ORK RPG Framework for Unity is half off - is it worth getting?

[Keldryn]

I'm starting to get the hang of how ORK's GUI is supposed to work. I switched from the Legacy GUI over to UGUI and whipped up a quick frame & background graphic for the prefab; Unity has support for 9-sliced images where the corners are not stretched to fit, so it was pretty easy:

The portrait needs a frame around it, I think.

Also re-worked the Overview menu as well:

It's still based on the one from the tutorial though; I'm going to split off the Save/Load/Quit stuff into a different menu and get the Inventory, Status, Bestiary, Quests, etc into icon/hotkey menus instead.

It is possible to just build your own custom UI and skip ORK's GUI entirely, as its API exposes all of the necessary data and methods to do so. You can also create Global Events and bind them to hotkeys, so you have the power of the event system accessible anywhere.

I got "Randalf" switched over to using a NavMesh Agent to follow the PC, so he doesn't get stuck trying to walk through solid objects. Can't get it to work right in battle though, as even when I tell it to Wait until all movement has stopped before proceeding to the next step, the attack animation still played halfway through the movement. A 3s delay worked at first, but then in the next battle a Goblin bumped into Randalf and that fucked up everything! I'm not going to spend too much time on that now; I'll just put the Battle spots where things are more open.

Also got Pixel Crushers' Dialogue System integrated as well, using one of its included GUI themes, as I haven't had time to look at how they are structured:

I didn't move Randalf's (formerly Blue Pants) dialogue over yet, but I know it works so I'll just do all of the throwaway dialogues in ORK events because it's simpler.

Next up: get rid of those ridiculous HP and damage totals and put some more down to earth stats in.

 

[Hellwalker]

Thanks for sharing this, it is good stuff. Looks like you don't have too far to go to test it.
I got Articy: Draft flex license. I'll see if I can get some design figured out and tested inside, while the engine/plugins is figured out. Gonna have a very busy weekend.

 

[Keldryn]

Haven't posted anything for a week or so... I was taking a break to try out some other stuff. Just a couple of updates today:

Exploring the town with the whole party. Added persistent portraits with HP/MP bars along the left side (and a compass):

In battle with a goblin and an orc. Refined a few things, including replacing the stats with my own set of stats that don't have HP in the hundreds:

 

[Hellwalker]

cool, how many hours went into making those changes? was it hard to do?

 

[Mustawd]

Looking good. Dat art tho...

 

[Keldryn]

cool, how many hours went into making those changes? was it hard to do?

It wasn't too hard to make the changes, and it didn't really take that long to make them, although getting those changes to work properly consumed quite a bit of time, particularly regarding the animations and GUI elements. Some of the animations still don't work properly, and I've had trouble getting some of the UI elements to scale as well. I probably put a good 20+ hours into working with it beyond what was in the tutorial. A lot of that time was just figuring out how things work in ORK, of course. You can't see it in the screenshots, but I also replaced the music and set up a different camera system.

I'm probably not going to continue with ORK though. While there are various things about how it works that bother me, I can live with those. The killer is how it saves everything to a single database file that cannot be merged via source control, nor can any settings be imported or exported. It also sometimes updates event files and prefabs if they reference anything in the database that was changed. So you can't have more than one person working with any of the ORK data at the same time, and it's probably best to designate one person to handle all of that just to make sure nothing gets messed up. That's not an appealing workflow to me.

Looking good. Dat art tho...

Thanks!

And yeah, the art is somewhat lacking. I'm certainly no artist. This was just a prototype, so I used pre-made assets plus a few UI things that I threw together in a few minutes. The "painting" effect on the portraits didn't work out like I'd hoped (especially when scaled down; I re-did them by first resizing the screen capture of the 3D model and then applying the filter and they look better). I didn't want to spend much time on them, as I was just testing out how much trouble it would be to put in different art assets.

