Any updates?

[mewmew]

Curious to see DGEngine continue to develop, especially as it has a very clean data-driven approach; which is thus far lacking from other engine re-implementations.

I know you posted a road-map earlier on, is this still the rough course of the project? Is there anything that the community could be invited to contribute on?

• make engine generic enough to load levels / game assets other than Diablo's (done)
• do the same for player textures (next - not major as most of the work was done for levels)
• add some hardcoded levels + quests to test the game
• implement enemy AI (for swords/enemies that don't throw missiles)
• Another thing I want to do is create a gamefiles folder that uses freely available game assets but is still Diablo (same quests, town folk, enemies). Was thinking of adding some of flare's game assets as a proof of concept.

Happy coding!
Robin

Hi Robin,

As you know, devilution was released some time ago. It got a lot of people excited (including me), so I figured I could stop releasing anything new since people had something else to entertain themselves with.

I'm still working on it privately. Now with devilution, I can see how many things are done in the original, so I've made some progress on some stuff from the list above:

• implemented gamma as in the original + shortcuts to increase/decrease it (using shaders).
• added all the levels (1-16) dumped from devilution.
• see how the text split worked in the original + scroll speeds and update the files so that the final result is the same.
• change gold/blue/red colors to use palette transformations like in the original (they were hardcoded in the code) - now the colors are exactly the same and not an approximation.
• improve items (gold image changes depending on the number of gold pieces) - make it generic so that it can be used for other stuff.
• ability to accumulate gold when picking it from the floor until it reaches that gold slot's capacity.
• right click gold to remove pieces from it.
• initial automap implementation.
• many small improvements

near roadmap:

• spells - initial implementation
• finish automap

I've been working privately because it's faster this way. With devilution, things changed as stuff I thought were complicated because they involved some research on how they worked are now simpler. The long term goal is to have a playable game with all the basic features done.

Until the project reaches a near final version (or close to it in terms of base features that are present in the original), it's hard to bring in contributions from others. The contributions that were more useful for me were the ones that explained how things worked (like the font, automap tips you gave me, CEL implementations other people did).
Some of the features listed above were implemented by refactoring existing code (more generic) and using it in more places - as I wrote it it's easier for me to see patterns for code reuse.

I wasn't planning on releasing anything until next year. I want the next release to be fully playable (even if some things are missing - missiles/spells). But load/save, buy/sell, enemy battles, quests should be done before the next release.

[predator8bit]

Another thing I want to do is create a gamefiles folder that uses freely available game assets but is still Diablo (same quests, town folk, enemies). Was thinking of adding some of flare's game assets as a proof of concept.

This could be really useful for a HD texture mod/pack too which could compliment the original assets!