Interessante progetto, anche su kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gavan/voxel-quest), che a breve arriverà in alpha.
Qui un video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0ul1674F1k
Si tratta di un RPG, roguelike, tattico, a turni, in cui ogni cosa è procedurale (storia, mondo, textures, ecc...) e gira su un voxel-engine completamente moddabile.
Il gioco avrà uno storytelling dinamico, tra le features principale:
The generated stories are not simply a collection of random events, but take into account classic storytelling mechanisms (the hero’s journey, conflict, character archetypes, etc) while avoiding common pitfalls (plot holes, deus ex machina, predictability, telling rather than showing, etc). Most of these things are achieved with either abstracted properties (especially in the case of character archetypes and personalities), or with predefined transitions that play out a bit like cards in some board games (i.e. Spartacus). The fact that everything is driven by an AI ensures there are no logical fallacies in the plot, and that many emergent, surprising, and sensible things occur in a playthrough.
Le caratteristiche base saranno queste:
- Easy to learn, hard to master.
- Only one difficulty level, which is very challenging but not unfairly so.
- No grinding, no repetition.
- Always engage the user mentally (never a "dull" moment).
- Avoid boring chores, tasks, and cumbersome interface.
- Isolate learning into small chunks - users should learn as they play (without annoying / forced tutorials).
- Simple, but infinitely extensible mechanics in the spirit of most collectible card games.
- No unlocking or accumulation - progression is always in the playthrough, not between the playthroughs.
- Risk vs. reward is always heavily emphasized.
- Die fast, level fast (in the spirit of most roguelikes).
- Deterministic gameplay - always choose skill over chance when designing game mechanics.
E' sviluppato da una sola persona, che annovera tra i suoi RPG preferiti Fallout 1, 2 e Ultima V, VI, il che fa ben sperare.
Il pledge che dà accesso anche all'alpha costa appena 10$...
Lo sviluppatore ha fatto un Q&A su RPG Codex e Reddit, qui di seguito domande e risposte:
Da RPG Codex
JCD: Very cool that you've decided to register here. How long did it take for you to develop the engine? How much original research did you have to make, and what gave you this idea? This is likely the most original engine I have ever seen, I'm very impressed, and I would love to see it in action. I don't see any demos showing any actual gameplay though, not even any characters in the world. Is the game still before the stage where you'll be adding gameplay to the existing engine? Good luck with your kickstarter; I won't be donating, because I don't believe in paying for nonexistent products, but I will definitely buy your game once it hits the shelves.
Hi jcd - I've been developing the engine fulltime since August 2013. But really, I should count all of the other engines I built as well because each on led up to this one - I started programming about 20 years ago and working with GPUs intensively in 2004. This is honestly the first engine I've built where the code and results turned out beautiful enough that I had no desire whatsoever to hit the restart button (and at this point, I don't have that luxury - when I was building engines as a hobby, I could just learn/improve and did not have to answer to anyone). As far as original research - its all "original" in that I rarely refer to any outside sources, I'm self taught and so stubborn I usually code things myself instead of looking to existing source (I'm not dumb though - I use many common libraries including C++'s standard libraries, OpenGL, and all the stuff to take care of low level things I don't care to (and should not) implement myself). The idea for this current engine sprung from my love of isometric games and pixel art. I wondered, would it be possible to automate the creation of pixel art, even following the standard rules of coloring, outlining, etc? Well, it is possible, but the results did not look great with the effort I put in so I broke the rules and decided to use a full color palette, allow use of blurring, etc. As far as gameplay, everything is inspired by past games in one way or another. This past year has been spent mostly putting in the functionality just to get to the point of gameplay - getting the UI working, pathfinding, generating the world in which entities can move around, and starting to work on the AI that controls them. You will probably see a lot more in terms of real gameplay this coming year. On the plus side, a huge amount of content creation is handled. As you can see on the VQ website and elsewhere, it can generate entire world maps with logical road, city, and house placement - I also have caves in but it does not look good at this point (I am still working on better ways to distinguish layers, which is difficult in a perspectiveless (isometric) viewpoint). No worries on donating, I can sympathize with that - and thanks for your interest. :)
ERYFKRAD: Four questions, Gavan Woolery : 1.) From what I've followed of this, the idea is that even the very storytelling aspect will be procedural, i. e. AI acting on its own whims, as such, from where the story arises. Will there be some provision to make a more linear story? 2.) This seems very fantasy-oriented at the moment, how easy do you think it will be to change the setting into, say, sci-fi, or lovecraftian stuff. 3.) Could you elaborate what you intend to do about dialog and dialog trees? I'm not very clear on that aspect of your vision. 4.) Demo when pl0x. Otherwise I'm looking forward to this.
