Grimrock

hows this coming along minmay? been a while since you've posted here

Well, what are you expecting to hear? That I've stopped working on it? It'll be done when it's done.
And make another thread for your scripting question, please.

minmay: Always charming like a car-accident...

THOM wrote:minmay: Always charming like a car-accident...

How dare you insult car accidents like that!

Minmay, you still sending invites out for this?

So I was planning on just keeping everything secret as usual, but I figured enough circumstances have changed that it's worth making another update post.
Firstly, my illness finally got to the point where I can't do my actual job anymore, which means a lot more time devoted to Avenie, which is a lot more interesting than my job was so that's cool, except it's not really cool because I'm still having to deal with said illness in the first place. But hey, the mod gets finished a lot quicker this way.

The mod is dedicated to being easy to pick up and play, even if you've never played Grimrock before. So I've been mercilessly streamlining the interface and mechanics. That does not mean that I've made the puzzles or combat easier or shallower; I haven't. It does mean, however, that I'm getting rid of as much tedium and busywork as possible. Here are some things I've done to that end:

• One of the biggest annoyances people have with Grimrock is that holding down movement keys doesn't work intuitively. Avenie's Awful Adventure offers two movement modes: the vanilla behaviour, and an "unbuffered" mode where you will move only if the movement key is currently down, like pretty much every other game does it.
  (This feature was already in Requiem for Kraken's Arm, and was one of the very first things I did after the PartyComponent:move() and PartyComponent:turn() methods were added, but I don't think I ever mentioned it until now, so there you go.)
• To read text on walls, instead of having to walk up to the wall and click on it, you can just...read it.
  
  Okay, so this particular font is barely readable, and it doesn't line up with the bricks yet, but you get the idea, right? It's all dynamically generated, so changing the text is easy.
• Large 3D levels are cool, but ladders disrupt the flow of movement. So instead of ladders, you change elevations by walking up stairs or slopes, which seamlessly connect different elevations.
  
• Everything you can click on is indicated as such. No more wondering whether something is an item you can pick up or just a decoration. And certainly no secret buttons, ever.
  
  The actual visuals of this are a work in progress, as you can tell...and as it happens, I took all the other screenshots before I implemented this feature and I'm too lazy to retake them, so that's why you don't see this feature in the other screenshots.
• Speaking of items, I'm getting rid of inventory management; there are no longer item slots to worry about. When you pick up a piece of equipment, you have it for the rest of the game, and you can choose your equipment at the beginning of every fight from a simpler menu. No dropping, throwing, etc.
  Puzzle items work similarly; once you pick them up, you have them, and when you're in the area where you can use them, they appear at the top of the screen for you to select.
  
  Of course, there will still be an inventory menu that lets you look at all your equipment, puzzle items, keys, etc. at once, but there won't be any rearranging or dropping them (because there's no need to anymore).
• Combat is optional. This is another thing I knew I'd have since the beginning, and another thing that is in Requiem for Kraken's Arm, but I'd been putting off coming up with a satisfying way to implement it in Avenie. But I finally stopped putting it off: you can toggle combat on and off in the options at any time. If it's off, the encounters with "normal" enemies simply don't happen. But the boss fights, which are important to the story...well, you'll just have to see for yourself what happens with those.
• There's a huge amount of dialogue. But don't worry, almost none of it pauses the game (and even the dialogue that does pause is instantly skippable). You also won't see 99% of it if you don't seek it out.
  There's so much, in fact, that voice acting it is impossible. So, sorry if you were looking forward to that. Boss battles do have some spoken lines, though.
  
  As usual, please excuse the placeholder portrait...I'm about to commission the real ones though!
• In the announcement of Requiem for Kraken's Arm, I made a big deal about how I gave the player a convenient light source. In Avenie's Awful Adventure, I've gotten rid of the player's light source entirely, and will just make all the areas well-lit in the first place. I expect to do the same for Requiem. Funny how these things work out sometimes, right?
• The original, lame example dungeon version of this mod had dozens of puzzles and loads of monsters. In 2016 I revamped it, shifting the focus away from generic Grimrock dungeon and towards more puzzles. There are now hundreds of them. Some are optional, and solving them only gives you more power. Some have multiple solutions. Some are required to progress. And all of them have hints and complete solutions available in-game if you get stuck, with no limits or penalties.

More trivia:

• Most of the levels have dynamic music.
• I remodeled that huge tower and made the top of it look like the fire rune (), but now the tower just looks like a giant penis, so I'm gonna have to keep working on that.
• God, I really wish the game options would let you switch between the OpenGL and Direct3D renderers on Windows. I went years without knowing that modulative blending doesn't look right for anyone playing the Mac version...

Looks amazing! Glad to see this is still going strong and I can't wait to see what comes next!

Minmay you are a genius. Looking forward to play your mod in the future. Really like the idea of stairs and slopes, wondering how you accomplished that feat ?

kelly1111 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 06, 2018 10:42 pm Really like the idea of stairs and slopes, wondering how you accomplished that feat ?

Im busting to know how you did this as well minmay hahaha
Is it like a graceful sweeping accent / decline - taking no longer than 1 sec, for instance....
.... or a bit more steppy, taking a slightly longer amount of time??

Some of the features im surprised by..... some arent exactly up my alley at all, but I think this is a good thing as
your mod will likely push other modders to develop original - out of the box - ideas for their mods.
(and by 'likely' I meant 'it already has')

Cant wait to have a play through!
It looks killerrr

You move up and down (and across) these stairs at the same speed you move over regular floor squares. You retain control the entire time, it's not like StairsComponent.
The movement is completely smooth, like moving across a heightmapped slope, except this actually changes your elevation. Falling onto them from above also works.
This is accomplished by updating the positions of two PlatformComponents every frame.

It would require some additional code to make items and monsters on the stairs work, but since the mod never puts items or monsters on them in the first place (remember, there's no item dropping/throwing), I haven't bothered to implement that.