 

[Davaris]

I'm probably not going to continue with ORK though. While there are various things about how it works that bother me, I can live with those. The killer is how it saves everything to a single database file that cannot be merged via source control, nor can any settings be imported or exported. It also sometimes updates event files and prefabs if they reference anything in the database that was changed. So you can't have more than one person working with any of the ORK data at the same time, and it's probably best to designate one person to handle all of that just to make sure nothing gets messed up. That's not an appealing workflow to me.

Been a while since you commented. Are you still with ORK or have you moved on to something else?


I found another one called RPG Kit Lite. I was told the code base is messy, but the guy seems to like it regardless. Looks to me like its for online action games.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19644

Something else about plyGame its for single player games. So you could make a game like Fallout 1 where your followers are controlled by script AI, but taking control of followers with mouse and keyboard is not what it was made for. I'm looking at the source code, hopefully I can hack it, otherwise I'll look at ORK or RPG Kit Lite.

 

[JamesDixon]

Keldryn How easy is it to switch ORK from level based to point based RPG system?

 

[Keldryn]

Been a while since you commented. Are you still with ORK or have you moved on to something else?

I took a break from ORK for a bit while I tried prototyping my own turn-based combat system. Plus there was the whole Christmas thing last week.

I was mostly wanting to try out gridless movement with my own prototype, and I got to the point where I could have n player-controlled characters taking turns moving up to an arbitrary 12m per turn, with a visual indicator of the path they would take that updated as you moved the mouse around. I was using Unity's Navigation API for this. I didn't get further than this because I needed to develop more of the basic framework (AI turns, attacks, etc) as well as a smoother switch back to "exploration" movement. At that point I felt like I was mostly just duplicating functionality that I could already get through ORK.

So I started looking at ORK again to see if it would be possible to add tactical movement to the existing turn-based combat (instead of the default "run to target, attack, run back" nonsense). Hopefully the team-buy for the tactical grid-based combat feature will be successful, but if it isn't, I don't want to be stuck having to decide between the 90s JRPG style combat or real-time combat.

The answer to that question is YES, thankfully. It's easy enough to add a "Move" ability to ORK and include it on the battle menu. In the event for that ability, I run the raycast to get the destination point and then set the navmesh destination for that combatant. I've got a rudimentary check in there to constrain movement to a specified distance -- which isn't actually precise right now, as it's just using ORK's built in distance check (which is a straight line), rather than the actual length of the calculated path. I've already written all of the code to handle calculating a potential path (as well as rendering that path visually), but I need to add a couple of things to make it accessible to ORK's events.

The major issue right now is that the turn-based combat mode only allows a combatant to take one action per turn. There are a couple of potential ways to get around this. One ORK user had developed his own Playmaker Actions for ORK for use by his own team, and he recently polished them up and released them on the Asset Store. It's primarily a set of wrappers around ORK event steps, but it makes it a lot easier and cleaner to integrate those event steps with your own code or third-party assets. If I had to, I could probably run a combatant's entire turn through these Playmaker FSMs. I'd rather not do that, but if the tactical combat "module" never comes to be, it's at least an option.

As for the collaboration issue which I have mentioned several times, I asked the author of ORK about whether or not he had any plans to improve this aspect of the framework. He said that he does have plans to address this issue, but it will have to wait until ORK 3 (TBA) due to the massive changes it will require to the data structures -- which will break backwards compatibility. He does have some import and export functionality on his to-do list, which would help considerably. I mean, it's not like I have a team of 3 or 4 people (in the same time zones) working full-time on a game. The guy who made the Playmaker Actions for ORK has mentioned that he has written an internal tool to export the ORK database to Google Sheets and then import the changes, which his team uses regularly. He's thinking about polishing it up and releasing it.

So it looks as though in the relatively near future there will be some sort of import/export functionality, which would be good enough to make collaboration among 3 or 4 developers relatively pain-free.