ERYFKRAD - To answer your questions: 1) I had no plans to implement a linear storyline, to be honest, but if there is enough community demand for such things I'll definitely add it in (otherwise, as usual I will leave such things to modders). 2) Here is the funny thing - I myself kind of hate fantasy. Well not hate, but I'm just worn out by fantasy games. I wanted to make it a post-apocalyptic game in the vein of Fallout, but more cyber-punky, but I thought the easiest generation would be to do a Fantasy setting. In fact, I'm still debating changing the setting, along with the name. In retrospect, doing generation for anything else at this point would not be very hard - the basic modeling principles I use to construct fantasy buildings could easily be changed around to make more sci-fi buildings, Edwardian style buildings, modern housing, etc. Again, I can definitely see the community changing this stuff around. 3) Good question. Dialogue is very crude, not English sentences like you might expect, but English tokens (words) combined together to form "facts" (which can in fact be "lies" - which is up to the NPC to figure out based on standard logical deduction techniques what is true, what is not, and what cannot be determined (in which case, its left up to the trustworthiness of the NPC in question, and how trusting the party is receiving the info). This is actually not new science, it is based heavily on something called logical programming, the flagship language being Prolog here. These techniques have been used for all sorts of AI, just never successfully in games to my knowledge. I've never been much of an academic, but I studied under one of the people who built the first autonomous vehicles for DARPA, and during that time my vision of AI greatly changed. I suspect many programmers never even get the chance to delve into many types of AI beyond the most common things like pathfinding. Anyhow (sorry for the tangent) - you can construct sentences with these tokens (even with autosuggest as to what words the system would accept following the ones you've input, so there is no ambiguity in the grammar and syntax). So, you present facts into the system - lets see how this works (i'm going to write psuedocode here, but anyone should be able to understand it by the context of the english words). Let's make some facts (psuedocode followed by my comments in parentheses) apple:red (this means that "An apple is red" evaluates to true - it is a fact apple:fruit (and apple is fruit...the amazing thing here is that the computer does not need to know what these words actually mean - you are just forming relationships between arbitrary strings of letters). banana:fruit banana:yellow fruit:food (fruit is food) is(food)? (here we are running a query to the system - what is food? and it would return the following list of results:) [apple, banana] is(red,food)? (what is red and is food?) apple now, I never specified directly that an apple was food. It applies a process called "backward chaining" to determine that an apple is food. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining) - this is based on a standard logic theorem called modus ponens. apple->fruit->food This simple rule is actually very powerful and the foundation of logical inference. these are simple rules and operators but more complex ones can be used or defined -- from another example I used on reddit: protects(shepherds,sheep) (a shepherd protects their sheep) kills(dragons,sheep) (a dragon kills (eats) sheep) killsOnPaymentOf(dragons,hero, 20 gold) (a hero kills a dragon for 20 gold - these rules are simplified but gives you the idea. The functions that define these rules can either be defined explicitly within the AI system or recursively using the grammar of existing words, functions, and phrases) Each turn, the AI runs a score maximization algorithm. Every NPC, monster, whatever tries to maximize their score by fullfilling as many goals as they can (their highest scoring goal is almost always to stay alive, but not always - sometimes they might sacrifice their life, i.e. to protect their children) So, here the shepherd predicts, by facts in the system, that a dragon will kill its sheep, which would lower his score since his goal is to protect the sheep. The shepherd would explore available actions to change the predicted course of action - in this case a dead dragon can't eat sheep, so he would hire a hero to kill the dragon). All of these facts are evaluated against proximity, availability (is a hero around?), etc. It sounds complex, and even CPU intensive, but it runs fast on a few iterations of predicting. As with chess, you can adjust how deep the system makes predictions in order to speed up computation, at the cost of slightly less effective AI. In this case, even one level of prediction makes all the difference. Of course, if you don't specify all the rules correctly, hilarity ensues. There will be a lot of WTF moments early on, I assure you. :) So, when you construct dialogue, you really just present new "facts" into the system, or query existing facts (you,job)? (what is your job). NPCs can decide if it works in their favor to lie about something, if they have the type of personality that might lie. Similarly you can lie to NPCs. Want to impress a love interest? (me,wealthy). :) Also, as for question #4: I'm debating when to put out the demo. Early builds will have little to no gameplay, so I'm wondering if I should hold off until there is sufficient stuff to play with, so as not to hurt my image.
