Release Tales of Maj'Eyal

[NearTao]

Repo download link:

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=ToME

Here's the project's webpage if you want to check it out:

http://te4.org/

 

This has been a long time coming... and still not exactly playable, but I will continue to beat on it until it is a full release worthy.  Consider this release Beta... you have been warned!  This game is released with support for a minimum display of 800x600, I had to do some... not so nice things to the engine to get it to work at 800x480.  I am thinking about the possibility of making changes to support either 800x480, or possibly 640x480 and seeing if I can get this work pushed upstream.

An excerpt from the description:

Tales of Maj’Eyal (ToME) is a free, open source roguelike RPG, featuring tactical turn-based combat and advanced character building.  Play as one of many unique races and classes in the lore-filled world of Eyal, exploring random dungeons, facing challenging battles, and developing characters with your own tailored mix of abilities and powers.  With a modern graphical and customisable interface, intuitive mouse control, streamlined mechanics and deep, challenging combat, Tales of Maj’Eyal offers engaging roguelike gameplay for the 21st century.

 

The continent of Maj’Eyal lives in a relative peace.  After millennia of war the orcs are extinct, the advanced races have allied together, and the evils of magic have been repressed.  But there are still untamed forests, cursed lands, marauding bandits, sealed dungeons of undead, and whispers spread of hidden cults of mages.  Some even say the orcs are not all dead, and muster their strength in dark places.

 

You are an adventurer, seeking your fortune in the open world, investigating ruins and mysteries in search of riches and powers.  Explore a continent still scarred by the terrible Spellblaze from ages past, teeming with wild beasts, monsters, trolls and giants.  Delve through dark dungeons infested by armies of undead, demonic monstrosities and hideous horrors.  Uncover world changing secrets, from relics of the ancient and all-powerful Sher’Tul race to veiled cities of magic and concealed psionic beings.  Fight with skill and care against undying necromancers, towering dragons, primeval forces, arcane demons and world-threatening powers.

 

Take part in an epic fantasy adventure like no other, engaging both your imagination and your intelligence, demanding thought and attention to succeed.  Winner of the Roguelike of the Year award 2010, 2011 and 2012, Tales of Maj’Eyal is backed by constant development and an active, friendly community that have together invested over 340 years of total playtime.  209 players are playing right now – why not join them?

You can find a board, docs and all sorts of other useful information there.

At any rate, as a beta release, things are bound to be wrong... here's my top list of things to resolve at this time:

• Likely the first thing you'll notice, is the horrible mouse cursor.  I'm going to be investigating this as one of my first tasks to see if a newer version of GLShim will help, or if it needs a code rewrite.  I have tried fixing it by switching the cursor mode to use X's mouse cursor, and it exhibits its own brand of problems.
• You'll also notice that a lot of text is small.  I did this intentionally so that I could get as much to fit on the screen as possible, but if you revert it to 'normal' size then it flows off the screen.  I imagine a lot of the dialog boxes need to be rewritten in Lua to allow for scroll bars, but I'm not a Lua developer so this will be slow work for me to dig through to get started.
• You will also notice that the character creation sheet is flowing off the screen, and essentially makes it impossible to make a new character.  I imagine I can resolve this by writing some more Lua to shrink the size down to our 800x480 screen size, but again I'm not a Lua developer and haven't figured out where to start with these fixes yet.
• The ToME version is 1.1.3, it's a few months old because that's when I started this project, and until just now I couldn't run it without codeblocks being mounted.  It's now free of this restriction, but I wanted to get a stable enough release together before I started upgrading components.
• So far I have only tested this on a 1ghz system, and it is known to not work with GPU drivers other than the 4.03... 

Things you can do to help:

• Play the game, document bugs and if possible any workarounds you have found.
• If you're a Lua developer, reach out to me, I'd be more than happy to have some support updating screens that have issues.
• I have a CC Pandora I will be testing on shortly, but if anybody has a Rebirth, please let me know how well it plays or issues found.

Latest Updates:

• Fixed a very dumb issue with the application space
• Switched from release quality flag to beta quality in the PXML.xml

 

[NearTao]

Yes, updated already :/

Not even released for 30 minutes...

1) Changed PXML release to beta

2) Fixed application space issue

 

[Xaeo]

YES!!!

I've just started this on my home pc, so excited to have it on the Pandora now.

I shall download it from the repo after work today and let you know some thoughts on it. I think I have the rebirth edition so I can let you know how it behaves on that.

Thanks so much for porting this!

-Xaeo

 

[NearTao]

YES!!!

I've just started this on my home pc, so excited to have it on the Pandora now.

I shall download it from the repo after work today and let you know some thoughts on it. I think I have the rebirth edition so I can let you know how it behaves on that.

Thanks so much for porting this!

-Xaeo

Don't get too excited just yet... it's definitely going to take some time to work this into shape

But yeah... been playing on the PC off and on for a few years and just to see it working on the Pandora is great.  I figured it was about time to get it uploaded at least.

 

[_jr_]

Good engine, but I lost interest after Dargod added online features.

 

[NearTao]

So... comparing to the PC version... I have a hunch that the cursor issue is at least related to the hybrid touch screen/mouse input.  I have verified that on Windows if you use a touch screen the cursor disappears and if you use the mouse it stays on.

The behavior I am seeing on the Pandora is that the mouse is visible as you move the mouse, but that it is immediately getting hidden.  I think I will be looking at the code that hides the cursor and see if I can get something started that way.

 

[klapse]

There is also the possibility to render to 1024x600 and use omapdss to scale to 800x480 as was done with Advanced Strategic COmmand.

http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/16105-advanced-strategic-command/

Maybe ptitSeb can help you with this.

 

[NearTao]

I am still trying to work out the cursor issue first, but I think you're right... it is quite possible that a 1024x600 resolution scaled to 800x480 might be far easier to implement than changing a lot of Lua code...

Decisions decisions

 

[NearTao]

Latest Update 

- The engine is now rendering at 1024x600 and being scaled to 800x480

- This seems to have resolved most text issues, please post where you find problems here

 

Known Issues

- Mouse is wonkier, the cursor is still only visible when moving it and now it is offset due to UI scaling

- Older 1.1.3 release, needs to be updated to 1.2.3

- Action Bar is visible, but a large portion is rendered off screen

 

I've got a good chunk of work to do, because it appears that the cursor is rendered to a different layer... so uhm... it appears to be using the 800x480 coordinates, while the engine is rendering at 1024x600 now.  So math needs to be applied to adjust all of this mess.  I also had to do some odd things to get the gl view port to scale properly... so it's possible that the math is wrong elsewhere... meh.

 

On the plus side though, everything seems to be rendering in a much friendlier way now and it is possible to see at least 95% of the content now from what I tested.  There appear to be a few scaling artifacts ( a few odd lines/shadows ) but nothing I am going to be too concerned about resolving yet.  At least you can navigate a large amount of the game with TAB to get around menus for now.  And what the heck... this is still a beta release right

 

Currently my next plan of attack is going to be to compile/incorporate the latest glshim from ptitSeb just on the off chance it may resolve a rendering issue or two.  From there I am torn between updating to the latest source which may fix some errors, but introduce others... or fighting with the mouse cursor to get it into a more usable state.

 

I know this is still far from optimal... but any feedback is appreciated!