I have been caring about older browser RPGs for decades and from the developper side, it always seemed the most convenient method to store maps as plain textr files,
each line representing a row or the map, using symbols like letters representing TERRAIN.
Even if the whole map is huge and not split up in some game, editing only parts and composing it for the game makes sense.
I wrote editors in PHP so that you can edit such maps having a GUI that is similar to PAINT (even mark areas, drag and drop).
Besides these maps you store special objects in a database with coords, type, data.
If I were evil, I could even transfer maps from one game to another one this way, translating terrain types.
So for this project, the ASCII maps from the walkthroughs can directly be put into files that the game reads to display a map.
This was kinda the easiest piece of work. You just have to make sure they cant move West from Sector 0 etc
Right now, im wondering if we should artificially mimic the old platform behaviour where client=server where you could SAVE games because saving the game was cruicial.
It normally makes no sense on a platform where data is saved permanently anyway - also its hard to explain from an RPGing perspective...how can a party save itself?
But it is humans who play games, wake up and load a game in some state (maybe) in the evening.
Another difference is the User Account. We just do not have physical devices around representing those disks and it would be too weird to ask the user to insert a disk while they are using a browser to play a game. So what we can do is associate our user accounts with a c-64 game-state, physical device. Possibly making it possible to duplicate them.
But I also would like to have something like a TOP LIST (of characters). Duplicates would be no good there.
We will have to find out by Playing if the game is much fun without SAVING states. If necessary we could invent a feature where you can save snapshots of parties that can be restored
(and suddenly all the high scores change?)
I planned to be very flexible with versions. For now, I prefixed all maps with 1_ meaning our WORLD1 = Phantasie 1
We can assign the world number to user account (when we create one) and we can easily transfer characters this way later.
I might even add a function to IMPORT characters from emulator snapshots, it seems doable
Right now it takes me about one day to make all the things of 1 undgeon work. I made a tool where I can walk a dungeon map and click one of 10 buttons to define:
"This is the right spot to add a PICKLOCK test of difficulty 90". So future dungeons / worlds might be editable also by other users.
I even planned that each user can have one game world /sandbox) on their own by default where they design their maps.
When I test and compare the online verison versus emulator...we do not have that awsome SOUND. Nowadays, everyone I talk to says they immediately disable sounds in any game they play even if it has modern type music / sound effects. So I wonder whats the point. But if we are so much into tryiing to dive into the old times, we should as well offer an option for the old sounds. I think for browser, the MIDI format was the easierst one to use. Maybe someone comes by to provide such samples later.
As you were worrying about the Netherworld maps...
For the P1 world I only needed the 16 main maps and the 2 additional ones and they are all playable now. you have to cross that river styx using the boatman etc all works fine.
You can walk through all dungeons but only the first two do have functionality right now. Making one dungeon in detail takes me a weekend so it will take quite some time and its more important to make the other parts work more properly.
What I like about this version right now is that you dont have to run to town and hit SAVE to stop playing (or take a snapshot). CLosing browser means you resume just inm that dungeon again next time. You can also log out with that user and log in your other user to play a different party...such things.
Combat: I finally got some images for the party members and monsters. but only 1 image per so I had a rough time because they should somehow move when its their turn in the swquence. Gladly, CSS allows us to create transformations like rotate, and transitions can make such effects appear to be smooth, so I think we do it like this (they would have used such methods back then if these had existed - isnt the party jumping up and down after a victory, too?) Maybe I find the time to optimize the animations later...
I hope I can get a version stable soon so that we can test Phantasie Online. Discussing something you have not seen yet must be pretty hard
And I hope we have some occasional testers/contributors
Bearbeiten
