[DDCecil]

Okay, I'll talk... I'll talk!

On and off for the past 2 and half years I've been quietly working on a DDL "Remake", yet again (though I suspect some of you already knew that, since I've been lurking about).

Why didn't I post about it sooner? I just didn't want it to be affected by the "unfinished" game curse like many, many other MZX projects. At some points I was going to just dump what I had finished and call it a day, but I've decided to just go for it and finish it, no matter how crappy it turns out (Remember those old '00 and '02 demos I released? With the headache-inducing flashing water? Now those were crappy!)

Since I'm slightly ever getting closer and closer to getting it done this time, why not post some info?

Some screenshots to whet your appetite:











Simple Premise for the remake: Zordan "Zording" Corvallius is forced by his parents wants to go to the castle's academy and become a soldier or something. Won't you guide him there?

Go through many familiar areas, fight over 100 individual enemies and bosses (really! palette swaps are for sissies, sir) in semi-generic JRPG battles (with some surprises), and see what fate has in store for the infamous c07 smiley.
---
I also have a question: Is there a utility out there that let's you take a screenshot of an entire MZX board into PNG format? Yeah this is more for the utility board, but I'll ask here.

[Lachesis]

Oooh, very nice! I'd seen you lurking for a while but didn't know you'd been working on something... sounds pretty large scale, very exciting!

As far as taking a screenshot of a board goes, not that I know of, but it doesn't sound like it'd be something difficult to throw together for somebody who knows how...

[Dr Lancer-X]

i've got something sort of underway although it still requires a bit of extra work to get some of the chars that evade the usual 'is this a custom#? if not, look up the char in the char id table' thing that correctly covers 95% of tiles.

[Val]

Lookin' good!

Just one thing, though: Consider making the font less offensive. It's very difficult to read, and I suspect that even using the default font would be appreciated more.

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

What a coincidence, I just reviewed DDL 1 & 2. They're not so bad, but they're unbalanced, kinda buggy, and Goain is so useless.

This remake will be better, right?

[Old-Sckool]

Who the bananas are you?

Anyhow, this does not look like complete shit like my stuff does. Keep it up.

[DDCecil]

Still chugging along. About the Font (which Ough is right, it isn't pretty), I tried FontUtil, but all it does is glitch out on me. Is there something else out there that allows you to easily move A-Z and the numbers from one .CHR set to another?

This remake will be better, right?

I hope so. Actually, I've been testing the heck out of it every time I add something new to the game. Hopefully someone else will want to beta test it when I get near the end (I still can't believe all the spelling errors I had in the originals "Chronicals, recieve"). Note that I'm only remaking part 1. 2 would be nice, but I don't see it happening. Of course if someone wants to do it, feel free.

I would love to release this on July 7th, 2012 - 15 years to the date of the original.

This post has been edited by DDCecil: 30 October 2011 - 02:33 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

DDCecil, on 30 October 2011 - 12:21 PM, said:

Is there something else out there that allows you to easily move A-Z and the numbers from one .CHR set to another?

You can do this in MZX itself now. The amount of work it takes depends on the number of contiguous blocks, but you can export and import partial charsets, which is sort of what you're after.

We'll call A.chr the charset you want to get the letters and numbers from and B.chr the charset you want to put them into. Import A.chr into the editor. Then go to 'Export Char Set' and have a look at the 'offset' and 'size' fields down the bottom. Now, the 3 rows of the char set with the numbers, upper-case letters and lowercase letters start at 32 and cover 96 chars, so if you wanted to move that whole block across into your new charset, you'd put 32 in the offset and 96 in the size. Now type in the name of your export charset (let's call it C.chr) and export it. Now, import B.chr into the editor. Now do another charset import, but this time put 32 in the 'Offset' field at the bottom and pick C.chr. This will load C.chr into your charset at char 32, which should replace the chars you want to replace.

If there's other graphics in the 3-row block of the charset, things will be a bit trickier, but you can get around it with multiple charset imports.

[DDCecil]

Just tried it, and it worked great. Thanks, Lancer-X!

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

DDCecil, on 30 October 2011 - 02:21 AM, said:

Note that I'm only remaking part 1. 2 would be nice, but I don't see it happening.

That's fine, I'm not a big fan of 2's story anyway (Zordan dies lol, and Goain is such a worthless load).

[KKairos]

You should also make sure to avoid the use of the annoying puzzles that were there in 1...

[DDCecil]

You should also make sure to avoid the use of the annoying puzzles that were there in 1...

I'm pretty proud of some of the puzzles I have done so far, and if you mess something up, you can always leave and come back and the whole thing resets. Plus, once you solve something, the screen will then go to the obstacle in your way and you'll watch it be removed.

[djtiesto]

This is amazing, I've been dying for a new game, or a remake, in the DDL saga.

[DDCecil]

Still working on it. Some days I can spend many hours working on it, other days, just a couple minutes. Depends on my mood. Here's some more screenshots:

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[NoahSoft]

Just keep working on it when you can and when you want to.

