#82 State of the project?

[Trilarion]

Hi,

I just discovered Hale and it plays and looks quite good in my eyes. I think it deserves more attention than it may have gotten. Some questions:

Is it true that version 0.7 is the final version as announced in the readme?
Is the sourcecode also published elsewhere (Github, ...) or is the SVN/trunk (https://sourceforge.net/p/hale/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/) last changed on 2015-05 the latest available source code version?
Is version 0.7 published in 2017 equivalent to the SVN state of 2015?
Is there also license information for the artwork available?

Cheers and again thanks for producing such a nice game.

[Grokmoo]

Hi. Thanks for you interest and I'm happy to hear you have enjoyed the game!

Is it true that version 0.7 is the final version as announced in the readme?

Yes; at least I personally have no plans to continue development. The primary reason being I have no desire to continue coding in Java. There are also some pretty basic engine choices which I am not happy with and would neccessitate (another) major rewrite to fix.

I am working on a successor game called Sulis, but it is not yet playable.

Is the sourcecode also published elsewhere (Github, ...)

Yes. the latest is available here:

https://github.com/Grokmoo/hale

Is version 0.7 published in 2017 equivalent to the SVN state of 2015?

No; see above.

Is there also license information for the artwork available?

The licensing information is unfortunately not in the state it should be - I am keeping much more careful track of licensing in my next game. The Battle for Wesnoth assets are generally licensed under the GPL, while the assets from http://opengameart.org are generally CC-BY-SA. The list of contributors is available here:

https://github.com/Grokmoo/hale/blob/master/docs/Contributors.html

[Trilarion]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm interested in playing around with the code but I haven't decided yet. If so, I would probably fork the Github repository. I like the game.

I'm good with Java and find it generally okay to program in, so I wonder what alternative language you are considering?

Could you maybe comment a bit further on the basic engine choices you are not happy with and what alternatives you would choose now?

Is there some kind of a vision statement/document in which direction you and the others wanted to develop Hale? Alternatively, any other description of features for a potential version 1.0 that are missing in 0.7?

Finally, what will the idea of Sulis be? You made me curious and since Hale already turned out quite good…

[Grokmoo]

You are welcome to fork Hale, of course. I would look forward to seeing what you might do with it! I can provide a bit of support, but as I said I don't intend to devote significant additional time to Hale.

https://github.com/Grokmoo/sulis

I'm writing Sulis in Rust. This has been my first major project in Rust, so some of the code is a bit rough. But, overall I am finding it well suited to developing a game.

99.99% of the coding in Hale was done by me. There were some others providing play testing and design help years ago, but I never put together any documents like you are describing.

The Sulis engine is actually quite far along at this point, and I am now at the point where I am developing an initial mini-campaign, finishing up engine features as they are needed. To a large extent, Sulis will be a similar game to Hale.

Advantages /differences of Sulis over Hale:

• Although I love the idea of a hex grid, free hex grid art assets are very limited - this is why so much of the art comes from Battle for Wesnoth. Sulis uses a square grid. I might also support isometric tiles at some point.
• The art I am using is being carefully catalogued with license info and attribution. Not doing this was a major failing on my part in Hale.
• Multi-tile characters and creatures - for example, humans are represented as 3x3 on the underlying grid. Arbitrary sizes are supported, so I can do big monsters.
• Sulis uses its own internally rolled UI toolkit. It is to a large extent based on the TWL toolkit used by Hale, but is nicer to work with (YAML instead of XML, easier layout).
• Better data file support. Rust has serde, which essentially means I can swap out / support formats like JSON vs YAML at almost no cost in the code. Hale is largely locked into JSON without a major rewrite (which I already did once to move to JSON).
• Sulis is using Lua for scripting, as opposed to Hale which uses JavaScript.
• Hale features a lot of what I would consider unneccesary concurrency. There are several race condition type bugs that I never did quite track down. I am actually staying single threaded for now in Sulis, but when I do need asynchronous features, Rust has some pretty sophisticated models for dealing with that.
• A bit longer term, I intend the campaign I'm building for Sulis to actually have a decent story and a realized world. I don't know how well I will be able to meet this particular goal as I've never done significant writing for a fictional setting - I am excited to try my hand at this, though!

[Trilarion]

Thanks for the explanations. Rust really seems like a very good choice, even though Wikipedia describes it as a system programming language (whatever that means). I hadn't heard of Rust before and I would assume that for these rather new languages the number of available frameworks and libraries is rather small, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Switching between different serialization formats sounds good.

I forked Hale from github. Let's see what can be done. I would first try to get an overview, run IntelliJ code analysis and things like this. Maybe I come back with some questions. The issue with missing license info for the artwork can probably be fixed by actively searching. I will try that as well.

I wish you all the best with Sulis and with writing a decent story. It's surely a good opportunity to be creative. Unfortunately I would be an absolute beginner in Rust, so I guess I cannot help much there, but I will check on Sulis if there is a release.

[Grokmoo]

Sounds good. Let me know if you have specific questions about the codebase; I may be able to help.