[ann] T-Engine4 and ToME4 are beta!

DarkGod darkgod at te4.org
Tue May 11 09:43:31 PDT 2010


The board is set, the pieces are moving.

For many years people have patiently waited for ToME3 to be released, for 
many years I have tried. But I always burned out of developing it too 
fast. It was a pile of old crappy code I could not stand working on 
anymore...

So one day I set out on a new venture, to rewrite it all from scratch, to 
forget code I could not bear using anymore and to focus on a new engine, 
and a new game. This was about six months ago, and now after 20 private 
alpha versions I am ready to unleash the Tales of Middle-Earth: The 
Fourth Age and T-Engine4 onto the world!

**** T-Engine 4

This is the “spiritual” successor of T-Engine 3, the basic idea is the 
same: to make a roguelike game engine that allows the game maker to focus 
on making a game, not on handling the trivialities of coding.

Being the lua fanatic I am the engine obviously uses it, and much more 
than in T-Engine2/3. There is a very small C core that is mostly unaware 
of any high level designs, it simply provides access to graphics, sounds, 
input, …

T-Engine4 can handle many things and is meant to be easily extended. Its 
lua core is documented and based on a simple OO design, leveraging the 
full power of Lua.

A list of features can be found at http://te4.org/ but the most important 
ones are:

    * single unified UI using OpenGL on all platforms
    * support for many roguelike concepts from scratch without imposing 
limits on what can be done with them
    * easy input (keyboard & mouse) support
    * generic save/load code using serialization, simple objects do not 
even need to be aware of it, it works auto-magically
    * support for both graphical mode and traditional ASCII, potentially 
at the same time
    * many other things, checkout the site and try it

**** Tales of Middle-Earth: The Fourth Age

Because an engine is nothing without a game (and because I wanted to make 
a game), I developed ToME4 at the same time.

As I developed ToME3 I was starting to feel restricted by the theme I had 
setup for myself, that of the quests for the ring in the third age. Do 
not get me wrong, I love the setting but it felt to me like I was meant 
to follow a pre-existing story and had little room for improvements, all 
I could do was bastardise it.

So I took a hard, but IMO needed, decision for ToME4 and scrapped that 
altogether. It is based one hundred and twenty two years after the fall 
of Sauron, in a world that is in relative peace under the guidance the 
High Kings of the Reunited Kingdom (Gondor and Arnor). The player is not 
“the chosen one” that goes on to save the world from level 1 but instead 
a simple adventurer, out for glory and treasures. While there is a grand-
evil-that-must-be-stopped it is revealed slowly as part of the player 
leveling up and should feel much less intimidating.

The biggest gameplay change is probably the switch to a new stats&skills 
system. The primary stats are now Strength, Dexterity, Magic, Willpower, 
Cunning and Constitution (with a hidden Luck stat) and the skill system 
has been changed to follow a “standard” pattern for most skills. They are 
now called talents and usually have 5 levels. All talents are organised 
in talent types, usually 4 talents per type.

This forces to have some interesting designs for each classes, melee 
classes have gained a lot from it and now have many combat techniques 
they can use.

Some races, classes and other “things” also need unlocking before they 
can be used. Fear not, the mage class for example is indeed in the game 
but requires unlocking to be available, as are others. There is mainly 
two reasons for this design:

    * it allows to not overwhelm a new player with too many unknown 
choices at birth
    * it allows to give “rewards” without winning the game

At the start the player can be a human, dwarf, elf or hobbit and either a 
warrior, rogue or archer (with subclasses for each).

ToME4 (and T-Engine4) are meant to be enjoyable by anybody, as such there 
is no hidden “macro”, or tons of useless and cryptic options. Key-
bindings and graphical modes are set-able in game with the main menu 
(available by pressing Escape from the game). Mouse support is available 
in most dialogs, it can even be used to activate talents.

Both ToME4 and T-Engine4 are now in public beta, meaning they are usable 
but not done. T-Engine4 is mostly good and I did not modify it much for 
some weeks now, except to add some new independent features (like new map 
generators). ToME4 story is fully planned in my head and was meant to be 
split in two half. The first half is done and playable (and such the game 
is currently winnable), the second half will be implemented during beta.

A new subforum has been setup at http://forum.t-o-m-e.net/ too.

Lastly I want to present my excuses to all the people who waited for so 
long without news, I tried to come back many times but never could. And 
when I started TE4 I did not want to announce it for fear of losing steam 
again, but now that beta is reached I do not fear anymore!

Now go to http://tome.te4.org or http://te4.org and download it!

PS: feels good to be back!

-- 
T-Engine4 and ToME4 now available!
http://blog.te4.org/ http://te4.org/ http://tome.te4.org/


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