[DDCecil]

Chugging along, looking at *crosses fingers* a 7/7/12 release!

Anyone still care? Yes? No?

---

Stuff I had in the Global Robot:

. "- DDCecil's Twittery Progress Notes! -"

2010:
. "must make it to July 7th release date! - ~~~4 months!"
. "now it's less than 3 weeks! Yikes!"
. "now it's almost August 7th!"
. "Now its September! I'll never finish this!"
. "Mid October! Slow and steady wins the race! Want to release 12/19/10!"
. "November 8th. Ys: Oath in Felghana and DQIX have kept me away from this."
. "November 24th. SOS! I've lost all creativity. Send help!"

2011:
. "January 29th. Got some of it back! Yeah! Too bad about 12/19/10."
. "March 13th. Enemies blink when you attack 'em! Oh, Yeah!"
. "March 25th. More work being done! 2 new runes!"
. "May 20th. Lost all of April's work. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR FILES!"
. "May 24th. New PC, using 2.83 now - was using 2.81f."
. "May 28th. Re-did credits sequence."
. "June 5th. Still need to work on enemies/most maps/a coherent STORY!"
. "Aug 15th. Keep going! You can do it!"
. "Sept 12. Slow and steady wins the race! I already said that!"

2012:
. "Feb 15th. Getting there!"

(At this point I removed the above from the global robot and started a .txt file.)

3/26/12 - Water/Forest Enemies
3/27/12 - had a bad headache
3/28/12 - Forest enemies
29-04 - Forest/Desert enemies
4/05/12 - Pyramid enemies
4/12/12 - Carpal Tunnel in my right hand? Let's hope not!
4/17/12 - 2 more Overworld2 enemies to finish. Want to release it on 7/7/12 in time of DDL's 15th Anniversary.

---

Info thus far:

- Secrets. Secrets. SECRETS GALORE!
- Over 12 huge, show-stopping bosses!
- Face over 100 very different, bigger than 1x1 enemies with many attacks each! You heard that right! No palette swaps here! (Okay, maybe a couple.)
- Call up over 20 different monsters to aid you in battle to give you the upper edge!
- The biggest Ancient Arena ever full of mini-games like Slots, Hi and Lo, the Bottomless Balloon Pit (that isn't even bottomless!), and a new and improved battle arena! Not to mention "Le Cachot de Nostalgie", which I'm really excited about!
- Special non-game-changing events that happen on certain real-time dates! NEATO!
- Special Key Items that are used more than once this time around. WOW!
- Special accessories that let you regain stamina during battle and even turn off battles completely! NICE!
- A really special bonus boss battle! I'll leave it at that.

BONUS: Comes with some surprises and a MZX file W-I-P for 11/09/09, the first time I started to keep back-ups. (note that since the .chr files evolved over time, you'll see strange graphics all over it!)

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Oh god, you specified a release date!

Now it's demo cursed...

[Lachesis]

It can't be, the demo curse doesn't exist

[CJA]

Lachesis, on 22 April 2012 - 02:04 PM, said:

It can't be, the demo curse doesn't exist

Yeah, it's just "The Curse" nowadays.

[Lachesis]

CJA, on 22 April 2012 - 01:55 PM, said:

Yeah, it's just "The Curse" nowadays.

No, that's something else

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Hmm, I guess that was a poor choice of words.

After all, a demo curse requires an actual demo.

...excuse me while I go depress myself with Dark Corner and Xenogenesis again.

[DDCecil]

Yeah, no demo this time. It's all or nothing!

[DDCecil]

Now... Music! What to do... what to do...

I have some Sound FX, some made by me, some from who knows where.

I know what mods/oggs/etc I'd like to use (I've basically been listening to them non-stop ever since '09 and I'm really used to them!), but can't get a hold of the original artists, or I can't figure out who did them. I'd love to make some sound-alikes or something, but have no music experience other than goofing around with the DDL main theme in Screamtracker and yelling into a microphone. I could do what the MZX Combat Trainer does and let people change the music to whatever files they have, or they could just listen to whatever they want during the game via iPod or whatever). Bah! I just don't know.

I just don't ever want to hear any more Squaresoft music in any MZX game again!

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Yeah, enough of the same ol' battle themes!

Let's start using some from FF8 and afterwards! Haven't heard those in MZX yet!

[DDCecil]

Baby Bonnie Hood, on 28 April 2012 - 06:38 AM, said:

Yeah, enough of the same ol' battle themes!

Let's start using some from FF8 and afterwards! Haven't heard those in MZX yet!

or iS: internal Section. Infinite+ awesome points to the person who uses music from that - my favorite Square game of all-time!

More screenshots:

This post has been edited by DDCecil: 30 April 2012 - 08:19 PM

[Dr Lancer-X]

'Skull of Zeux uses Era's Light!' uh oh

[NoahSoft]

Wow, looks like you are putting in lots of effort for this! I'll make some music for you if you want!

