PaperFX is the JavaFX Version of the Paper TextBased Game "Engine". Notice "Engine" being put in quotes, as I have a tendency to not finish game engines I start writing, this is not going to be called one up front. Game Player/ Game Editor might be more fitting, but I digress.
Paper is a Textbased RPG Game Editor/Player.
This "Engine", as I'll keep putting quotes, was inspired by a few different titles while it is being built. A list can be seen below:
- The Elder Scrolls and Fallout - (Inspired NpcAI, NpcStats, NpcSkills, Plugin Loading)
- Shadowrun Returns - (Plugin Loading)
- Dungeons and Dragons 5e - (NpcStats, Magic Schools, NpcSkills)
- Call of Cthulhu 7e (TTRPG) - (NpcSkills)
Someway somehow I've taken inspiration from the following titles when I build each system. (Granted how they say they're used as inspirations probably are stretching the truth, I can guarentee these games were all thought of when writing the code.)
One of the main focuses for PaperFX is to provide a way for people to play Textbased "Open World" RPGs. Paper will allow the user to load Plugin files (*.pepm or *.pepf) to play games, similar to the way The Elder Scrolls and Fallout allow modding, though without the need to pay attention to your load order.
PaperFX is separated into a gradle multiproject. PaperFX is the over all main "project" and it has 3 sub-projects that comprise it
- Ink - The substance that fills Paper and Pen and allows the two to actually work. It's the core 'engine' and most if not all of the non-ui code. It holds all the code for most basic game data objects
- Pen - The editor, what was previously called Ink, now swapped to Pen, allows you to create Plugin for Paper to run.
- Paper - The program that takes what Ink offers, and what was created with Pen to provide an game experience. It's the main UI for the 'engine' and is what the PLAYER will mostly use and provides the main game loop.
With it broken up in to 3 major projects, both Pen and Paper build and include Ink as a dependency.
When launching Paper for the first time, we recommend putting the Jar (Both 'Engine' and Editor) in a subfolder first. When Paper/Ink are ran for the first time, they check to see if a folder named "paper" is next to the executable, if it isn't, it creates the folder, along with all it's subfolders and then runs.
To run Paper, it requires at the very least two things to be present inside your paper/data folder.
- paper/data/pluginName.pepm
- paper/data/scripts/pluginNameMainScript.lua**
**The plugin main script should be named whatever the plugin author called it when creating the plugin.
When you first launch Paper with the files in place, you'll be asked to choose your plugins. Selecting them with checkbox then clicking okay, will add them to lists, so they can be sorted and then loaded. If you have multiple Main Plugin Files and they all have a script file attached, the last Main Plugin to be loaded will have it's script take effect. This is done on purpose to ensure compatibility and to allow other plugins to modify and overhaul others.
Once the plugin is loaded you'll be presented with the Main Menu Screen, and from there you can start a new game, or load a previous save.
A markdown document that describes the Lua Simple Class implementation.
A doc that describes the File Formats used by both Paper and Ink.
A TODO list detailing what I want to tackle for a myriad of different topics.
A Script Tutorial of sorts. I'll try to write it as I fill out the engine.
- Gson
- Ini4J
- ZStd
- JavaFX
- TinyLog2
- ControlsFX
- LuaJ 3.0.1 (Needs to be swapped for a reliable fork)