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Stripping down some features - how hard can it be?

Posted: 27 Dec 2018, 20:50
by Newser
I've opened a thread that was (partially) about this before, but I'll try to make it clearer here so there will be no more misunderstandings :oops:

I simply want to ask the opinions of developers who are familiar with the code - How hard would the following changes be for someone who isn't familiar with your code but knows C/C++?

1. Remove the buttons that appear on the top (except for inventory and equipment), and remove hotkey access to stats and spells
2. Create a client that will connect directly to my custom server (hopefully I can just call the function that initiates the connection on startup with an IP/port that it reads from a file, skipping the server selection parts)
3. Give each user some premade character (Hopefully it will be as simple as playing a little bit, then taking the data, and creating a copy of it for each new user, only changing the character name/any value used to reference it).
4. Make the game progress much faster (more drops, lower creep HP, more exp per kill...)

Note that I'm not looking to spread this version of the game around. It's meant to be played for about 15 minutes by a bunch of psychologists who are unlikely to be familiar with MMORPGs, so it's not worth the effort of actually making the code look good, getting rid of unnecessary code, etc.

I'm just hoping I can delete a few lines, move some code around for (2), and maybe add just a little bit of code to accomplish (3).

Re: Stripping down some features - how hard can it be?

Posted: 27 Dec 2018, 22:22
by gumi
  1. You can remove the buttons on top of the ManaPlus interface without modifying its source code. The whole interface is very customizable: simply right-click on one of the button and you will be able to enable/disable the buttons that you want
  2. Once again, there is no need to modify the client to accomplish this. All you have to do is create a custom branding file, like what is done for Evol Online: https://github.com/ManaPlus/ManaPlus/bl ... e.manaplus & https://github.com/ManaPlus/ManaPlus/bl ... l.manaplus
  3. If using Hercules, you could create your custom characters with a PHP (or Python or whatever you prefer) script to inject characters to the char SQL table when a new account is created
  4. All of the game parameters can be tweaked by changing the files in server-data/db: https://gitlab.com/evol/serverdata/tree/master/db

Re: Stripping down some features - how hard can it be?

Posted: 28 Dec 2018, 09:14
by Newser
gumi wrote: 27 Dec 2018, 22:22
  1. You can remove the buttons on top of the ManaPlus interface without modifying its source code. The whole interface is very customizable: simply right-click on one of the button and you will be able to enable/disable the buttons that you want
  2. Once again, there is no need to modify the client to accomplish this. All you have to do is create a custom branding file, like what is done for Evol Online: https://github.com/ManaPlus/ManaPlus/bl ... e.manaplus & https://github.com/ManaPlus/ManaPlus/bl ... l.manaplus
  3. If using Hercules, you could create your custom characters with a PHP (or Python or whatever you prefer) script to inject characters to the char SQL table when a new account is created
  4. All of the game parameters can be tweaked by changing the files in server-data/db: https://gitlab.com/evol/serverdata/tree/master/db
Wow! It's more customizable than I expected. Thank you very much for your help :D