simple Visual Novel "engine"

[Martu]

Hi,

I wanted to Introduce my first project with c++ and SFML.
Some details about the project:

What is this project about?
This is a small Visual Novel. Or at least it should be one when it's finished  :)

Why a VN?
Because I'm new to SFML and thought that a VN can't be that hard to create... Ok I'm still not finished after 2-3 weeks of working on this project, but I still want to finish this :P

Goal:
The main Goal is to create a short VN which is completely defined by configuration files, so as little as possible should be hardcoded.
When I'm finished and still want to continue this project I may even write some editor for this "engine" (if I can call it that)

Current State and some things about the code:
I'm using c++ and SFML 1.6, but I'm thinking about switching to SFML 2 but haven't decided yet. At the moment everything is still hardcoded, but I will change that later on. Currently I'm working on a own class for reading *.ini files ( I just want to write some own parser for exercise ), so when this is finished I'll make as much as possible with ini files.

Because I suck at drawing and because this is still far away from being finished the graphics and the overall look is horrible at the moment

I got the idea of the structure with the effects for the sprites from one of Spidyys projects, so the credit for this goes  to him  :)

But enough with the text, here's the source code, the windows exe (should compiled under Linux/Mac too but I haven't tested it) and the some data (images, font, ...) needed to run the game.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IGIGJ6UD

Some things I should also mention is:
Space = going to the next scene
Backspace = hide the text box
Back to Mainmenue = clicking on the "x" or alt+F4

I'll post my TODO list later.

[Friend]

Wow that's really nice! I've been working on making a videogame which is very text intensive. Something like this would be very beneficial to something like that.

The file says it's unavailable at the time though, might be a megaupload server problem?

[Martu]

With the current State of the code it isn't easily possible to include it in other projects. Currently I've put the *.ini parser aside and am working on separating the code from my Framework and improving it here and there.  The result should then be a simple "conversation" class. Then it should be possible to create conversations with the style of "Recettear" or similar games, with just a few lines of code and a file containing the "scenes".

Another "feature" of this class (I don't really know if it really belongs to this class) is the option to have conditions and choices. Which means that a specific scene is only shown when when as example the Flag "FEMALE" is set. In future versions I'll work on "advanced" conditions, which only means the possibility to test if X is greater or equal to Y for example.

I will upload a new version when I have at least separated the code for the conversations from the rest and everything is working. So hopefully 3-4 days but can't really promise anything  :)

[Svenstaro]

If you want to finish a game (an enormous task by itself) you should try to get sidetracked as little as possible. Do not write an INI parser yourself, use boost property tree or serialization (I recommend the former).

Can you host it on Github or similar service? Releasing code on upload sites like MegaUpload is not a very good idea since it is hard to follow upstream progress.

[Martu]

so finally some small update  

now the code can be found on github http://github.com/martu/simple-VN (git://github.com/martu/simple-VN.git)

At the moment there is just a slightly improved version of the conversation "engine". Now it should be possible to include it easily in your own projects if you want to (a small example can be found in the main.cpp). It is not really tested at the moment and it's very easy to create memory leaks with it. The next step will be to include this conversation engine in my Visual-Novel project.

I'm thinking of using json for saving the configuration and the scenes of the conversation, because it should be possible to easily modify them by hand.

Any comments or ideas for the code/project are appreciated