[T-Bone]

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Wow! Your graphics work is top-notch. How far did you get in that P.O.P. game?

Absolutely no animations what so ever, other than the torch flames and a rat that occasionally would run on by. You could move the player about and the enemies would also move. You could jump and climb but I never got around to the fighting functionality.

Its a game I started working on at the same time as Mario but I left it behind, since Mario had fewer frames of animation to create.

A little neat piece of history, I started working on Prince of Persia originally inspired by a side scrolling game you made, Amnesia. I even remember showing my father it as he was the one that introduced me to ZZT/MZX. It was the first time i ever saw "big characters" being used in a side-scroller for MZX. inevitably this inspired me to go forward with Super Mario.

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T-Bone, these all look incredible. I'm still really, really looking forward to Mario.

Also, have you seen Mario Maker yet? Seems up your alley.

Thanks! The Mario game is coming along, though a bit slow as the more I add things and fix things the more bugs appear. Its a hell of a lot better than any of the previous demos floating around, however.

I never actually got around to playing with Mario Maker, but i did get some time to poke at this amazing utility called "Super Mario Bros X" which allows you to make your own SMB1,SMB2,SMB3,SMW hybrid game. Before that I used to use Lunar Magic which allowed you to hack the Super Mario World SNES rom.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 01 March 2015 - 12:00 PM

[T-Bone]

Spent most of the morning outdoors enjoying the sun. For the evening I opened up MegaZeux and decided to take a look at my Zelda game's engine. Trying to figure out some ways to better the battle mechanisms. Currently you cannot walk while using the sword, so I'm looking at ways to make the sprite stick with the players position without going over top of him or lagging behind. I noticed the new command called SPACELOCK which I seemed to have over looked in the past - or it simply didn't exist in the past. It seems pretty handy.

Additionally I'd like to improve the boomerang and the shield. Currently the boomerang is an overlay so I'm working on converting it to a sprite. Always think it be really cool to make it so you can grab various items with the boomerang. I noticed in A Link to The Past, when you get the shield it actually helps you deflect some projectiles. Going to be looking at a possible way to implement that same functionality.

After a quick play through with a test level I noticed the enemies are way too difficult to hit with the sword. Since at close range they seemingly always end up hurting you 1 space away from themselves. So I've added a small delay in their damage delivery detection so it gives Link a small amount of time to slash the enemy before it attacks him. WAIT 1 in a Cycle 2 setting.

I have not yet worked on the inventory menu screen. So there's a ton of work to be done with this game if I ever get the free time to really dig into it. Might be worth it as I'm loving the nostalgic feel of it so far. Waking through pots looking for rupees and just listening to all those classic Zelda sound effects.

PS: if you didn't get a chance to see my project dump list, its on the bottom of page 9 of my journal. Feels kind of good to let some go.

http://www.digitalmz...pic=9809&st=240

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 25 May 2015 - 01:14 AM

[Old-Sckool]

I wanna say that spacelock is a 2.84 feature, as that release had a number of new changes added in that necessitated a version bump.

[T-Bone]

A Hero's Utopia

I've been looking at one of my older games "A Hero's Utopia" that I used to have a lot of fun working on. But got stuck during the entire combat scenes. It used a lot of sprite work and AI scripting. Started to get a bit crazy when allowing for multiplayer turn based play, NPC battles with player, NPC vs NPC spectating and even multiplayer across LAN! I had originally prototyped the concept of having the players move around the map and then when their turn ends it would attempt to load a DATA file from an Fread to a file their opponent could either MSN/Skype/ICQ them or email them or even send them via LAN connection. This was my original attempt at making the first multiplayer online MegaZeux game. Me and my brother tried to get it to work and it some what did but it made a single battle take as long as an hour and a half. Kind of like a really extreme version of chess.

