Online Tiles Version


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Lair Larrikin

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Post Friday, 17th December 2010, 22:56

Online Tiles Version

I don't know if this is the right place to post it but I wanna know...

- Does the Crawl development team have plans to make a way to play Dungeon Crawl online with tiles?

I found somewhere in internet a client that you could play online but it was too buggy and laggy, is there a similar client without these errors?
It would be very nice and bring a lot more players for the dungeon crawling :D

Lair Larrikin

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Post Friday, 17th December 2010, 22:59

Re: Online Tiles Version

If there will be a client with tiles to play online, it will be danm laggy. Look at EbonHack, a client for playing NetHack online with tiles, it's IMPOSSIBLE to play.

Lair Larrikin

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Post Friday, 17th December 2010, 23:22

Re: Online Tiles Version

I don't know, but it is slow. Download it and see.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 00:21

Re: Online Tiles Version

Yes, there are plans. But it is still a long way. The fact that someone made a slow online nethack tiles doesn't mean that it's impossible to do better...
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

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Vestibule Violator

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 02:05

Re: Online Tiles Version

This would be great. I'd love to be able to play online, but alas I am too stuck on tiles...

Temple Termagant

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 04:51

Re: Online Tiles Version

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this!
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Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 06:32

Re: Online Tiles Version

I used NetTiles (probably what the OP was referring to) for a few months. It was basically the console version with tiles. It had some flaws: it lacked several of the tiles version's features (mini-map, various panes, and mouse support), it was buggy, and it caused some lag. It was still usable, until 0.7 came out.

I didn't use it during the tournament, since the tiles were outdated and it was extremely buggy (the dungeon's appearance constantly morphed). I would probably play online again, if there was a real online Tiles version.
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Swamp Slogger

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 10:11

Re: Online Tiles Version

For off-line play I would like to see the old Crawl Iso-tile version also for Stone Soup.

Image

Temple Termagant

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 10:40

Re: Online Tiles Version

Wow those tiles look amazing!

Lair Larrikin

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 16:15

Re: Online Tiles Version

Epic tiles! Where can I find it?
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Swamp Slogger

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 16:42

Re: Online Tiles Version

You can find it here:

http://rltiles.sourceforge.net/

Lair Larrikin

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 17:08

Re: Online Tiles Version

Thanks :)

Server Admin

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 17:42

Re: Online Tiles Version

Stone Soup's current tiles are actually based on those rltiles and have received many updates since they were included a while back.

But Stone Soup only displays in 2D.
Please report bugs to the bug tracker, and leave feedback on the development wiki. Thank you!
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Lair Larrikin

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Post Saturday, 18th December 2010, 19:51

Re: Online Tiles Version

Can someone make a client similar to the NetTiles but without bugs, lags, etc...?
:D

Lair Larrikin

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 00:07

Re: Online Tiles Version

galehar wrote:Yes, there are plans. But it is still a long way. The fact that someone made a slow online nethack tiles doesn't mean that it's impossible to do better...


Good to hear there are plans! So how long is the way approximately? Is it planned for 1.0 at least? You have an alpha tester here ... Since I played NetTiles even in 0.8 and never had any lag issues except those caused by myself. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but the only thing I really need to see are the dungeon and monster tiles anyway. The only thing that made me stop playing was the introduction of all the new / renamed monsters. I know most of the Crawl players are ascii die-hards, but Online tiles would give Crawl a huge boost in popularity and player base. Maybe the latter is what some people are afraid of? ;)

Has anyone tried to get into contact with the person who made NetTiles? Maybe he can compile a new version if there are not too much code changes between 06. and 0.8.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 14:07

Re: Online Tiles Version

Narretz wrote:
galehar wrote:Yes, there are plans. But it is still a long way. The fact that someone made a slow online nethack tiles doesn't mean that it's impossible to do better...


Good to hear there are plans! So how long is the way approximately? Is it planned for 1.0 at least? You have an alpha tester here ... Since I played NetTiles even in 0.8 and never had any lag issues except those caused by myself. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but the only thing I really need to see are the dungeon and monster tiles anyway. The only thing that made me stop playing was the introduction of all the new / renamed monsters. I know most of the Crawl players are ascii die-hards, but Online tiles would give Crawl a huge boost in popularity and player base. Maybe the latter is what some people are afraid of? ;)

Has anyone tried to get into contact with the person who made NetTiles? Maybe he can compile a new version if there are not too much code changes between 06. and 0.8.

It's not planned. Nobody is currently working on it right now so it's hard to give an estimate. If I had to take a guess, I'd say between 1 and 3 years. There's no plan for 1.0 either. It's possible that we go from 0.9 to 0.10 if we feel like it.
I don't think most of the Crawl players are die-hard ascii players. I think most of the vocal player base, that are active on IRC, tournaments, mantis and wiki are die-hard, Unix gurus bearded ascii players. But the silent majority plays tiles locally under windows :D
There was a poll on the forum about tiles vs ascii (can't find it), and last time I checked it, there was a majority of tiles players.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Lair Larrikin

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Post Friday, 25th February 2011, 02:34

Re: Online Tiles Version

NetTile, out of a few bugs with misinterpreted tiles sometime, was very enjoyable to me, so much that i played the whole tournament last year with it.