I found another one called RPG Kit Lite. I was told the code base is messy, but the guy seems to like it regardless. Looks to me like its for online action games.
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19644

I've seen that one in the Asset Store, but never considered it seriously, as it does look like it is primarily oriented towards multiplayer action RPGs. It doesn't look like it is anywhere near as flexible as ORK (for example). Sure, it has a 5-star rating, but that's only across 14 submitted ratings, whereas ORK has a 5-star rating across 110 submitted ratings. For comparison, plyGame is at a 4-star rating across 247 submitted ratings.

It also doesn't appear to have much of a community around it, given the state of its forum.

Something else about plyGame its for single player games. So you could make a game like Fallout 1 where your followers are controlled by script AI, but taking control of followers with mouse and keyboard is not what it was made for. I'm looking at the source code, hopefully I can hack it, otherwise I'll look at ORK or RPG Kit Lite.

I grabbed a copy of plyGame when it was on sale recently and fiddled around with it for a little bit. My impression is that it's somewhat feature-lite compared to ORK. It's a bit easier to use, at least at first. My primary concern with using plyGame is that the author continues to state that it is a finished product feature-wise and he will only be updating it to fix bugs and address compatibility issues with new version of Unity. On the other hand, Gaming is Love continues to update ORK with new features (many requested by his customers) on a monthly basis -- sometimes twice in a month. It looks like plyGame might have more users, but the ORK forums are more active than plyGame's. The level of support he provides for ORK is outstanding, and that's worth a lot right there.

As for taking control of followers -- you can do that in ORK very easily. I had that working in those screenshots I posted previously; when you click on one of the HUD portraits on the left, that character is selected and becomes the party leader with the others following behind.

Keldryn How easy is it to switch ORK from level based to point based RPG system?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

Out of the box, it gives you the option to have the player spend experience points to level up Abilities; in ORK, Abilities are either distinct actions that a character can take (a melee attack, an individual spell, etc) or passive effects that grant bonus Status Values or Status Effects. Status Values are designed to improve as you level up, either using a formula to determine how much it increases or simply by applying a growth curve to each Status Value.

You might be able to emulate a point-based system by:

1. setting up a Character Points status value as an "Experience" type, no auto level up, and using smaller numbers
2. creating status values for all of your attributes and skills and setting their development to None
3. creating passive Abilities for each attribute and skill and setting them to increase by spending Experience on them
4. setting up each of those passive Abilities to add a bonus value to the corresponding status value. You can have different settings for each level of an Ability, so you can specify how many Character Points each level of that Ability will cost.

I think that this would give you something pretty close to what you get with GURPS or Hero System, but I can't say for sure without trying it out. It's not pretty, and setting it all up would be a bit labor-intensive (but still a lot less time than having to code your own framework for doing so).

The current prototype I'm working on with ORK more or less emulates the d20 core mechanics; not because I think they're wonderful, but simply because I wanted some placeholder mechanics that were different from the ORK tutorial and I didn't want to put much thought into it right now, because I want to see just how much I can get out of ORK without having to do any custom coding (which I'm fine doing).

 

[Davaris]

Hopefully the team-buy for the tactical grid-based combat feature will be successful, but if it isn't, I don't want to be stuck having to decide between the 90s JRPG style combat or real-time combat.

I'm sure it will be. Its half way there with 2 months to go.

Do you know if they plan to make it work with large creatures on a hex/square grid, with much smaller creatures? So men fit on a single hex, but large creatures like dragons overlap many hexes. Also are they going to make the grid adjust for changes in the environment?

I grabbed a copy of plyGame when it was on sale recently and fiddled around with it for a little bit. My impression is that it's somewhat feature-lite compared to ORK. It's a bit easier to use, at least at first. My primary concern with using plyGame is that the author continues to state that it is a finished product feature-wise and he will only be updating it to fix bugs and address compatibility issues with new version of Unity. On the other hand, Gaming is Love continues to update ORK with new features (many requested by his customers) on a monthly basis -- sometimes twice in a month. It looks like plyGame might have more users, but the ORK forums are more active than plyGame's. The level of support he provides for ORK is outstanding, and that's worth a lot right there.