ERYFKRAD: So in effect, the fact-association process means that, during gameplay, you'd be typing in queries and receiving answers? Similar to older games like Ultima, with the Name, Job, Bye stuff? That's actually what I was trying to ask, how would a dialog with the NPC look like in game. EDIT: As for the demo, maybe toss out a general simple 1-3 level dungeon, with enough variations or something? P. S. You may want to put a disclaimer for the Kickstarter video regarding the deadpan-delivery. :D
yes it will be a text parser like Ultima 6, but with far more keywords, phrases, etc - and no predefined conversations. The output (i.e. answers to your questions) will be as crude as the text parse input initially, although I may add some "syntactic sugar" to make it more readable (i.e. pad with words like "the", "is", etc)
JCD: I think you shouldn't do that, I saw your design doc, and if you're planning to make a game that will feature short, intense playthroughs (like stonesoup dungeon crawl for example), adding a linear story is a very bad idea - it limits the freedom the player has and it will get boring and annoying after many playthroughs. That dialogue system is great, reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, where the best aspects of the game emerge from simple rules like that. It looks to me like it's a mini-expert system a la Cyc. BTW. What will modding allow for? I saw some basic modelling in your kickstarter video, what will be able to design, exactly? Will we be able to create our own scenery, items, buildings? I'm guessing characters are possible since that's what was in the video, but can we also design our own animations/behaviours for them?
jcd yeah, currently no plans for a linear story, and I think community demand will ultimately lean towards no linear story support, so it will most likely be left up to modders. Thanks - interesting you mention Cyc, one of the few systems I remember reading about many years ago. Modding will really allow for anything, it depends how deep you want to delve into the source. Superficial changes are easy, for coders familiar with GLSL. Its almost like working with a super fancy graphing calculator - it really is just math equations that govern everything. Aside from this, people who don't know how to code will be able to manipulate tons of stuff simply by editing property sheets and AI rules (weight, color, material, stas, etc for items, personalities and habits of monsters and NPC classes, etc). Inventory items will, for now, just be raw bitmaps so you can make and insert your own types of items pretty easily. The engine is not really a silver bullet and would be best suited for isometric, turn based games - I actually wrote it with the intention that people could use it as a virtual substitute for any type of game that involved miniatures and tilesets or boards - war games, pen and paper RPGs, etc, in addition to everything else. For characters, right now it will just be posing. Animation is a very simple extension of that (posing with keyframes, then interpolating), but I'm not going to do animation for simplicity of content development, and performance, for the time being (again, think of them like miniatures that are stuck in one or more poses). Additionally, it is not limited to humanoids, the editor will allow any bone structure, and probably automated ways of clothing them (nothing too complex though like cloth simulation). As it stands, the character editor was written in one week!! I was amazed, because I thought it would take a month just to get that far. Future changes should not take long, hopefully. Also, I should add that in addition to whatever you can manipulate in code, if the functionality is not already there, modders will likely introduce more tools for the average user to automate the construction and placement of various shapes. I have seen this in the past with mods for Minecraft and other games.
JCD: So in other words, we'll be able to play D&D and WH40k games with this, it's like a versatile virtual tabletop?
Exactly :) I'm planning to implement a ruleless mode where players can just move around pieces with their friends, roll virtual dice, and draw from a virtual deck of cards. Most of these things are not mentioned elsewhere - although I think I may have hinted at them in my March video IIRC. Other features, if not in place, can be added in as usual.
Qui trovate il resto
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/voxel-quest-voxel-based-roguelike-rpg-and-engine.94666/page-2
Da Reddit
With that incredible level of detail, what tools will be available for making the voxels easy to manipulate on a decent scale? Is this a world players could walk around in 1st person view? Are there things that interact with each other similarly to Redstone/pistons/etc.? Could I use this game as an awesome tool for being as d&d DM? Can you elaborate a bit on how scenarios are generated? Is your favorite color green? Green is objectively the best color since is the most easily distinguished color for humans.
Thanks! The engine is developer-oriented, but developers can make tools for everybody else (if there is something lacking from what I put in). You can pretty easily throw in some code to generate, place, and scale geometry like spheres, cones, metaballs, superellipsoids, whatever. 1st person - could be done, theoretically (project each chunk to a stereographic 2D map, then fold/unfold it into worldspace). Redstone/pistons/etc - I think it would be a great idea to put in that functionality eventually (or let the modders do it) :) Scenarios are generated emergently based on the state of the world. This uses tried-and-true AI techniques like score maximization, pathfinding, proposition logic, etc. Basically, entities try to do the smartest move at any given moment, just as if they were playing chess. Only, the rules are changed to be much more complicated than chess. The end result is that you get entities that are trying to maximize their "scores" by fullfilling motivations - which can be arbitrarily defined (get an artifact, accumulate x amount of wealth, etc). These things are "backwards chained" so that they act emergently. Example: a person is sick, and they need some medicine to heal. But the medicine is really expensive - costs more money than they have. So they need to some how accumulate the money to buy the medicine to cure the sickness. So they need to do a job to accumulate the money to buy the medicine to cure the sickness. Only top level rules are defined, AI figures out the rest. (this is not new, its existed in languages like Prolog for decades, just has never been used in games for some reason). For DnD - yes! this was actually its primary purpose initially - to allow players to simulate whatever pen and paper rpg they wanted without having to buy miniatures and tilesets. My favorite color probably is green, I guess? :)
Awww yiss. This is definitely a game I'll be paying attention to. I think it'd be great to be able to loosely draw up a map for DnD that I can pretty much use for NPC interaction. For that purpose, would there be any way for me to create a sort of large scale event based theme to a world? For example, if I was trying to create a story that has events that affect NPC's and dialogue so that they would have motivations/actions that are relevant to my story, would it work? I'm having a bit of difficulty wording this, so let me know if you get what I mean.
