La Vida- The Sims For Linux

[dagoth_pie]

To be brutally honest, we are completely at the mercy of whoever wants to contribute content. Insisting on CC licenses will not help us at all at this point. That said, I don't think awesome game models is a priority at the moment.

That's true, I was thinking of Planeshift when I said that, all art contributions are locked into a proprietary license. If the artist contributing wanted it to only be used in La Vida that would be different. But things like textures could be used in a wide variety of games, while only keen eye would spot the reused ones.

Not wanting to be negative or anything, but it's not exactly wise to scrape money for models. The graphical side of things are least of your worries. Make sure you have a good solid game engine before even thinking about graphics.

Coloured cubes should be used instead as a representation of character models. Maybe transform it to show animations and different actions.

Later on in the year I'll be taught the fundamentals of placeholder art, I'll help throw something together then.

[myromance123]

Argh I studied the code quite a bit and I still can't piece the code together in a general understanding of workflow towards the final game product.

I get certain parts and what they do, but the Python code you guys wrote makes me feel at times like I'm looking at cryptic messages.

I want to add to the code and game functionality so bad, but my basic understanding of game concepts applied in code aren't enough yet.

What did you guys learn from to comprehend how things should come together in code to equal to a game? (3D).

I know that any game requires a game loop, and from there things can be broken down into updating the world and its objects then rendering and clean up. (Hmm now that I look at my inability to understand, it seems to stem from not knowning soya3D and its modules, or knowing sufficient Python but still...).

Anyhow, if anyone wants to look at the code and/or modify it/extend it, you can download the game via SVN in terminal using:

svn co https://la-vida.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/la-vida la-vida

More instructions on the La Vida website:
http://www.la-vida-game.co.uk/

Let us know here if you're up for the challenge >

[JDShu]

Argh I studied the code quite a bit and I still can't piece the code together in a general understanding of workflow towards the final game product.

I get certain parts and what they do, but the Python code you guys wrote makes me feel at times like I'm looking at cryptic messages.

I want to add to the code and game functionality so bad, but my basic understanding of game concepts applied in code aren't enough yet.

What did you guys learn from to comprehend how things should come together in code to equal to a game? (3D).

I know that any game requires a game loop, and from there things can be broken down into updating the world and its objects then rendering and clean up. (Hmm now that I look at my inability to understand, it seems to stem from not knowning soya3D and its modules, or knowing sufficient Python but still...).

Yep, I am absolutely aware of the problem. The current La Vida code is not very maintainable. The problem is that there is a huge singleton style class (gameapp3d) that does a lot of test code and the UI/gamelogic/representation is all lumped into it, only sometimes put into classes that are not necessarily logical. Please remember that when I wrote my first patch, I had JUST started learning to program properly

Noraphalem, as I've said before is working on separating the game logic into a server, which I am hoping will help a lot, since game logic is currently near non-existent. I believe he'll publish it in a git repo soon. The current la vida code could be used as a base for a 3D client for the server, since most of the work was on graphical representation.

[KoRnKloWn]

About the 3D models, art, etc., it can always be mixed licenses, if someone wants to contribute CC models, they should be able to, and if Mike buys models with locked licenses, then those should also be used. Same goes for music, I was thinking of making a bunch of miscellaneous music targeted towards the game, and just giving them all Creative Commons licenses. Of course I'd lock the commercial use, that way it could only be used in nonprofit games like La Vida. If people had the ability to add CC licensed art then you'd think it would really boost that department of the game, then we just have to worry about the coding (which as usual, is the hard part).

By the way, I'm still working on my first song targeted toward this game.

[myromance123]

Please remember that when I wrote my first patch, I had JUST started learning to program properly

If this is true, then you sir are a genius for catching on so quick!

Well I look forward to what Noraphalem can do and also to Kornklown's first song hehe.

[JDShu]

If this is true, then you sir are a genius for catching on so quick!

Well I look forward to what Noraphalem can do and also to Kornklown's first song hehe.

hehe I think most people can do it tbh, and I still have a very long way to go.

Anyway, here's the code:

https://github.com/fraang/La-Vida

First we need to get it to match the PEP 8 standard, which we've started doing. I haven't looked deeply into it besides making sure it can run, but whoever is interested should play around with the code and pop into our IRC room! (#lavida on Freenode).

EDIT: there is a dependency on twisted. Should be in the repos of your distribution.

[Noraphalem]

For all who are curious what I am doing:

I am currently working on a way to seperate the simulation itself from the user interface/representation of what's going on. And I have achieved a very basic but running server which runs a simple simulation.

Features so far:
- A Twisted reactor which handles incoming connections (from the clients) and multithreading (the simulation runs in its own thread)
- A simulation world with its own time handling (game time instead of os time) which can be scaled (run the simulation slower or faster)
- Characters (Should I call the class Dude?) with needs and doing activities to satisfy the needs.
- Characters interact with objects in the world.

Next steps:
- Characters interact with other characters. (Not to hard. Code can taken from object interaction and modified)
- Budget and money in general.

Future:
- Personality, spyche/mood.
- Clothing as a gameplay feature. Maybe as a modifier of the opposites spyche/mood.

I am open for specific ideas. If you have a rough idea which needs some care I would suggest to discuss it here or in the IRC (http://www.la-vida-game.co.uk/?page_id=5) before you ask for an implementation.

Greetings.

[Noraphalem]

For everyone who wants to know how to print text in the console on a defined position:

class asciiMapView:
    # A simple map view in ASCII art style.
    
    def __init__( self, world ):
        self.cmdPrefix = '\033['
        self.cmdSeperator = ';'
        self.cmdPostfixPosition = 'H'
        self.cmdPostfixColor = 'm'
        self.world = world
        
    def printWidget( self, posX, posY ):
        cmdPosition = '%s%i%s%i%s' % ( self.cmdPrefix, posX, self.cmdSeperator, posY, self.cmdPostfixPosition )
        print '%sThis is a test for the text position.' % cmdPosition        
        
mapView = asciiMapView( 'world' )

mapView.printWidget( 10, 10 )

The magic does the simple escape sequence:

\033[<x>;<y>H

This technique should also work in other language with proper stdout support.

EDIT:
Here is a first impression for the ASCII interface I am currently working on. Sorry but at the moment it is very minimalistic. If someone is aware of graphics programming (in Python if possible) I would be more as happy about help.

[KoRnKloWn]

I just had an idea, would it be possible to make La Vida compatible with skins from the sims? Then people could use skins from websites like Mod the Sims, they could expand it and it might draw in more people.

[Noraphalem]

I just had an idea, would it be possible to make La Vida compatible with skins from the sims? Then people could use skins from websites like Mod the Sims, they could expand it and it might draw in more people.

1) At the moment we don't have any graphical representation of the game world at all.

2) We have to use the exact model mesh with the same UV layout which is not easy but possible.