Life In The Frontier 2024 (The road to the final release)

[BeeTLe BeTHLeHeM]

Hello, everyone!

After nearly 10 years I'm ready to start working on my OXP again, and this time should be the last - in the sense that I want to release, in the next future, a finalized version.

I had (and I have) many ideas, and the good people who worked on the OXP during my absence had other ideas (phkb, MassiveLocked, Norby and Cholmondely with so much enthusiam), so there's a great amount of stuff to reassess, integrate and eventually improve. I don't want to put away their work, on the contrary I will re-read the codebase to see if I can learn something new (I'm sure of it).

The main goal is still the same: provide the player something to fill his stops to the various space stations of the Oolite universe, and to build a way to insert more content and flavour into the game.

In the old versions we had a choose-your-own-adventure style interface, to visit directly the main point of interests aboard a station. Then I implemented a BBS inspired to Elite:Frontier. I'm going to reread and rewrite the code to add something more, in small steps.

This time the main inspiration are text adventures (interactive fiction), roguelikes and dungeon crawlers. The Oolite interface is limited but I can put in the menu some movement actions, to allow the player to move inside a map. On the map will be present the point of interests (POI), and the player would interact with them when it is in front of them.

For now, I've written a basic prototype. One single map, representing one floor, Ship Maintenance, where the player hangar is located. The map is this:

basic-floor-map.png (2.06 KiB) Viewed 334 times

As you can see, the number sign character is a wall, the dot is a free space (corridor), and the letters are labels for the POIs: h for hangar, e for elevator, s for storage, d for docks, m for maintenance corridors.

You start in front of the hangar (this is set in the properties of the floor, more on this later) and you can move along the "dots". The screen tells you where you can go and if there's something in the immediate vicinity (in front, at left, at right).
The only interactive POI, for now, is the hangar, that quits the navigation phase. The other POIs are disabled.

Maps can be of any size, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matter is the path you can walk along, the POIs, and the start position and facing.

You can try it if you want. It's very barebones.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z_rGM0 ... sp=sharing

Where do we go from here?

- enabling the elevator to allow changing floors. Therefore, multiple floors with maps and other POIs, to recreate the initial layout.

- enabling interactions with POIs. Once you "enter" a POI, it should display the original interface used in the OXP. I will integrate that part so you'll have bookshops, museums, churches et cetera as they were. Exiting the POI the player will be put on the map again, ready to go.

- adding a map screen that show the current map level layout and a list of the POIs for reference.

- different layouts for different stations types or systems variables (like TL, economy, government). More or less floors, more or less facilities, different POIs.

- expanding the system to other OXP. There are so many good OXP that adds new stations, and I would like to put a way to search for external custom layouts, with their own POIs. I want to put a system to hook an interaction to a function in the same OXP, to find a way to hook to OXP function to get their features seamlessly connected to the map navigation.

This is the main roadmap - and it will take time to implement everything. Unfortunately during the week I spend nearly all day commuting and working, so I mostly focus on the OXP during the weekends (with a little bit of monday and friday).

And there's more.

Once I have a working system and a complete station layout, I'll bring back the BBS as a POIs in the station, like a series of Terminals on the various floors.
Furthermore, I can pickup again the random encounters feature, since they can be integrated into the map navigation, starting with simple things and thinking about more complex events.
And then... station quests with temporary procedural maps.
The last thing it's the RPG aspect, but that's a thing that I would reather leave at the last step since it would be the more complicated thing to manage. Let's see how development will go.

I thank you for reading all of this, and to bearing with my long disappearances from the forum. I thank everyone who tried the OXP and especially those who tinkered with it. I'm honored.

Next time I'll talk about the data structure I'm working for storing maps and POIs.

[hiran]

Adding interactive fiction via mission OXPs sounds very powerful. I like that idea.

When I mulled over rhe same I concluded it would be easier to get good content if the engine were not built from scratch but use something already known in the interactive fiction community.

While there are some open source choices the best prospect was IMHO Ink.
https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

Yet I could not make out how to package it into OXP.

[Captain Beatnik]

I like the idea and I'm looking forward to the release of the finalized version of the OXP.

[BeeTLe BeTHLeHeM]

Regarding interactive fiction, there are good engines out there, but I prefer to adopt an easier approach as a compromise with the game limitations.

The basic concept is building a dialogue, or an event, as a series of blocks that define various parameters:
- the title
- the description
- the choices

Title and description act as the context of what is happening, while the choices allow for different outcomes. Every choice is associated with one or more requirements (to make it appear in the list) and actions (the consequences of the action or a reference to another block).

The same thing happens with the exploration: you can choose between going forward, turning left or right. Every choice executs a function that re-position the player, and start again the exploration block changing the description (according to what the player sees now). If there is an interaction, the action will run the block belonging to that point of interest. And so on.

I've written a parser that manages the data for events/interactions/exploration, and I'm adding the various action while I add stuff to the prototype.

The data structure I'm using now for the station it's the following:

Code: Select all

{
    startingFloor: number, // on which floor the player appear when disembarking
    startingLocation: string, // label of the poi adjacent to the player when disembarking.
    floors: array, // the list of the station floors
}

The floor array:

Code: Select all

{
    floor: number, // floor reference id (0 - lowest)
    name: string, // the name or title of the floor
    corridorDesc: string, // generic description to use when the player walk along the map
    map: array, // the map of the floor (as I shown in the last post)
    poiCatalog: object, // a list of the point of interests on this floor
}

The corridorDesc property could be an array, so it would choose a random text from it.

The point of interests in the poiCatalog are referenced by their label, a single letter used in the map, i.e. "h" for hangar (but it's arbitrary after all).
The poiCatalog object:

Code: Select all

label: {
    name: string, // the name of the poi
    desc: string, // the description of the poi from outside
    enter: boolean, // player can interact (enter) with this poi?
    enterTrue: string, // if enter == true, this is the relative choice text
    exitFacing: number, // what direction the player is facing when it exits the poi (1 - up, 2 right, 3 - down, 4 - left)
    exitPos: { x: number, y: number }, // coords of the player when it exits the poi
    call: string, // the js method to eval and execute when selecting the "enterTrue" choice
}

The startingLocation property at the beginning is a reference to the corresponding item in the poiCatalog, so I can retrieve the player facing and position and put it on the map.

This structure will be eventually modified to suit the next features, both for a single floor, for every floor or for the station as a whole.

Next I'm going to implement the elevator, where the player can see a list of the floors (that I'll read from the array). Every floor will execute a function that will put the player on that floor outside the elevator tile (using exitFacing and exitPos for the "e" point of interest). In this way the elevator will work automatically for every station layout.

This week I will expand the prototype with a three-floors array as an example. And after this I'll start with the interactions with the point of interests.

[Cholmondely]

There is a detailed description of a Feudal States oxp “Royal Hunting Lodge” if it is of any help (see our wiki page on the lodge). And another of the Commies oxp “SLAPU”.

I’ll need to check our Oolite Fiction, but I suspect that they are the only detailed descriptions of oxp station interiors.

Phkb’s “Hermitage” oxp might well have consequences for a Rock Hermit interior (and he also has a recent alternative outer model for RH’s).