Lemma Soft Forums

My feeling is that if you're making a free game, there's very little downside to releasing the game script under some sort of open license. My game, Moonlight Walks, was released under the following license:



I think that's the best compromise between openness and artistic integrity.

Releasing a game in an open manner has a lot of advantages to it - if someone needs to modify it to work on a new platform, they can. If they want to learn from it, they can. If they want to mirror it to a website, they can. Think about what would happen if you were abducted by aliens tomorrow - people could still keep your game running.

I don't see many disadvantages to keeping a free game closed. People worry about their games getting stolen - but I think community pressure is a far better way of stopping that then simple code-based approaches.

I'm a pragmatist, though. I can see reasons for keeping at least parts of a commercial game closed - but at the same time, it might make sense to use a more fine-grained approach than totally closed or open. (Like keep the script and drm stuff closed, but let people see the UI code or the engine.)



Done. It's easier to patrol the forums for spam, rather than having to deal with the wiki.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

A bit off topic here, but I wish there was a like feature so that I can click it for the posts in here .

Anyway, hopefully we can get a lot of people to contribute to the forum cookbook. I've been looking forward to something like that for awhile now so that I can pick up some new programming lessons, since no one updates the wiki anymore.

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Could one of the admins move my dressup code? viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14559

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Could that code be changed to make better use of screens? It strikes me that a single screen with a SetVariable in it could get rid of a lot of the branch-and-loop logic.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

Glad we got the cookbook forum.
Where to discuss about codes which should be move to the cookbook scattered in the Q&A forum?
Here or make a new topic on there?

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I kind of just threw the cookbook forum up without too much discussion here. How about the following rules for the cookbook forum:

(1) Cookbook threads should be either reusable and open-licensed code that creators can include in their game, or tutorials that they can follow to improve their project.

(2) A cookbook thread should consist of code or a tutorial in the first post or posts, followed by discussion. The thread creator is expected to amend the code if bugs or better ways of doing things are posted.

(3) Cookbook threads should exemplify modern Ren'Py programming. They should indicate the version of Ren'Py that they are intended for.

I can move threads that qualify in - otherwise, it's probably best to just make a new thread there.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

If it's alright to suggest threads we didn't make, I think sventheviking's journal system viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14367 would be a good candidate for moving to the cookbook forum. Same with Susanthecat's Hidden Object Game tutorial viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13830

I moved the hidden-object tutorial, but not the journal one. It's a thread format thing - a new thread with the journal in it would be fine. I just want to have the feel that if you read the first post of a Cookbook thread, you know what you need to know.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

I thought the journal topic might be a little too far from the guidelines to put in the forum. It was worth a try though! Here's hoping SvenTheViking remakes the thread.

Would it be a good idea to maybe get people who originally created some of the code in the original cookbook to make them into threads (if they're still around?) and try to update them? Or find someone who can update the code and have them post instead? If anyone was willing to take on such a task....

I'd think so. But it's important that the code be updated, rather than copied over verbatim. A lot of it is out of whack with today's best practices.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

Yeah, I suspect a lot of it can be streamlined or needs to be translated to screens.

Sure. I updated the code.

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I'm not sure where to ask this, but since we've been discussing the new forum here... I was thinking of doing a general tutorial on making new screens and using screen language and whatnot, but I'm not really sure what direction to take it in. What are some things people would like covered? What are some examples of screens you'd like me to try and explain how to make?

I can't do anything super complicated (the screens in BCM are like, the extent of my abilities right now), but basic screens that can be called with buttons... I can definitely explain stuff like that. My previous tutorial was more about modifying currently-existing screens rather than making new ones.

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It seems like most of the screen help requests are for making an overlay that calls stat, message, and navigation map screens. Those might be the most useful examples to start with.

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I like it. When deciding to buy a textbook on a programming language, I normally skip the actual textbook and buy the supplementary coding examples text. A lot of what I consider to be my personal coding accomplishments came about thanks to seeing a similar code, finding the faults in it, and then fixing it.

For example, in C, I have a simple function that will perfectly get a line from stdin and fstream. It can read white space without a problem, and it has enough checks on it that it won't fail. It is the best alternative to anything like scanf() or gets() and it will always work. It is also cross-platform and made entirely out of standard functions that come with the C language. I wouldn't have been able to come up with this function unless I saw this particular coding example in K&R's original C textbook that did the same thing.

The problem with the K&R example was that it was coded in old C using old syntax, and thus I had to not only modernize it, but improve on it so that it would work on a modern system.

Furthermore, the majority of external libraries, like the FMOD audio library, include coding examples on how to use their system. Microsoft provides a lot of reference on <windows.h> functions through MSDN, and Adobe has a ton of documentation on the exact specifics of AS3 through free online reference.

tl;dr; I'd rather give code so people can make things instead of being stuck trying to figure out why the system isn't working.