[astral]

It's been a real long time since I've bothered making a journal at all, so bear with me if the etiquette's all wrong.

I'm working on FPARPG partially inspired by a lot of modern games plus wervyn's 3d engine. So using his engine as a base so far I have something like this:

This is standing outside of a demo large brick building as a mage-type character with no abilities equipped to the action bar.



Redid the brick texture today. Same general area, different wall texture.

Lul. I've found a way to cheat my way into smoother between-tile movement for sprites on screen, extended the engine with an automap, tip box, all the other nice hud features you see and a 40 character wide giant scrolling combat text thing not displayed here since all of my test messages are offensive and/or racist. I haven't mucked with all the textures yet, and what you see here is the result of 20 minutes of dicking around. Thanks for your attention, I'll probably stick something playable here late December if my motivation holds up.

[Koji]

Quote

40 character wide giant scrolling combat text thing not displayed here since all of my test messages are offensive and/or racist.

I love this journal.

This post has been edited by Koji: 22 November 2009 - 02:20 AM

[astral]

some of the new stuff I've been banging out, new trees, added a column looking thing. Mostly just scenery today, but I felt like the new objects and textures warranted a new screen, since it looks so different from the old stuff.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Hey, that doesn't look bad. I approve.

[Risu2112]

I imagine you'll add interacting resources to the engine such as random people, vendors, treasure chests or maybe even traps? Quite a bit of potential I'd think.

[djtiesto]

Looks pretty cool, I'd be more curious to see how it looks in action though. You should post some pics of the text boxes with the offensive/racist messages in them...

[Tixus]

Nice pillar, tree, and bricks. Making the bricks bigger was the right call. I'm not sure I really dig the new grass, though. I think repeated patterns like that can make the screen look too grainy when they have that much presence onscreen, especially with that much color contrast. Perhaps something darker and slightly more subtle would be more fitting, but it's your call. I like what I see here.

[T-Bone]

my 3D engines were always shit. I might end up stealing yours at some point

stealing with permissions of course lol

[Wervyn]

Just so long as you remember that the engine is actually my work, right?

I really do like the art though, astral, it's starting to look very cool. That was my major hope, that someone would take what I did and make prettier artwork for it.

I also started working on a utility to make generating those config scripts easier, but I stalled on that. Maybe I'll get back to that when I'm done with this semester and have a little more free time.

"Babes in Toyland."

[astral]

So the smoother movement stuff is a bomb, but with proper usage of visual cues in map design, disorientation is no longer a problem. The reason why is views tend to be sufficiently different such that you don't really find yourself wondering what direction you're facing as long as you have a basic grasp of the map, which can be gained by walking around it like you would any other 3d game. What this does mean though is that sprite movement on the screen is currently particularly jarring, if you played Assault you have an idea of how this can be. I'm trying to work on a way to provide offsets from the actor itself on screen so that the display engine can adjust the position in the viewport so that pseudo between tile movement exists and it's not quite so bad, but I'm just not that good of a programmer and it's not exactly easy.


Per Tixus' advice I've gone and reworked the grass texture and colors, I think it looks much better now save perhaps that it gets real dark in the back.


and this is indoors. Indoor moat. yep. The ceiling texture, which is by extension the roof block currently, is not finished. You'll note that it hasn't changed since my first drunken post, and that's because I haven't decided on what I want it to look like yet. It's very ugly currently and has bad overlap problems that I need to fix with the clip lists. It's not such a big task really, I just haven't gotten to it. This is the part where Wervyn's engine really shines, there's no technical expertise really required to dump a ton of new art resources into the map, and by virtue of how it stores the information you can warp between boards with relatively little (if any) clean up required.

As you can see I've also revamped the user interface, it's not so intrusive at the bottom, looks a lot sharper overall. I really appreciate you guys taking an interest in what I'm working on, and the constructive criticism. I should start working on the game mechanics beyond exploration in the next week or so, my first major tasks are an inventory engine and quest log, which shouldn't be too bad.

[Jester]

This is looking good. I have always liked games like these.

How are the battles done in this? Are you going to make fighting similar to Bard's Tale or Eye of The Beholder? Do you control a group of people or just one character?

[astral]

Jester, on Nov 24 2009, 02:06 PM, said:

This is looking good. I have always liked games like these.

