Ore Chasm is a game that is greatly inspired by Terraria, but of course aims to be a hell of a lot more. Not to mention it will be the community, instead of just using the community.
It is a project, that is open source from the very beginning, as improving upon the ideas that Terraria introduced to the world when it released.
It isn't written in XNA and C#, but SFML and C++, so is cross-platform and very fast (I use the GPU quite a bit, including fragment shaders).
- It will have modding capabilities
- It is open source, everything..including all assets
- It will have loads of features that I missed and I'm sure some others have as well
- It will not be just dropped within a year after release. And in the event that I get hit by a bus tomorrow, feel free to fork it and pick it up!
- Cross-platform
- Sane GUI/HUD
- Many, many features are planned that people only dreamed of for Terraria to have.
- Community driven. I'm very open to code reviews, patches, and constructive criticism, bug and feature requests, etc.
All assets are required (by me ;) to be under a Free and Open license.
The code is presently under GPLv2+ as that seems to be the licence I like the most.
The goal initially is to make it run on Linux/Unixen, Mac OS X and Windows. I'm a developer on Linux, as that's the only real way to program, so this will likely get the most support. With testers and patches, the other platforms will have exactly the same support as Linux. I don't want to force anyone onto a platform just to play my game, even though I think everyone should run Linux anyways.. ;-)
I would love to see it run on Android for instance. But for this to happen I'd have to wait until SFML has ports to that/those platforms. Or switch to a different framework if that becomes the only option.
The project is very, very preliminary right now. If there was a word for pre-alpha, I would use it to describe this.
But of course, it's progressing quite quickly over just the few weeks it has existed
What is working? Not much :)
- I did have a working tilemap rendering fragment shader..which uses some neat tricks to render it all in super fast manner.
- I just implemented pretty stupid entity->tilemap collision, but it seems to work.
- And as I'm typing this, I'm researching on how to further revamp the tilemap renderer, and implement the background (underground, and walls), in addition to making the foreground tiles meshable (cleanly, seamless). The design I'm planning on allows for a lot more flexibility than Terraria has.
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Merge requests/patches. They will need to match my coding style, which isn't too difficult (and there's an astyle script at the root directory for ease of use). And of course, fix the issue. I love features, so chances are I'm going to accept your patch if it does the job nicely. I'm not too overlordy when it comes to code. Oh and of course, all other assets are most welcome. Of course, they'll also have to be released under a free license.
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Coding style: http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Kdelibs_Coding_Style use astyle.sh file to automatically format everything to this.
I'll do so ruthlessly every so often. I'd rather have clean code than easy history
- Edit the Wiki on here (github)!
- Submit issues and feature requests on the issue tracker on github!
- Test, test, test!
- ART! Please give me all of your art :-)
We have an irc channel on chat.freenode.net #ore-chasm, feel free to drop in for chilling, devel questions, user questions...or whatever.
First of all, I use SFML 2.0, which is technically unreleased.
No matter, you can build it easily since I use CMake.
See: http://www.sfml-dev.org/download.php
After this is installed and you have followed their directions, to get my code,
you can either click download the zip, or run git clone git://github.com/sreich/ore-chasm.git
After you have my code, go to the top directory of it, mkdir build; cd build;
and now to actually build it
- SFML 2.0 (unreleased, from git)
- Platform of Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X
- Minimum RAM of 250 MiB. Ore Chasm uses so far.. an average of 60 MiB RES. This will change with world size, since we don't have chunk based loading (yet?), Currently the size of the Block class is 2 bytes (2 unsigned chars). Which means for a 8400x2600 map (the default, soft minimum), (8400 * 2600 * 2 bytes = ~44 MiB). Presently, to run the game it's about 60MiB of RAM usage on average. Subject to change, of course.
- GPU capable of OpenGL 3.0+ and/or GLSL 1.30. This is what I know it works on. It may work on lesser GPUs, so please let me know if it does. In theory it should, but we all know how well theory works..
Some of these plans are merely thoughts and things to experiment with, some are must haves and others are things that will hopefully come later. Of course, nothing is in stone.
- Networking (a must)
- Dungeons
- Ladders! I hated navigation from depths in Terraria. It was terrible and usually resulted in you dying or being stranded.
- Villages! (randomly generated). Think similar to Minecraft
- No guide! This NPC always lingered around your house even though you wanted to be left the hell alone. It was really a piss poor replacement for a tutorial anyways, and he only had a couple tid bits of information. Literally.
- NPCs/merchants you can "place" in your home?
- Teleporters/Portals! Seriously. This is a definite want in my mind.
- Crafting system more simlar to Minecraft? Would people like that? Personally, I was not much of a fan for Terraria's crafting.
- Menu system (HUD) that isn't impossible to navigate, unlike Terraria's. It will also be customizable/fully moddable, by XML and images.
- Full modding support (another must). This will have to be a later feature though of course, until I get a good amount of content into the game.
- Android and in general, a mobile port? This is very much long term though.
- Dynamic 2D lighting and shadow system, versus Terraria's very simplistic tile-based lighting.
- More than 1 or 2 soundtracks, unlike Terraria's which get very repetitive :-)
- Water...and I'd also like to make it pressure based, but that's going to be a lot more work as well
- Weather system
- Chunk Loading. Presently Ore Chasm just loads the whole map into memory. Currently this isn't much of an issue, but with larger worlds and assets, it could turn into something to think about.
#ToDo Most of the stuff to do is either in Planned Features, or in my head..but here's the more technical scratch notes, if I keep them updated:
PARTICLES, neat stuff, may find useful: