On Friday, October 11, 1996 at 3:00:00 PM UTC+8, Peter J. Vessenes wrote:

Sorry about the cross post, but I think that all three apply -- I've been rolling over the idea of writing a quake/hack total conversion of quake. (That is, something along the lines of nethack, adom, moria, angband, omega for
you non hack players in the quake groups.) Of course, the major difference would be the significantly improved graphics. : ).

I have some thoughts, I'd be interested in other input.

Thoughts
--------

1. We have to lose the turn based movement scheme, unfortunately. There's
Just no way to keep any of the bonuses of a game like Quake while
enforcing turn based movement. If you can come up with a proposal to
keep it, let me know. (I.e. if you move a certain distance from your
previous turn's start, then a new turn begins..hmmm..)

2. Clearly we need more text in the game. Two thoughts -- One: Just use
the system style messages that already appear. Two: Create 26 plus
small .tri files, one for each letter, plus punctuation, and
instantiate them for words. Cooler, but probably slower.

3. More monsters.

4. Level generation: I think it's pretty obvious that we can't do this
one on the fly. I imagine a shell program that generates the
dungeons when you begin a new game with your character. Or, perhaps,
one that generates pieces of it, so every eighth level down or so,
you need to give it a few minutes. Slightly more annoying, but less
upfront investment.

4a. Auto Light sourcing: If we follow most hack derivatives, then we
should blindly light almost everywhere not specifically considered
"dark." On the other hand, since we have this sexy new engine that
allows more characters than " " and "." for visualization, maybe a
little experimentation would be apropos.

5. Inventory additions -- Raven software is reportedly adding stuff like
this to their quake mod. My feeling on this is that it would be okay
to have more generic icons for items if we could substantially increase
the number of items. For instance, hexen's 8 to 10 items clearly
won't cut it in a rogue environment where we are used to almost
thousands of items, and the enhanced gameplay they provide.

6. Gameplay compatibility -- This is the big one. I think that the
Quake engine could be succesfully used in this scenario, although it
would take some modification. I'm interested in other people's
opinions. (Volunteers are also welcomed!)

7. <Your thoughts here> I'm looking for other issues everyone would see
in putting together something of this nature. Try and follow up in
the newsgroups if at all possible. Thanks!

At any rate, thanks for the time.

- Peter

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