Ren'Py campaign (demo)

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Histidine

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

Since a bunch of people (myself included) have expressed great annoyance with the web campaign handling and its many defects, I've been working on porting the entire campaign to Ren'Py. Now I have a demo:

Download (Windows)
Download (Linux)
Github

Requires Zero-K v1.4.6.11

Installation
* Download, extract to anywhere
* Important! Open Zero-K-Sunrise/game/options.rpy and set SPRING_DIR to the path of the engine folder you want to use (100.0 or 101+ dev recommended)
* Run Sunrise.exe to play

Notes
Currently only covers tutorials 1 and 2, and episode 1. Fancy stuff with forking paths and comm module customization will come later.

Post baw, etc.

+6 / -0

GoogleFrog

7 years ago

Why is this in a personal repository?

+0 / -0

Histidine

7 years ago

I wasn't sure it was ready to be "official" work yet. I can make a Zero-K group repo and commit to that now.

+0 / -0

aeonios

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

why ren'py?

+0 / -0

Orfelius

7 years ago

because kawaii

+4 / -0

Histidine

7 years ago

quote:
why ren'py?

It's pretty much the best of the options I considered that meets my needs:

Good storytelling tools
Support for persistent and metagame elements (progression saving, comm modules)
Can do good player-facing GUI for the above
Not a massive pain to work with in general

The alternatives were:

Integrate into ZKL: Far too much work required to implement the needed features. Also Licho doesn't want to support offline SP.
Something inside Spring engine (using Chili VN + ingame lobby by gajop ): Lobby isn't done yet (and neither is Chili VN; it's lacking some important things like save/load), didn't want to wait until it was ready. Still keeping this as my fallback option though.

+1 / -0

GoogleFrog

7 years ago

Wait.. this isn't Spring. How are you going to integrate it with anything? Are you going to make Chili read the same files?

+0 / -0

Histidine

7 years ago

Current implementation just starts Spring with the provided startscript and mod archive, and reads a .json output file. So it's not what I'd called integrated with ZK the multiplayer game but it's really not significantly worse than ZKL/SWL in that regard.
As for lobby <-> Ren'Py, ZKL can just have a button that launches the Sunrise application and not care about it otherwise.

Distribution will probably as a Steam DLC (which also makes sure it gets put in the right place to use relative path to engine folder).

If I decide to switch to a Chili-based solution, I can port the dialogue and such and integrate (at least UI-wise) with ingame lobby.

+0 / -0

Vermind

7 years ago

This sounds great. A future lobby may run it as a subprocess, embedded into the lobby window if desired in window mode, so we can "keep" the ZKL tabs and allow switching between them (which may close the single player and ask for confirmation, or just pause it).

+0 / -0

TheEloIsALie

7 years ago

So... just for the record, this would mean you could (in theory) make a campaign that encompasses multiple spring mods?

+0 / -0

gajop

7 years ago

For an ingame implementation, I think the main hurdle would be to add video playback to the engine.
I'm not sure how hard it would be to do, but it's a long requested feature of mine (and many others).

+0 / -0

Histidine

7 years ago

Video support would be nice for campaigns in general. In this particular instance though, we can do without if we don't mind losing the anime style OP video* (and the splash screen and main menu screen, but those aren't specific to campaign).

*shamelessly stole this particular conceit from War of the Human Tanks

quote:
So... just for the record, this would mean you could (in theory) make a campaign that encompasses multiple spring mods?

If so desired, yes.

+0 / -0

Shadowfury333

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

Who would be making said anime style video[*]?

Anyway, apart from that, I guess I should give this a spin at some point. It sounds like this is a good foundation, but I can't really judge without trying it.

Okay, just gave it a spin, might as well write down thoughts as they come:
[Spoiler]
Alright, biggest issue is that the maps aren't included and it doesn't seem to recognize pool data for Zero-K itself. I'm not going to say that a Zero-K sd7 should be included as well due to its size, but the maps should be, or ZKL/SWL integration works too. The actual storytelling engine seems to do the job. Definitely a bit simple but I was invested, and the bits of camera shake, sounds, etc. did help with pulling me in. VA would be nice, but that's obviously not something to look at until the dialogue is finalized. However the intro needs to only play at the very very start, not midway through each mid-mission dialogue session, and there needs to be some indication that user input is expected, especially when it's just white text on a black background.

quote:
shamelessly stole this particular conceit from War of the Human Tanks

Are we "Girls und Strider" now? :P

+1 / -0

Orfelius

7 years ago

quote:
Who would be making said anime style video[*]?

Who is the video-making-guy around here?

Maybe Ada essentially is THE commander or rather like a visual representation of the commander unit. Kind of like this anime where girls are ships and they wage war.

+0 / -0

Histidine

7 years ago

Shadowfury333: Thanks for going over it!

Maps/mods not loading
Are you using SWL? My engine folders downloaded by ZKL have a springsettings.cfg that specify both engine folder and main userland folder as data dirs, which let it load "normally downloaded" game and map files (including from pool) fine. I may add another config line to options, to allow manually specifying the user's main data dir.

Intro playing multiple times
This is intentional. It plays the OP video at the start of each episode, like an anime. (I would've added a closing video too if I had one.)

...

I'm sorry. :(

+0 / -0

Qrow

7 years ago

This conversation reminds me so much of Upotte

+0 / -0

TheEloIsALie

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

quote:
It plays the OP video at the start of each episode, like an anime

Uhh... You realize you're making an RTS campaign though? O.O

Just kidding, it's great to see someone working on an immersive campaign experience. Still, unlike an anime episode coming out now and then, the campaign will (hopefully) be played more than one mission at a time, so the intro before every mission should not be necessary (and rather distracts from the rest apparently). But I reckon you're already aware.

+2 / -0

Shadowfury333

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

quote:
Maps/mods not loading
Are you using SWL? My engine folders downloaded by ZKL have a springsettings.cfg that specify both engine folder and main userland folder as data dirs, which let it load "normally downloaded" game and map files (including from pool) fine. I may add another config line to options, to allow manually specifying the user's main data dir.

Ah, my bad. I copied my SpringSettings.cfg from my Spring folder into the engine folder, because I have a lot of custom settings and I didn't want to have to re-adjust them manually.

quote:
Intro playing multiple times
This is intentional. It plays the OP video at the start of each episode, like an anime. (I would've added a closing video too if I had one.)

I was going to counter this, but

TheEloIsALie already did, because yeah, games are typically played several missions in a row. Having a different major cutscene at the midway point or at thirds or something is good, but having the same intro repeated before every mission is jarring and doesn't work. Games do their intro once, at the very start of the campaign, if even then. The most anime games I've ever played (BlazBlue, Melty Blood, and Arcana Heart 3) do their anime intros right as you start up the game at all, rather than when starting up the main singleplayer mode.

+1 / -0

Anarchid

7 years ago
(edited 7 years ago)

I've finally gotten around to test it (on linux).
- Results parsing is broken (comments say that this is known, but i thought i'd mention anyway)
- Oh god why is the gesture build menu still enabled by default
- Woah spinning radar main menu!
- ~~I had to hack missionrunner.rpy to get it to work with optimus (though i guess i should have tried to `optirun Sunrise` first; will test that shortly as well)~~ haha disregard that `optirun ./Sunrise.sh` works
- The VN part could work some polish (like portraits, and explosion overlays when there are explosions happening on Isis, etc) but overall is a QUAD BRUTAL improvement over journal logs.
- Minimap in s1e01 was extra cool.
- J-pop doesn't really fit in the sense that it clashes with Denny.
- Credits screen blames GoogleFrog and Denny for the j-pop.

+3 / -0

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