Wesband, MP dungeon-crawler (now for Wesnoth 1.9.14+ !)

[Ken_Oh]

Wesband is a multiplayer dungeon-crawler campaign for Wesnoth, much influenced by Zangband. The project was originally started by Dovolente, who is too busy with real life to deal with Wesnoth. He wanted to use my Modular RPG era for it, so I have since taken over the whole project. Exasperation came on the scene this year and has been an awesome asset, both technically and creatively.

The idea is to make a multiplayer, hack-and-slash dungeon-crawler campaign that can be played just as well with one player as it can be with two or three. The goal would be to explore randomly-generated caves, fight randomly-placed hostiles, get randomly-generated loot and improve your character. There might eventually be an end game objective like many roguelikes have (i.e. like defeat the evil lich and bring back the sacred amulet).

Here are some screenshots:






Known bugs
-traits don't show a description (except for intelligent types)
-units can sometimes duplicate or die when right-click menus are being accessed. this is a bug in Wesnoth: https://gna.org/bugs/?14789

New to the campaign/era
-New inventory management menu (drop item, get item, give item, and manage inventory are all merged into one manage inventory command). You can manage your own inventory as well as the inventory of any hired/skeletal henches; just right click on the unit that you want to manage and select manage inventory. This also means you can use inventory-capable henches to collect items/gold (items go into their inventory, but gold gets automatically transferred to the player).
-Enemies now drop weapons/armor of varying quality (generally improving as you go deeper into the dungeon).
-Two new spells with associated items.
-Many bugfixes and behind-the-scenes improvements (more details available in the changelog).

Here's a list of our development direction for the project

If there are any artists out there that want to help, here is a wishlist for art



Don't hesitate to tell me what you think. Bug reports are welcome, but more than anything I'd like suggestions of what things you would like to see in the future.

[Sapient]

It looks cool, and I like what you've done so far. I'm not sure how fun it will be to play random dungeons with single units, though... I kinda prefer a good storyline and a hand crafted map over a random one. Don't let me discourage you, though.

[Velensk]

I might be better if you combined it with Bob-the-Mighty's rpg system and resources.

[Blarumyrran]

i tried it a few days back, but are the player characters really supposed to be on separate teams?

[TL]

Sweet. I've been toying around with doing something along these lines myself. I'll have to try it out, I may be able to pitch in some assistance.

[Dovolente]

I kinda prefer a good storyline and a hand crafted map over a random one.

Me too, generally. But sometimes randomness is fun for variety. I play RPGs mostly, but I go through spurts of zangband addiction.

I might be better if you combined it with Bob-the-Mighty's rpg system and resources.

I've spent a lot more time with Ken Oh's system--I've really only just checked out Bob's very briefly. I imagine either could work, but I haven't taken the time to analyze which might be a better fit yet (surely, using or adapting one of these will be easier than doing things, esp. inventory management, from scratch). Is there something in particular with Bob's that seems to lend itself well to this idea, vs. Ken's?

I tried it a few days back, but are the player characters really supposed to be on separate teams?

No. I did most of my map testing with sides 2 and 3 empty, so I didn't notice that--oops.

Sweet. I've been toying around with doing something along these lines myself. I'll have to try it out, I may be able to pitch in some assistance.

Great!

[TL]

I'm envisioning 50 dungeon levels total, with a final task to be completed on the last level to win the campaign.

You know, you could drastically reduce filesize and load times if you did away with having individual scenario files for each level. Since variables are persistent across scenarios you can just have all the dungeon scenarios use the same scenario, with background variables carrying the info on depth/difficulty adjustment/etc.

Similarly, it would probably help cut back on WML bloat, savefile size, and processing time to define all your static variables in a [variables] tag inside the first scenario, rather than going through and doing lots of {VARIABLE} commands in your other functions. I'll take a look at it in more detail after dinner.

[Neoskel]

So its sorta like 'WesDiablo' then huh?

[TL]

I took a quick crack at making the mob generation a bit more interesting. It still just throws them randomly all over the level for now, but mob types are somewhat more thematically linked now.

To get this modification to work, add the following snippet somewhere within the multiplayer tags of Wesband_Main.cfg:

Code: Select all

	[variables]
		{WBD_DEFINE_MOBS}
	[/variables]

[Dovolente]

Nice! It looks like a good framework.

At a future point in development, I'd like to borrow interesting units from various scenarios and eras, especially more monster-type units.

In regards to making simulating level changes from a single dungeon scenario, that sounds fine; I didn't realize it would make a difference in terms of efficiency (I would have guessed it would be less efficient to put it all in one scenario, actually). Anyway, I imagine that the starting village could also work in the same scenario, as I imagine players would want to return frequently (via mundane or magical means). Another change I'm planning to make is to handle passageways via masks rather than step-by-step calculations--I presume using masks would be less resource intensive.

[Dovolente]

Some other NPC/monster ideas:
- groups of related monsters
- checks for adding an extra water/swamp monster or two when there are water or swamp pools.
- switch off 'guardian' status in fights, so they'll chase.
- add an AI side with high caution settings, so NPCs can be switched to that side to flee when very wounded.

[TL]

Oh, no, not like that. What I'm recommending would be to still have it do the scenario change, but to change to the same scenario for each dungeon level. So it would work like this:

-Player starts a new game using town scenario. The town scenario initializes several starting variables, let's say it assigns a value of 0 to the variable $level.
-Player goes to the exit, so the game adds 1 to $level and goes to the dungeon scenario as the next scenario. The dungeon scenario looks at $level and sees the player has moved on to level 1, so it initializes floor 1.
-Player gets through the exit to floor 2. The game adds 1 to $level again and moves onto the next scenario, which is the same scenario. But now $level has a value of 2, so when the scenario loads this time it initializes differently based on the value of $level.

[Dovolente]

Ah, I get it now, thanks.

[Qes]

Sound's Fun. A lot actually.

I dig things that can be multiplayer OR singleplayer but still be the same scenario. Sometimes this isnt really feasible, such as Bob's (The Mighty) Seige War's scenario. That can only be done with live players. However, A few other 'multiplayer' survival dungeons can be attempted single player - though they're usually harder because of that. So I hope I can dungeon crawl by myself or with friends, when all is said and done.

Also, have you given any thought to "heroic" monsters. Or "bosses" found throughout a 'floor'?
It'd be quite grand if on average a player-unit is as lethal/tough as 4 or so mobs but the occasional boss who's equally tough or tougher wanders in/by.

What do you have for a feeling between player-monster power differential?

Hope it goes smoothly for ya,
-Qes

[Slann]

I have a qestion, is possible download now the project? if the answer is yes, where can i find it?