Yes - you can actually edit these rules very easily - almost like a collection of english words. Its mostly about making relationships with english words (apple:fruit, fruit:food, is apple:food? yes - see examples in languages like Prolog of how this works (basically follows classic rules of logic)). In this manner, you could setup an event, and properties of the event, and this would determine how people react (i.e. spawn a dragon, dragons:kill sheep, shepherds:protect sheep, shepherds:conflicting interests with dragons, shepherds: hire hero to kill dragons)
So, I understand how story elements are defined similarly to pointers/variables, but I'm a little foggy on what kinds of categories these can fit into. Is it possible to have specific areas/items tagged as story elements? For example, I could zone out a city with affiliations and traits. I would tag churches with different religions and such that are identified with tags pertaining to certain moralities and other character traits. I'd designate a shady area of a town as being where shady people congregate, etc... Do NPCs have ties to locations(house, job, etc.), or could I possibly create a web of these things by individually designating houses and such for them myself? Will there be a time variable where characters are more likely to do things at certain times of the day/week/etc.? I'm also considering giving NPCs attributes like reliability which would be defined as how precise they are with sticking to their schedule, or inebriation which would make them more likely to do certain actions they wouldn't normally do. Is that possible?
NPCs will do the most sensible things based on the way the environment around them is defined - it is implicit, rather than explicit, meaning you only define top level rules, the rest is figured out automatically. There will be a whole bunch of things predefined in script/data files, but not hard-coded into the engine. You can go through and modify these things to fit your needs, or build on top of them. You won't need to write rules to figure out complex stuff, most of that will be done in the engine. For example, prioritizing based on the proximity of the circumstance and severity, and finding a path to an object, and so forth - all this is figured out by the engine. NPCs won't have schedules, per say. But they might have things like "when(exhausted):sleep, when(business hours):work job, etc -- and they might work around these things. If there is a fire in their house, they won't try to sleep there, even if they are exhausted. Everything pretty much boils down to satisfying needs and avoiding danger. Needless to say, I can already see many hilarious, really bad interactions will happen just because I forgot to define something (i.e. they just let their house burn down and go sleep in the neighbors house).
Intervista
http://cliqist.com/2014/10/19/gavan-woolery-voxel-based-rpg-roguelike-sim-hybrid-voxel-quest/
Tra le altre cose dice che ha ricevuto anche proposte da investitori, ma che non è certo possan andare in porto. Il gioco/engine si farà, in un modo o nell'altro, ma non vuole dar efalse speranze e ricorda cxhe il 90% dei progetti di questo tipo fallisce.
Cliqist : What is Voxel Quest? What makes it special?
Gavan Woolery : Voxel Quest is two things: a game and an engine. Most people would say “pick one” but I am just building a game and the engine is a side-effect. It is a fairly unique engine so it would be a shame not to open it up and share it with others. Most of all, I am only one person and I probably cannot build anything nearly as cool as other people might be able to with the engine. Keep in mind many games were conceived as mods, including Portal, DoTA, Team Fortress, Counterstrike, Gary’s Mod, etc.
On the game side, the simplest comparison I can make is Dwarf Fortress. But it has a few game modes, including a sandbox/ruleless mode designed for people who want to easily implement their favorite tabletop game, where you can play a virtual dungeon master and spawn items / enemies / events, place characters, place buildings, and so forth. These two modes are pretty closely tied together as the tools I use to test are the same tools used in the sandbox. The primary difference between the game and sandbox mode is that you are passing some control to the AI when you play in game-mode.
Cliqist : Of the games you list as inspirations; which one has had the largest impact on you, and how?
Gavan Woolery : By far, Ultima. It was a game that consumed my childhood, and probably had the most reinstalls of any game I’ve played. I started the series on 5, but probably most enjoyed 7 (Part 1). The thing I enjoyed about 7 Part 1 is that it did not force you on a linear path (in Part 2, you were restricted to certain areas at a time). Ultima was a game far ahead of its time, that had far more interactivity than many modern games.
vBulletin® v3.6.4, Copyright ©2000-2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.