ERF - The Extensible RPG Framework

[willrandship]

The ERF is a project I'm doing for the Raspberry Pi summer programming contest.

I'll be using this topic for progress reports and stuff, as well as a reference document. The official rules don't say anything about source code, so I might put that here too. (you know, a link to a repo or something)

So...here's some of the things I plan to implement.

-A unified class system for managing battle stats of players and monsters. This way a player could use any character with defined stats as either a player or a monster.

-An event system where the events are customized python code segments, probably going to be functions in a designated file or section of a file in the framework. This would have everything from animations to spell effects inside, and functions can reference each other. Very modular.

-A data management structure for managing inventories (multiple or singular) of either unlimited or arbitrarily limited capacity.

-A Sound system that allows smooth blending between different background music tracks while playing an arbitrary number of effect files.

-And others.

I don't think I'll include any preferred graphical interface as part of the standard framework, since it's intended to work for anything from ASCII to SDL to OpenGL, or any other display method. Plus, it would take a LOT of time to set up an OpenGL method, especially since I don't know OpenGL, and frankly don't know SDL all that well.
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[willrandship]

So, now that it's been a few days, a progress report.

I have a map storage system working. It keeps the map in a pseudo-binary file format. There can be up to 256 different tiles. Length and width are determined by the first 8 bytes, which are two ASCII integers interpreted by the interpreter. This makes reading maps in a hex editor really easy.

I've set up a basic character class as part of the map module. They have the capability of having a set speech from a file, and to automatically create a set of monsters to fight. It's intended that monsters and NPCs share the same class. The map system itself needs to be rewritten, to work with the new map tiling system (I was going to make on using lists, but the new way is far more storage-friendly)

There's also a module called battle, which allows for invoking the battle engine, and contains the classes for participants in said battle. The player's fighters and the enemies are stored in the same format, for flexibility. The engine itself isn't written yet, but the class for storing battle participants is.

One of my end goals is for the end framework to require absolutely no imports of other modules, including os and sys. So far, that's working out just fine.
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Hmm...what to put here....

[KermMartian]

I guess this is implemented in Python, based on that last sentence of your most recent post. Why would you want to avoid needing to import sys and os? That seems like an unnecessary restriction on yourself to me. Other than that, this sounds like a nifty plan, and I hope you see it through. When you say "set speech", I presume we're talking about a text string rather than an audio file? Although I noticed that (!) you mentioned a Sound system, which is cool.
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[willrandship]

I'm actually not avoiding sys, I just haven't needed it yet. As for OS, the commands vary from windows to linux enough to make cross-compatibility an issue.

Currently, I'm trying to figure out a decent way to get keyboard input without using ncurses (unix-only, or mingw dependent) SDL (Graphically dependent) or OpenGL (Do I need to say anything?)

I'm planning, after it's done, to release it in an "option" style, such that it would have an SDL version, a curses version, etc. but I want one that would run on literally anything that can run the full python interpreter. The sound system would be one of these.

Oh and yes, with the speech bit I was referring to text.

By the way, I got the mapper's partial display routine to work. I'm planning on making the map display work as follows:

*Map tiles are stored in a list of strings.
*Said list is turned into a single string with newlines every frame. This is the part where only a certain X and Y range is taken, so from here on the map is only the local view.
*Said string has any objects on the map (people, monsters, items, etc.) applied. I'm debating about having speech being displayed on the map, so it would go here too.
*Said string is messed with however the programmer wants to mess with it.
*String is displayed.
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Hmm...what to put here....

[willrandship]

By the way, I got really excited when I found PyPy, a JIT-style rewrite of the python interpreter. An average of 5.7x faster is pretty awesome!

Anyways, up next is the inventory system. I think I'll have the items totally separate from everything else, and contained in a class. That way, it's easy to make some small changes for multiple inventories, ie for multiple party members, or for shops, etc. I think I'll have gold be part of that too, so expect Elder Scrolls style shops by default.
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Hmm...what to put here....

[KermMartian]

[Tari]