How are the battles done in this? Are you going to make fighting similar to Bard's Tale or Eye of The Beholder? Do you control a group of people or just one character?

One character for now, unless I can think of a way to implement multiple that I like. I toyed briefly with the idea of a party that you issue commands to though a radial menu, but doing that well might be a little bit out of my skill range. Ideally I want combat to take place in first person, the engine's more than fast enough, and you can strafe and use the mouse to turn, it's just slightly disorienting sometimes and takes a little getting used to. The mouse turning's sensitivity can be changed and it can also be turned off, keyboard turning is still in, and remappable control keys aren't exactly difficult to implement. It'd also spare me all three people whining about how it's hard to use on a dvorak keyboard or something equally ridiculous. Hopefully combat will vary wildly depending on the character you pick and how you develop it.

[astral]

After a surprising amount of work, mostly troubleshooting my initially terrible file reading and writing scripts, I got a save/load screen working that stores pertinent information about the save and a screenshot of what you saw when you went to the settings screen. You can have 21 different saves, I settled on that number because that's what fits in the space I gave it and I didn't want to bother implementing a scrolling box for it, since it doesn't fit with the rest of the UI elements. The key bind menu is nearly finished, I just need to go and write in special cases for the display of non-single character keys and the binding of mouse buttons. You can bind any key you want, it just won't show properly in the list. Interestingly a single save is 30mb, but I'm not entirely sure what's causing it, it might be the size of the vlayer. I'll have to experiment with that. Changing the mouse sensitivity and toggling mouse turning has been implemented, and you can also toggle the bigass scrolling combat text that I still haven't shown off and you can toggle the in game tips too. These aren't saved externally and neither are keybinds, I left it that way so that you can have per-character settings. There are three levels of difficulty, hard is going to be something like a new game plus type feature tuned for an endgame character. For what it's worth, this brings the game engine itself a lot closer to completion. The general mechanics of each character, inventory, and quest journal are really all that's left to be implemented before I really start putting together the story and art.

[nooodl]

astral, on Nov 24 2009, 07:20 PM, said:

This screenshot especially is looking wonderful. Also love the fact you have a little minimap over there: I hate most 3D things in MZX ending up like mazes. Great job so far -- hope you don't drop this game and/or take 8 years to finish it

This post has been edited by nooodl: 25 November 2009 - 08:18 PM

[Frobozz]

astral, on Nov 25 2009, 03:00 PM, said:

You can have 21 different saves, I settled on that number because that's what fits in the space I gave it and I didn't want to bother implementing a scrolling box for it, since it doesn't fit with the rest of the UI elements.

You could make it 20 and throw in an autosave feature that occurs at specific times. Such as directly before a big fight.

[astral]

Frobozz, on Nov 25 2009, 03:33 PM, said:

You could make it 20 and throw in an autosave feature that occurs at specific times. Such as directly before a big fight.

This was really easy to just throw in, Save 0 is now Autosave.

[Risu2112]

I know all about massive save files... Good news for you is since you've already gone through the work of a custom data screen you've already done the hardest part.

Things that take tons of space in a save file:
*Massive amounts of counters
*saving the entire world state & global assets (vlayer)

In your case, you can probably greatly reduce the size of your save files by swaping to a second world file, and putting only the small data management screen there, the downside is you need to then be able to restore the players world state with counters. This might or might not be easy depending on how you've set the game up. (this is what sfmzx does)

If that is not a practical solution for you, try freeing up your assets before you save, and initialize then again after loading. For example, try killing the Vlayer size, I assume that it's being used to store the resources for the 3d engine? those don't need to be stored in each save file since they could just be imported after loading from a resource file.

[astral]

Risu2112, on Nov 25 2009, 06:26 PM, said:

If that is not a practical solution for you, try freeing up your assets before you save, and initialize then again after loading. For example, try killing the Vlayer size, I assume that it's being used to store the resources for the 3d engine? those don't need to be stored in each save file since they could just be imported after loading from a resource file.

This here is a great idea.

[CJA]

I think that you should fade the gradients as they hit the wall. I am seeing solid-color sawtooths all over the place.

[astral]

Lots of new pictures, not much new to say really. Again, this isn't really a production map, just a place I've been putting together to test my textures and objects out, but it's starting to kind of look like a walled city.










