One of the reasons I love the Wizardry games is the easy to use interface design. Even the earlier versions were often better and more intuitive then their counterparts of the same era.

There are a lot of great older games out there that are open source and more or less text driven.

I have only dabbled in a little programming here and there but I know there are others on this board who do do programming - including our semi-glorious Llevram.

How difficult would it be to take one of these older games (ie hack) and get the source code and from that build a small easy to use graphical interface just for moving and making decisions so you don't have to remember the 50 keyboard commands and menus, because that is where I start to get lost.

So if you did this for something like hack you would still have the text part of the game but you would have an adjacent graphical window where you could easily click on things, go through menus, view your inventory, change out your weapons and armor, and even allow it to remember what identified items do.

Of course you would have to build all the little graphical tiles but you wouldn't need one for each individual item - just one for each like item and just like in wizardry when you click or right-click on it you could get more info about that item.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

-Myrddin

Always remember the Tleilaxu Epigram:
Here lies a toppled god
his fall was but a small one
we did but build his pedestal
a narrow and a tall one.

• Hmmm ...,Llevram, 07:08 AM, Sep-15-07
  • RE: Hmmm ...,myrddin, 02:51 PM, Sep-15-07
    • Well, ya ...,Llevram, 08:46 PM, Sep-18-07

To me (if I am following you correctly), it would be just as hard to reverse engineer the games, to be able to intreface with them, as it would to make your own game (which is truly where my interest lies ... now if I just had time and ambition, to go along with the interest )

Tools for Wizardry(r) 7

But you wouldn't have to reverse engineer them. Just find the ones that are open source and that provide the source code and documentation.

There are many good ones out there that fall under this category.

Always remember the Tleilaxu Epigram:
Here lies a toppled god
his fall was but a small one
we did but build his pedestal
a narrow and a tall one.

That would make things a bit easier, but you would be stuck using whatever language/compiler the game was built with ... and you are just making it easier to play an old game.

This falls into my high effort/low reward category

Tools for Wizardry(r) 7