Tele-Arena Game Engine 1.0 Enters BETA

[daniel_spain]

Tele-Arena Game Engine, a premier game engine toolkit for Sysops has now entered beta status.

what it is...

just a simple game addon in the image of the classic 90s-era tele-arena game that gives sysops the ability to modify their game on-the-fly by adding content
in a live environment without needing to take the bbs down and interrupt all the users online.
gameplay is identical to that of the original, however sysops now have the ability to modify a lot of game parameters within the configurations such as how many items a player can carry, the percentage a monster has to attack when you run by, etc... i tried to think of everything to allow sysops total control of their game.

the editors...

over the years i have created 4 custom flavors of the game, Tele-Arena Classic, Tele-Arena Darkness, Tele-Arena Infernal, and Tele-Arena Warfare.
all these games were built using my own engine and shared the same underlying framework however each one had their own toolkits i used
to build the content so this game is a collection of all those tools combined under a single hood. and they are...

!guiedit ... this command allows opening a gui editor to edit a specific database table (ie !guiedit mon will edit the monster table)
!cmdedit ... this command is a built-in command line editor to make quick database edits (ie !cmdedit itm 23 max 40 will change item 23's max damage to 40)
!mapedit ... this is a walk-and-edit map creation tool used to build maps simply by walking around in an instanced version of the world unaffecting other players)

you can edit all databases to allow complete customization of your world including races and classes... to stay true to the vanilla universe it ships with all 6 races and
8 classes and must maintain a minimum of those numbers but you can edit the existing as well as add up to 2 more of each.

the editors were put in for ease-of-use but if you are comfortable with your own gui sqlite tools you can use those as well just keep in mind the limitations on values
the in-game editors will control and while i have mad every attempt to catch a crash before it happens to prevent it from happening using external
editing sources will not know the boundaries of each field so be wary of this.

out-of-the-box...

right now out of the box is a game world consisting of a fully stocked and playable game including town1, the mountains, the dungeon, and town2, all built by hand using the in-game editors, and with that said, i will be rebuilding a replica of the full original game to ensure i have covered all things like pulling levers, toggling darknesses,
etc... but there will be alot of things sysops may want added, and i am down for that too, i want it to be a fully configurable game engine that will cover everything.

now for those who want to start their own game from scratch you can go with a blank canvas, if the game ever initializes with an empty database, it will create the necessary records needed which are 1 default weapon, 1 default armor, and 1 town room... however if you do this, i also recommend you do it by downloading an empty template from my support bbs because the message files has to reflect this so there are no illegal records being called such as the resurrection room number, etc....

this is a 3-year development project here that actually took a bit longer if you count the restarts and scraps of older prototypes to get to this build.
and im pretty happy with it, but i am just 1 person, there may be features you feel are missing, and that's what this beta is for... to get community input
and build off of it...


major bbs 10 support...

i do not personally have a m10 system online, as i run my own custom core version of wg3 so if anyone wants to throw this thing on a v10 release and see what happens
please let me know, i know a lot of issues have arisen from wg3 -> m10 so it would be good to nip them early and see if i need to make any adjustments internally to facilitate the core changes.

[Kracken]

Hi Dan !

I recall stock TA, there was a switch to turn on light in laby but rather pointless as it was accessible only past the blue rune, which was the only goal..
Felt like an interesting feature for a custom TA, but barely used..

Seems there are no files on telnet://Bbs.arcticzonebbs.net, is that the official support bbs?

Cheers,

[daniel_spain]

Kracken wrote:
> Hi Dan !
>
> I recall stock TA, there was a switch to turn on light in laby but rather
> pointless as it was accessible only past the blue rune, which was the only
> goal..
> Felt like an interesting feature for a custom TA, but barely used..
>
> Seems there are no files on telnet://Bbs.arcticzonebbs.net, is that the
> official support bbs?
>
> Cheers,

its still the support. bbs.

i haven't put Darkness, Infernal, or Engine up there yet because i need to write out some warning file info so anyone tinkering with it knows updates will break any progress until i push the final beta release... right nopw i am still making adjustments to the sqlite engine and sometimes i add things or change them in the database.

Tele-Arena Darkness was made 100% using this engine as was Infernal (formerly platinum)