Oblige + Engine

I guess you guys remember Randoom, which was a source port merged with the SLIGE source code. Each time a level was loaded, the game generated new levels. It was fun as hell.

Maybe something similar is possible with OBLIGE? How flexible the OBLIGE code is? Anyone tinkered with it?

I had suggested to the author some time ago that it would be a good idea to decouple the interface & engine, to increase its flexibility and general usefulness.

He didn't seem to like that idea. His reply was that 99% of people want GUI apps and so that's what he's going to make.

Too bad, because in addition to scenarios like you describe, it would also have made Oblige easier to build on more exotic systems (not everyone runs Windows, OS/X or Linux) where the GUI toolkit depency can be a burden.

I did at one point modify an old verion of the LUA scripts to be able to run from CLI only, but later on some significant changes were made upstream and my hack didn't work anymore. After posting about it and finding out he didn't care about that stuff, I gave up and now just use slige for making random levels.

I don't see much difference in building a megawad and playing through it, compared with building each map from within the game engine. Only a bit more convenient.

Recent versions of Oblige have a "batch mode" which allows creating levels without using the GUI. I use it all the time in Linux. This mode could be used within a game engine too, running Oblige to generate levels to play.

(I'm the author of Oblige btw)

The Doomsday Engine architecture utilizes a plugin system where maps are loaded using an external map converter plugin and transfered into the engine via its API. It would be very straight forward to create a new plugin which instead of loading an existing map; called out to something like Oblige to generate a new one instead.

This might make an interesting little project for someone.

Does someone know where I can find Randoom? I can't find it. I want to see what it looks like.

I think that creating a source port that creats a level everytime you play is a lose of time, why not just creating a level (or a megawad) with Slige or Oblige and play with the source port you prefer? But it can still be a good idea because you don't have to open different programs everytime.

ManDoom does this:

http://users.zoominternet.net/~tain/ManDoom/

ManDoom is very difficult in crazy mode. But I don't like to play with ZDoom. I prefer using Chocolate-Doom (moded with higher limits).

The problem I would see would be the lack of choosing options and everything else, such as modifying stuff like I like to do (add new texture choices, tweak monster settings, etc) so keeping it separate is better in my opinion.

It looks like you need to compile the GUI to run Oblige in batch mode. Or is it setup so you can just invoke a Lua script directly, via the interpreter?

To compile the GUI, I'd need to rebuild Lua itself, due to this note in makefile.unixy:
"the Lua library must be compiled as C++"

But my OS packaged lua-5.1.4 works fine for just running any scripts, like:
$ lua scriptname.lua

The Oblige EXE in V3 and V4 contains essential map-building code in it -- the Lua scripts cannot make anything without it.

So you need the Oblige EXE for batch mode, and it needs to be compiled with FLTK library even when not using the GUI. And yes the Lua library needs to be compiled with C++ compiler.