I dunno which game engine to program in Python… ^_^’

[Kaworu]

Hi!

I just realized that I would like to make some kinda game engine in Python. It would be object-oriented software and it would emulate the mechanics of some ttRPG that I like. It wouldn’t be a game into itself, rather the underlining logic some other persom (maybe?) could use to create a game with graphic, plot, music etc.

I was thinking and I realize I am not that sure what RPG game I would like to base the engine on. I have some possibilities, but it’s hard to pick my favourite.

Some games I am thinking about:

- M&M 2nd edition (I don’t like 3rd that much…)
- Tri-Stat dX
- Pathfinder 1e (it would be very long and complicated stuff to program, because the SRD is freakingly enormous. But hey, that’s some possibility, ain’t it?)
- Cypher System (???) (I am not sure if Cypher system would make a good gaming engine, but, as above, it’s some kinda possibility)
- Eclipse Phase 2nd edition (I just love the game!)
- Theoretically I could try coding DnD 5e, but uh… I don’t see what the whole fuzz about this game is. Though I admit, if 5e would look like Advanced 5e, I would probably be a big fan of it. Still, it’s easy, even though not funny from my ttRPG player perspective?

Generally I wanna code some game mechanic engine into Python and I cannot choose one option xD Oh noes xD

Thus my question – maybe you would like to have some game mechanics in Python, but you can’t code? I mean, if enough people would find game x interesting, it would be some kinda incentive for me? I think?

I believe personally that M&M would be fairly simple and yet you can do a lot with this mechanics, but the same can be told about Tri-Stat dX. And there are some games on my list that make excellent dungeon crawls… oh my, why I hafta be so indecisive? : <

Just random thought I wanted to share with you ;-) Or maybe you have some other mechanics you would be suggesting instead of the ones I named? ;-)

PS. I dunno if this tells something to everybody, but the code is gonna be open source ;-)

PPS. I couldn’t decide whether to put this post in Friendly Banter or Grumpy Technology… xD Please, fell free to change the subforum as an admin if you find my choice weird… ;-)

[JeenLeen]

Riddle of Steel is a cool game with incredibly granular combat. Like, you roll based on your attack - opponent's defense, and then roll to see if you hit. If you hit, you roll to see if you hit where you planned to hit (head vs hand vs chest). Then you roll how much damage and/or (I forget if it's 1 or 2 rolls) what sort of injury they got.
I'm playing it up to make it sound worse than it probably is in-play, but reading the rules makes it sound horrific to play in-person.

I fiddled with the idea of programming a combat engine for it.
You could use a lot of if-else statements for the rolling logic, or perhaps a pandas data table as a lookup for the different percentiles. Could even add in a feature to keep the character's equipment to factor in getting hurt; different armors on different parts of the body protect differently. E.g., your hand might have a different armor value than your head or arm.

Since talking coding for a gaming system, I'll throw out a link to my R program of dice-roller: https://forums.giantitp.com/search.php?searchid=1332885

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If you want to program a simple, interactive game in Python, I found the turtle add-in helpful. Made something like Space Invaders via it.
But that's not really applicable for this sort of thing.

[DavidSh]

Some years back I saw a description of Renpy, designed for writing "visual novels". If I remember correctly, no 3d graphics, but you could implement a menu-based RPG in it, I think.

[NichG]

You can do 3d stuff in Ren'py. It uses OpenGL for its 2d rendering and has a general interface that lets you push arbitrary meshes and shaders into its renderer if you want. You're going to have to bring your own ambient occlusion/shadow mapping/etc shader code if you want it to look like a modern game though, the defaults that come with Ren'py are just going to give you unlit textured meshes and some screen effects (blur, etc) used in the 2d engine.

One of the things that amuses me about Ren'py is that, because it exposes Python (unlike C# based engines like Unity and Godot), its pretty much the easiest publically available game engine to do AI stuff in since you can just import torch and go, versus having to mess with network sockets and simultaneously running Python scripts, or the incomplete mess that is ONNX, or compiling DLL plugins. So like, Unity game in which the player invents new dishes and it calls Stable Diffusion to illustrate the new dish? Would be a bit of a nightmare. Ren'py game that does that? Would be almost trivial, just 10 lines of code.

[Kaworu]

Hm... shouldn't I have some graphical avatars in order to learn RenPy? I mean, I am not opposed to the idea (but actually, if I will implement the mechanics, maybe I could do so in a roguelike game? I'm moving slowly through the tutorial) but also I am not really that sure if that would be working in my circumstances?

[NichG]

Hm... shouldn't I have some graphical avatars in order to learn RenPy? I mean, I am not opposed to the idea (but actually, if I will implement the mechanics, maybe I could do so in a roguelike game? I'm moving slowly through the tutorial) but also I am not really that sure if that would be working in my circumstances?

Well it's designed to make certain kinds of things very easy to do - back and forth dialogues with backgrounds and avatars and so on, you barely need to program. But you can definitely go beyond that, or even just ignore all that if you really wanted to. It might not give you much advantage over just using Python if you do ignore all of that stuff though.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I can't weigh in on most of these systems, but in general I thin a more rules heavy system like Pathfinder 1 works better for this idea than a rules lighter system like dnd 5e. I like 5e to play and DM, but a lot of stuff is left intentionally or unintentionally vague. There's a lot of stuff a character might be able to do, which is great, just pull a DC out of your ear and go! But that only works if there's an interaction between players and DM, it's hard to script all the weird things players might come up with. If you want to do something weird in Pathfinder there's often a specific rule or feat for it. With all these rules programmed it's much easier to design encounters where they can be used.