Designing an Online Computer Game

ITC, Autumn 2002

Front page

Literature

Course plan

About the exam

Previous sessions

The system

About the system

The system is online at diac.it-c.dk/groups.html

If you are running Explorer on Windows, optimal performance comes from installing the Java plugin: http://java.sun.com/getjava/. You can alternatively set your desktop depth to 16 bit. This is for no apparent reason much faster than 32-bit.

Documents

Basic introduction to editing the world

Scripting reference.

This provides a general introduction to the system:

General documentation

And this introduces to programming it in Java.

Introduction to programming

General programing documentation

Note that there is an extra set of files that you need for Java programming, get them from Jesper!

Tutorials:

Introduction to scripting.

Quest & NPC tutorial.

Floor mask - a photoshop file with the area that a standard floor tile should have. Beware of antialiasing!

System history

... and since then ... too many things to mention...

News September 26th:

-NPCs now only receive chat messages that happened in the samme room.

-Found the bug that destroyed the functions: Remember that any function should be called with (). I.e. if (roomId()==2) .. But if you type if (roomId=2), then the roomId function ceases to work!

-Renamed systemId() to playerId()

-Added speakerIsBot(), myId(), removePlayer(), myId() functions.

-playerProperty(), setPlayerProperty(), setPlayerPos(), sendPlayerToRoom() now can take ids as parameters. I.e. an NPC can move itself, go to different rooms etc...

News September 24th:

-The "period" property sets the number of milliseconds between each update. The lower, the faster. (Values between 50 and 200 make sense, default is 100).

-Updated the Scripting reference.

News September 19th:

-You can change the tile size in each room using the "tilesize" property. (I.e. go to the administration interface, find the room, enter a new "tilesize" property = the size of each tile.)

News September 18th:

-Level editor - edit your user using the admin interface and make it an "superuser". In the client, click on a tile and press F6, F7, and F8 to change the tile. Alt-click to paint with a tile type. (See World editing exercise.)

News September 12th:

-Press F2 in the graphical client to see the IDs of all things and people.

-In the admin interface, the "script errors" menu will display the last 20 script errors to help you debug.

-Updated the Scripting reference.

-Uploading graphics with the admin interface now actually works.

-You can now set the property "singleimage" on a person to make their character display a single image.