[DDCecil]

NoahSoft, on 06 May 2012 - 11:14 AM, said:

Wow, looks like you are putting in lots of effort for this! I'll make some music for you if you want!

That would be AWESOME!!!!! Not sure how to go about doing that, though. Would I have to send you the current .MZX file with the mods I was using, or a text list of the areas and the mod files I was using for each, or something else? Let me know!

I actually found an old DDL theme Cheezit200 made for me a long time ago on an audio cassette, too bad it's barely audible, because it was great!

This post has been edited by DDCecil: 07 May 2012 - 08:04 AM

[DDCecil]

Someone remind me... is there a program that will work with 2.83 that tells you what .chr and .pal sets that are being mentioned within a .MZX file? I don't want to add anything that isn't being used to a zipfile/7z, and I haven't kept very good track like I should have been doing from the start.

Also, Lancer-X, in post 3 you mention a program that maps an entire MZX board. I just need something to show the actual shapes, don't care if it can't see certain characters. Would it possible for me to use, as it would me make some .png maps when I'm finished?

This post has been edited by DDCecil: 08 May 2012 - 08:14 PM

[Dr Lancer-X]

It would probably be quite easy to do that in MZX itself, if that's okay. It would be as a robot that writes a BMP of the current board.

I still have the program somewhere but it's on another computer and I don't feel like rewriting it right now =P

EDIT: Threw this together real quick, here you go. It'll appear to freeze MZX while it's running, just be patient. You can set "commands" to something like 65536 if you want to be able to watch the progress- but I set it to maximum so that the entire board gets written in one cycle without anything on the board being able to change in the middle of the writing. It saves to {board name}.bmp. You could put this in the global robot- if you do this, I recommend putting a 'wait 1' before it or something so that any robots on the board that load the board's charset and palette get to run first. Otherwise, just put this robot on the board somewhere after those robots are run (bottom-right corner is probably safe)

set "local30" to "commands"
set "commands" to "(-1>>1)"

. "Hack to enable overlay so that MZX doesn't crash when the overlay_char"
. "and overlay_color counters are read when overlay is set to 'off'."
. "Is this bug in the tracker anywhere?"
overlay is on

set "$filename" to "BOARD_NAME"
inc "$filename" by ".bmp"
set "&$filename&" to "fwrite_open"
set "$header" to "BM"
set "$header" to "fwrite2"
set "fwrite_counter" to "('board_w'*'board_h'*56+118)"
set "fwrite_counter" to 0
set "fwrite_counter" to 118

. "BITMAPINFOHEADER"
set "fwrite_counter" to 40
set "fwrite_counter" to "('board_w'*8)"
set "fwrite_counter" to "('board_h'*14)"
set "fwrite_counter" to "(4<<16o1)"
set "fwrite_counter" to 0
set "fwrite_counter" to "('board_w'*'board_h'*56)"
set "fwrite_counter" to 2835
set "fwrite_counter" to 2835
set "fwrite_counter" to 16
set "fwrite_counter" to 16

. "Palette"
loop start
set "fwrite_counter" to "('smzx_r&loopcount&'<<8o'smzx_g&loopcount&'<<8o'smzx_b&loopcount&'<<2)"
loop for 15

set "$blank.0" to 0
loop start
inc "$blank" by "$blank"
loop for 15
set "$row" to "$blank#('board_w'*56)"

loop start
set "board_x" to "('loopcount'%'board_w')"
set "board_y" to "('board_h'-1-('loopcount'/'board_w'))"
set "overlay_x" to "board_x"
set "overlay_y" to "board_y"
set "local2" to "board_char"
set "local3" to "board_color"
if "overlay_char" != 32 then "#overlay"
goto "#draw_char"
* "('loopcount'*100/'board_w'/'board_h')% DONE"
if "('loopcount'+1%'board_w')" = 0 then "#write_row"
loop for "('board_w'*'board_h'-1)"
* "Bitmap written"
set "" to "fwrite_open"

set "commands" to "local30"
end
: "#overlay"
set "local2" to "overlay_char"
set "local3" to "('overlay_color'a0xf0o('local3'a0x0f))"
if "overlay_color" < 16 then "#return"
set "local3" to "overlay_color"
goto "#return"
: "#draw_char"
set "local10" to "('local3'/16)"
set "local11" to "('local3'%16)"
set "local5" to "loopcount"
loop start
set "char_x" to "('local2'%32*8+('loopcount'%4*2))"
set "char_y" to "('local2'/32*14+('loopcount'/4))"
set "$row.(13-('loopcount'/4)*('board_w'*4)+('board_x'*4)+('loopcount'%4))" to "('local1&pixel&'*16)"
inc "char_x" by 1
inc "$row.(13-('loopcount'/4)*('board_w'*4)+('board_x'*4)+('loopcount'%4))" by "local1&pixel&"
loop for "(4*14-1)"

set "loopcount" to "local5"
goto "#return"
: "#write_row"
set "$row" to "fwrite('board_w'*56)"
goto "#return"