FLARE
Any interest in full game saves? (i.e., to restore the exact previous game state)
Wednesday, September 26, 2018 - 08:21
Hello. I did this for Glest a decade ago or so. Is the engine dev team interested in patches to save the full state of the level? Obviously, I don't want to do it if it isn't wanted. Serialization / de-serialization is a specialty of mine -- can keep it a text save game file by ker-chunking a fat uuencoded blob for the binary data or some such. Also, fog of war that gets removed as areas are explored?
Just cruious. I don't have a *ton* of time on my hands, but I haven't played with a game in too long. :)
wait...does FLARE even have support for fog of war?
Relating to your question, there was some discussion on the FLARE github a while back, asking for the option for monsters to not respawn if when you enter or exit the level. So if I am understanding correctly, then yes, such features would be very much appreciated :)
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Well no, that was a question. Is this something engine development team is interested in?
Well it's a little more interesting than just rather or not monsters respawn and I suppose a few different options (from the engine perspective) would be appropriate, such as having monsters permenently dead, respawn every time you leave and come back or respawn after a set amount of time (rather you're in that particular map or not). It also means serializing the state of each monster, all effects, currently in-flight projectiles and map-specific objects (doors, chests, levers, etc.)
So it would be a non-trivial patch set. Adding de/serialization is also a step towards implementing multiplayer (peer-to-peer or client/server) functionality.
Well, I'm just a modder and not part of the engine development team so I can't speak for them, but as a modder I can say that I have an entire wishlist of things I would like FLARE to be capable of. I just try not to make too many demands since the folks who develop FLARE engine are doing this for free after all!
Oftentimes as a modder I try to find workarounds for things that the FLARE engine is not capable of natively. For example, instead of fog of war I use an image overlay to create a diablo style light radius for some dungeons. I know it isn't the same thing as fog of war , but its close enough for me!
But that stuff about working towards multiplayer, I would definitely be very excited if it could be implemented, even if it is some small step, and even if it is only some very limited multiplayer feature. I know from gamedev experience that multiplayer is very tough and complicated to implement, but for modders like me, it never hurts to have more features :)
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