As for taking control of followers -- you can do that in ORK very easily. I had that working in those screenshots I posted previously; when you click on one of the HUD portraits on the left, that character is selected and becomes the party leader with the others following behind.

Welp, you convinced me to take a look at ORK. I've gone through 9 tutorials and am impressed with the detail. Very glad I looked in on this thread. Thanks!

 

[Keldryn]

I'm sure it will be. Its half way there with 2 months to go.

Yeah, but it's moving very slowly. Everyone who was really interested in it pledged at the start and it's been creeping up very slowly. I doubled my pledge from $75 to $150 over this past week, but that's as much as I can put into it.

Do you know if they plan to make it work with large creatures on a hex/square grid, with much smaller creatures? So men fit on a single hex, but large creatures like dragons overlap many hexes. Also are they going to make the grid adjust for changes in the environment?

Creatures taking up more than one grid unit was mentioned in the original proposal, so hopefully it's still part of the design.

As for the grid adjusting to changes in the environment, each grid cell will be represented by a GameObject in the world, so even if the grid doesn't automatically adjust, you'll be able to script whatever changes you need. I assume you're talking about dynamic changes such as noxious clouds, walls of ice/fire, etc? I'm guessing that the base framework will be there, but you'll have to do a fair bit of scripting or working with events to get it all hooked up.

The grid will use raycasting for placement, so it will conform to the terrain and environment models that it is placed on.

Welp, you convinced me to take a look at ORK. I've gone through 9 tutorials and am impressed with the detail. Very glad I looked in on this thread. Thanks!

You're welcome! As I've said previously, there are plently of things in the framework that I would have approached differently, but it is so comprehensive and flexible that I'm not sure how much that matters. Last night, I actually got an Action Point system almost working within the turn-based battle structure. I just need to manage each combatant's Turn Value more carefully, and it should work with no problems. Well, other than it messes with any turn-based ability durations or refresh intervals, as it effectively gives a combatant multiple turns until they run out of AP.

Definitely work through the entire 50 tutorials in that series and then look into some of the "How To" and "Gameplay" series to add a few different features. Resist the temptation to make too many changes as you're doing the main tutorial series; your mind will race with the possibilities, but just write down those ideas and set them aside until you're done the set. Once you've done the tutorials, start looking at the included source code and get a feel for how he's put everything together. I'm just starting to look into the ORK Framework's scripting API so that I can start doing things outside of the Editor when I need to. It looks like pretty much all of the framework's functionality is exposed through the API. So if you don't like how the GUI system provided through the Editor works (for example), you should be able to put your own GUI together completely outside of the Editor and hook it up to the API calls.

I'm also looking at the plugin template to get an idea for how they are intended to be used. I'm using the Navigation API (NavMesh) for all of my movement, but the ORK events only let you interact with it directly by setting the NavMesh destination. So I think my first plugin will just be a set of Event steps that expose the other Navigation API functions that are necessary to really use the API to its fullest (calculate path without navigating, check remaining distance, etc).

Drop me a line if you have any ORK related questions... I've gotten pretty familiar with it now.

 

[Keldryn]

ORK Framework 2.6.3 was released this morning, featuring the capacity to have multiple attacks per turn (defined by a forumlua). One can easily use this to implement an action point system in turn-based battles.

Another example of the fantastic level of support provided by the author of the framework.

 

[Keldryn]

ORK Framework is on sale again for 50% off for the next 24 hours.

Also released today is the 2nd preview of the Grid Battle System, which will become part of the core framework package when it is complete:

And looking back at those screenshots I posed back in January... ugh. I've certainly learned a lot since then. These are from three different game concepts I've experimented with, all of them using ORK:

ORK Framework is a really fantastic tool for building RPGs. I was on the fence about it back in December, but it's really saved me a tremendous amount of time in getting basic RPG systems set up.

 

[Hellwalker]

Grid based Turn Based Battle support was added in official release. Supports both square and hex grids. Though does not support creatures who take more then one cell out of the box.