Also, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to make it look like night with a different blank mzm loaded, I might upload some pictures of that later. I was thinking that perhaps a day/night cycle that was plot based might be interesting.

So far I'm thinking the game will have three selectable characters, each one kind of representing a different class or style of play, each starting in their own scenario before feeding into kind of a main story branch. Doesn't seem too terribly difficult to do. Currently though, art is taking up most of my time, I haven't even started work on the stuff I mentioned in the last post or so.

[astral]

New skies. There are some new window textures too, but I haven't got a screenshot of those at the moment. For real, any day now, I'm gonna start working on the actual game part. seriously.

[astral]

Annnnd title screens.

I didn't mention this before so here's an edit, but I have the quest journal fully implemented now. You can be on 19 quests at a time, and they're automatically sorted from the lowest to the highest level.

[mzxgiant]

astral, on Nov 28 2009, 04:56 PM, said:

Just a thought -- the massive negative space between the L and A draws my eye more than the center of the word (or picture), as I'd assume it should be.

I'm not sure how to correct this... maybe shorten the horizontal bar of the L or make the crossbar on the A jut to the left?

[Frobozz]

Or seeing that the later letters are rough and jagged, apply the same effect to the first three letters.

[Sai'ke]

You don't actually see mzxers use other people's engines very often (except for a few cases without consent xD). It's refreshing to see someone who doesn't want to reinvent the wheel just for the heck of it .

Anyways, looks nice. Curious where this will go.

[Galladin]

astral, on Nov 28 2009, 07:18 AM, said:

Somehow I first thought the first screen here was the sunset. Silly me. Anyhow, this is looking really good. In my opinion the title screen and the letters are perfect just as they are.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Sai'ke, on Nov 29 2009, 09:38 PM, said:

You don't actually see mzxers use other people's engines very often (except for a few cases without consent xD). It's refreshing to see someone who doesn't want to reinvent the wheel just for the heck of it .

I'd personally like to see more of this, because there's historically been a gap between the people who write fancy engines and the people who actually finish games, so it seems most logical to try and combine the two =P

[astral]

No new screens, but I redid the quest journal and started serious work on the inventory engine. The quest journal system now no longer automagically sorts the quests, but it's much easier for me, developer side, to add new quests new to the game without having to keep track of reference numbers. I may return to sorting, it just won't be built into the list this time. The inventory system right now is file-io heavy but it doesn't really slow anything down extensively. Currently there are five tabs, Weapons, Armor, Consumables, Crafting Supplies, and Plot Items. Each tab has ten slots, all items stack. So you can carry ten different types of however many items, I feel like this system will make returning to the quest hub worthwhile without robbing spelunkers of their prizes. Currently you can collect and view the items you have, I started working on allowing you to equip them last night.

To return to an old issue that's been solved, the save games are no longer 30mb, they're now about 200kb and climbing with the size of the game world. This is much more acceptable. The whole game so far with sound included weighs in at ~9mb. Saves can be loaded like traditional Megazeux saves as long as you know the slot number you used, but the much more convenient method is the load menu from the game which shows a screenshot and a time stamp.

I have working doors in the game, and I spent a lot of time yesterday working with sound. There are footfalls now, but they're not horrible. I have between 5 and 10 footfall sound effects for each type of terrain, and where you're walking determines which footfall you hear. They cycle through instead of picking a random one, so there's really no chance you'll keep hearing the same step five times in a row, you'll hear 5 or 10 different ones and then it cycles.

The biggest advantage to all this framework hubbub is that when I get down to making quests, I'll be able to do several a day with minimal time impact. Art resources will be 90% of the time, which is something I enjoy and won't easily lose interest in like I do with programming.

[astral]

astral, on Nov 30 2009, 09:41 AM, said:

Each tab has ten slots, all items stack. So you can carry ten different types of however many items, I feel like this system will make returning to the quest hub worthwhile without robbing spelunkers of their prizes.

Turns out this is ridiculous so weapons, armor, and plot items don't stack while consumables and crafting components will.
(lul ten sets of plate armor in your backpack)

[astral]

I haven't been able to work on it much today, but for the bulk of the time I was able to work on it I was hammering away at the inventory engine. A player can now find, equip, and discard items handed out in the game. Doing this also let me knock out the basic stat structure and soon I'm actually going to start working on character classes. As of now I have a working quest prototype with reward in place, and so far everything works like it's supposed to.