Even if i understand that a real online function for the tile version of Crawl and its amazing interface can only be a dream for a far future if at all, i really hope some updates to NetTiles will be planned at some point to support newer version of Crawl for future tournaments.

And it even had integrated fully PuTTY, helping the configuration for online play being easier for people not used to telnet-like interfaces. Nettiles was an impressive piece of coding work as it was working rather well for 0.6/0.7.
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Temple Termagant

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Post Thursday, 10th March 2011, 22:26

Re: Online Tiles Version

I really don't understand why a compiled version of NetTiles isn't posted in the crawl.develz.org download area? It's amazing! Although a the map and inventory functions don't work - those aren't available in Putty anyway: X and i still work fine.

http://repo.or.cz/w/crawl/crawl-nettiles.git

You can download a compiled windows version here: http://www.mediafire.com/?zmyzge3o2wd

Lair Larrikin

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Post Saturday, 12th March 2011, 12:43

Re: Online Tiles Version

Well, do you play 0.8 / development? Last time I checked Nettiles was completely broken, i.e. playable, but without any tiles (basically ASCII). That actually put me off of Crawl for now. As I said, a Crawl Online Client would give Crawl a huge popularity boost.
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Temple Termagant

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Post Sunday, 13th March 2011, 03:51

Re: Online Tiles Version

Narretz wrote:Well, do you play 0.8 / development? Last time I checked Nettiles was completely broken, i.e. playable, but without any tiles (basically ASCII). That actually put me off of Crawl for now. As I said, a Crawl Online Client would give Crawl a huge popularity boost.


I'm running the version that I've linked in the post above. Works fine for me. No problems with it at all.

The Map(X) shows up in ascii, but for just tromping around with the arrow keys, the tiles are working just fine.

Lair Larrikin

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Post Sunday, 13th March 2011, 19:37

Re: Online Tiles Version

Well, with version I don't mean the Nettiles Version ( your link contains the only build for Windows made until today). I mean the game version, and regarding that, it's definitely broken for me in 0.8 / Trunk. So if you connect to crawl.develz and play trunk, the tiles don't work anymore. Dayum shame.
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Temple Termagant

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Post Monday, 14th March 2011, 05:15

Re: Online Tiles Version

Narretz wrote:Well, with version I don't mean the Nettiles Version ( your link contains the only build for Windows made until today). I mean the game version, and regarding that, it's definitely broken for me in 0.8 / Trunk. So if you connect to crawl.develz and play trunk, the tiles don't work anymore. Dayum shame.


Gotcha, well not sure I understand. I'm playing 0.7.1. I was mainly interested in rendering the tiles for the online crawl.akrasiac.org. So that's all I've really done with it.

Jk

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Post Wednesday, 23rd March 2011, 18:42

Re: Online Tiles Version

I know I'm in the minority here, as I am a newly vocal (on Tavern, anyway) player who plays offline on OS X, but I want to beg... beg, beg, beg... that the development team considers approaching an online graphical version as an HTML5 project so-as to make it accessible for us atypical users.

I'm going to start trying out the online version - I don't mind ascii, since that's how I play dwarf fortress - but I really enjoy old fashion pixel art. An online arcade-style isometric HTML5 game would be *cough* worth paying for.
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Lair Larrikin

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Post Thursday, 24th March 2011, 16:39

Re: Online Tiles Version

been a long time i don't come here but it's good to see people replying.

LE'TS YELL TOGETHER: "PLEASE MAKE AN ONLINE TILES VERSION"

- Recently me and my friend made a topic about crawl in a Brazilian forum. The topic have more than 25.000 views and 600+ replies... People always say the same thing "wow! good game! but would be much better with an online version!".
- In my humbly opinion; the work will worth much more if you guys spend time making such version than making new "beautiful" tiles, new monsters, etc...

I'm saying this because it will be good a "popularity boost" for the game because i don't mind about playing ascii version (as i always do).

Temple Termagant

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Post Thursday, 24th March 2011, 20:38

Re: Online Tiles Version

Hello All,

I'm all for it, and willing to devote some of my software development time towards an online tiles feature. Has any developer actually started thinking about this yet? Is there any work we can build off of?

--Pace
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Dungeon Master

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Post Thursday, 24th March 2011, 23:11

Re: Online Tiles Version

There has been some necessary code refactoring which has been done, but it's stalling now. Someone also suggested an interesting alternative, but we haven't heard from him since.
A web client would require a massive rewrite of a big part of the game. Even if someone does it, it would probably end up not being maintained like Nettiles.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Jk

Swamp Slogger

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Post Friday, 25th March 2011, 00:26

Re: Online Tiles Version

Oi. Reading that conversation thread made my heart sink a little: lots of boring refactoring before anything tangible and fun is made, even with that alternative :(

Temple Termagant

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Post Friday, 25th March 2011, 23:53

Re: Online Tiles Version

Not to get anyone's hopes up, but I put together some ideas in some Javascript code based off of the ideas of henryci as noted above.

