mini Micro used? Python is found in many places, so learning Python definitely makes sense. I was told that Lua is also often used, but less exposed to the end user, more in embedded devices (in fact there are microcontrollers which run an Lua interpreter as OS), so learning Lua is useful too.
Joe, but even Garry says in the linked blog post:
"Lua has served us really well in Garry's Mod in terms of both speed and speed of implementation. It's worked pretty much flawlessly"
So ... it works flawlessly. Garry doesn't like how some things have to be written in Lua. I must admit I agree on his findings about the + vs .. operators and missing ++ and += operators. But Lua is open source and has been around for 15 years, a long time to build a community.
JavaScript has many users too. The more people use some software, the easier it is to get help.
Love2d is more than Lua though, there are graphics, audio, networking and more APIs included, and very easy to use. I think for game makers that is a very important point.
Other than that I would suppoer the pygame and libtcod suggestion from above. For roguelikes that is probably the easiest way to start.
I've recently discovered Löve2d, a game framework based on Lua. You can produce an *.exe file for Windows with this, but it also runs on Linux and Android. My experiences are good so far, the start was very easy, performance is good and Lua does the job. Object oriented programming in Lua is different from what I had been used to (C++/Java) but not bad at all.
https://love2d.org/
Lua was made for smaller projects, and while I think you can use it for any size, it definitely requires some discipline and planning to do so. On the other hand, the start is very easy and swift.
@watatita micro field:
Thanks, that formula looks very useful! I think I'll use a very similar one, just need to adjust the "charm" part.
@Danimal:
You are right, typing the numbers is cumbersome, a few quick clicks are probaly the most that a player will accept in the long run.
The story idea is nice. Particularly since I wanted to let the player choose from several characters to play as shop keeper, there could even be a few stories for the characters and their goals. At the moment I'm still busy implementing the trade mechanics though, just finished the code for selling items from the shelf. A lot to do there still, have customers actually chose items "reasonably" and not just buy what is on the shelf.
Thanks, that will help to buff the customer selection :)
I'm still struggling with Blender though, must find a good and easy way to get consistent lighting for all the customer models.
I've made a first version of the trade UI, where the shopkeeper and the customer will negotiate item prices. I'm not entirely sure about the logic for the customers though, how they will value their items, and what sorts of overcharge/underpay they will accept. I guess if the keeper keeps overpaying for offers, customers will tend to come back more frequently, while underpaying makes them look for other shops which pay better, unless they are near this shop anyways and the travel to the next shop would be too cumbersome.
I'm not sure about the font ... I tried several and this one looked best so far. Since Java uses diferent fonts on Windows/Linux/MacOS, it seems the only way to avoid text size problems is to bundle a font that will be used on all platforms.
( https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/medievalsharp )
I've been putting the code together with the new shop graphics. I had to change a few things, but it basically works again. The new item boxes are a bit smaller though and the images have to be scaled to fit, that reduces the quality a bit. I think it's still alright though.
I'm wondering if the shopkeeper should have skills like the characters in an RPG usually do. A few that I could imagine:
- Haggling: Make customers pay more, make suppliers ask less money for the goods
- Identify items: Allows to identify unknown secand hand items sold by customers.
- Repair items: Improve the condition of second hand items.
Thanks. It's slowly going better again. Good luck to you, too!
Last summer I suffered from a bad mental breakdown and it took long to recover. Working on Grafics is something that I can do again since some weeks, programming I hope to return to soon again as well.
So I hope I can pick up work on this project some time soon again.
I've been trying to streamline my process to create the shop grafics, so that in future I can import new/im,proved shop grafics more easily into the project. At the moment I have two building types, a log house and a brick built house.
I'm currently working on improved furniture for the shop, next steps will be a book to keep track of the orders (and quests) and a sort of cash register, which is tricky since I'm not quite decided about the era of the game yet.
Thanks for making the previews work with SSL! This a great step forward.
For those who were lured here by the title "PNG Animation" - there is a companion format to PNG, called MNG, which was supposed to serve as animation format. Unfortunately it never caught on like animated GIFs did:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics
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