You can take a look at it here: http://dcssjsc.99k.org/Page1.htm

It works for me in IE9 and FF4. Not sure about anything else as it uses an HTML5 canvas object. It just takes a floor tiles graphic and puts different tiles on the screen, which change when you hit keys. It may look like more than it is, take a look at the page source. It does everything client side.

What I'd like to assess is if this idea is even feasible. I'm no JavaScript/WebSockets expert. I think the graphics are totally doable in Javascript, especially with the Canvas element. The keyboard/mouse input is manageable (e.g. ctrl-F brings up a find dialog, so we'll have to remap that or find something more clever).

The big idea is that for every key press, the JavaScript will send the info via WebSockets to the server and the server will reply with a stringified JSON object that says what to display on the screen. I'm not sure if this works other than in theory. Will it be too slow? How much information are we talking about? How slow is too slow? I've never really played via SSH. Is that laggy at times?

Happy Friday (if applicable).

--Pace

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Jk

Swamp Slogger

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Post Saturday, 26th March 2011, 14:42

Re: Online Tiles Version

My layman's take is that this is great work (thanks!), but the major challenges that remain are:

1 - there is not clean separation between "game logic" and "display logic" code in the necessary source, so these things need to be de-coupled through refactoring
2 - this particular corner of the game is Original Gangsta - as in developed pre-DCSS - and no one working today is intimately familiar with wtf is going on in there (yet) OR if they are, they have other pressing development concerns
3 - this is a low fun project (development-wise) since it is lots of refactoring versus adding fun stuff
4 - this is low priority because the game works well for the people who play it already, so this project is mostly for people who can't / don't play the game, and it's not clear "popularity" is a central design goal

Anyway, none of this is to nay-say the idea (which I am 100% behind), just capture some of the challenges expressed in what I've read. As an interpretted languages guy, I already find it a hard enough challenge to look through the excellent refactored code. When I look at the original stuff, my head spins, otherwise I'd chip in by more than just chatting in this thread :)

Temple Termagant

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 01:03

Re: Online Tiles Version

Here are some minor updates. I hacked some printf's into a standard (0.8) Crawl Tiles build to get tile location information. The output was in JSON format. This output is hard coded as input when you click the 'Get New Data'.

The result is a screen that looks vaguely like a Crawl screen. I don't have the player tiles and the GUI, Minimap and Inventory tiles are messed up. I didn't realize at first that not all tiles were the same size.

You can take a look at it here: http://dcssjsc.99k.org/Page1.htm

Edit: Minor updates handling non-uniform tile size.

--Pace
Last edited by PaceMaker on Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 19:58, edited 1 time in total.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 07:55

Re: Online Tiles Version

Still a long way to go, but that's pretty cool :)
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Halls Hopper

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 12:39

Re: Online Tiles Version

I started a thread about this in game design, but it got no traction. Why is the focus on communicating dungeon information from a server? Why not let the client and server share the same random seed. This way all that would need to be communicated would be inputs and (maybe) the status of various monsters, items, ghosts. To give a parallel, you can currently share world generation in dwarf fortress by sharing the same seed. Does this require more refactoring than what is already being done?
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Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 13:14

Re: Online Tiles Version

I guess you would be able to cheat, like this guy did with nethack.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Halls Hopper

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 13:52

Re: Online Tiles Version

Cheating is always a possibility- regardless of the system. Minimizing the accessibility of 'easy' exploits should be fairly simple. If the goal is to minimize overhead of communicating dungeon information, on a risk v reward scale, is sharing a random seed just for the level layouts really a risk? Even if the server still handled all information pertaining to generating items, monsters, ghosts, stores, etc. this should still drastically reduce the amount of information needing to be transmitted.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 14:23

Re: Online Tiles Version

The point of online play is to prevent cheating. If the client is able to predict the outcome of actions using the seed, the player will be too.
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...
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Snake Sneak

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Post Tuesday, 29th March 2011, 15:13

Re: Online Tiles Version

Pumpking wrote:LE'TS YELL TOGETHER: "PLEASE MAKE AN ONLINE TILES VERSION"
.


Let's add onto that "WHICH WORKS ON ANDROID BASED DEVICES!" 8-)

Temple Termagant

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Post Friday, 15th April 2011, 20:50

Re: Online Tiles Version

For updates on the (very slow) progress on this issue check out the wiki here:
https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:internal:clientserver&#online_tiles

and my Proof-of-Concept code here: http://dcssjsc.99k.org/Page4-Timer.htm

--Pace

Lair Larrikin

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Post Monday, 18th April 2011, 19:31

Re: Online Tiles Version

Nice! Keep up the work, many more will appreciate it than will ever post here. :)

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