I have decided as of today to completely remove the movements during battle. As this has been the cause of many bugs and just countless scripting issues. Since the combat is designed to detect if the player is a player or NPC or 2nd Player (out of 4 players in total). Having robots do all this work required way too much work on my part than I had time for and I never really did complete the process. While the demo some what worked, it just didnt play well. I find one of the great strengths of the game was its overworld where you can navigate the map alongside 3 other players/NPCs and search for resources. Its much more easier for me to focus on the AI of having the NPC's navigate a random map and attempt to engage in combat with other players that it feels it can successfully win against.

For the battle combat over-haul im going to remove the moveable units and make it so that the battles play more like traditional NES RPG games. Where each unit has a turn to attack any unit it wishes to (without actually moving). I can however animate it so enemies run up to attack and move back into position.

The reason why I'm re-opening such an old project is due to the fact that it was nearly completed long ago but I got stopped by the multiplayer issues and just the overall battle system. I'd love to make the game enjoyable to actually play and I find this is one of the few games I could actually get finished. I am removing the multiplayer elements as I don't find that MegaZeux games get much multiplayer play. I could be wrong.

UPDATES:

Unit Stacks

I've added stacks for your units. So each time the HP reaches zero for a specific unit type, the unit's stack is reduced by 1 and only dies when it reaches zero units in the stack. This allows you to build an army of units, even though only 5 maybe visible on the screen.

Unit Details

I've added a hud to display all the unit details during battle. For instance you can now view your units HP and your enemies HP. Including attack points and defense points.

NPC Defending and Fleeing

An NPC may choose to defend if it feels the need to do so during combat. Also if the NPC determines that it will absolutely not win the battle it may attempt to flee from combat. Additionally I've added it so that if you attempt to fight an enemy you cannot beat, you will be prompted if you are you sure you wish to engage in that battle.

Unit Types

I've knocked out a lot of unused enemies from the game. Since I haven't completed all the sprites and statistics for each. Narrowing down the types of units each type of character can use. Also trying my best to balance each race.

Enemy Spawns

Previously if you encountered a creature on the map you would have to fight up to 5 of them. Now it randomizes the amount of stacks you may encounter. At times you may even be fortunate enough to only encounter 1.

Spectating

You can now watch enemy players battle other NPC's. Its actually kind of cool to watch. I will be adding an option to disable this or skip it. Since right now spectating is enabled by default.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 13 August 2015 - 09:55 AM

[T-Bone]

Hey all, if your interested in watching some streams I use twitch and youtube and stream generally 3 times a week.

teabone3 on twitch and youtube and be sure to follow to get notifications of when I go live.


May stream again some of my MZX project process

[Galladin]

Hero's Utopia sounds and looks good, hope you're still working on it.

[T-Bone]

Its a game that may have been too ambitious.

[T-Bone]

So I've taken a very, very, very long break on the Super Mario game I've been working on my entire adult life. I've started poking around with an old prototype of another game. Something that I find actually quite fun to tweak with. Even if it doesn't end up getting finished I find its a lot fun just working on and test.

Its the old Grand Theft Auto concept I had. I've been plugging away at the AI and having loads of fun with it. Have an entire city of traffic that is intelligent and pedestrians that walk about. I also have police in the game that occasionally scope out the city and if you commit a crime they will come after you.

The concept is very old. I started working on it when MegaZeux was very young and GTA3 had just came out. At first I was actually inspired by the original GTA PC games. But started later on adapting the to the GTA3 inspirations even though the concept was top-down like the original GTA games. The first concept was a racing game which was a lot of fun but the controls were a bit nightmare-ish. When I moved on to turning the racing game into GTA i focused a lot on the controls. Since there was no pixel perfect support with MZX at the time I had quite the task ahead of me to make the game actually playable.

The vehicles controls are as such:

Space - Throttle Gas
Up - Maintain Speed
Down - Break
Right - Steer Right (Rotate CW)
Left - Steer Left (Rotate CCW)
Del - Reverse
Enter - Exit Vehicle

What was quite unique was this game wasn't just a driving sim. The player actually starts off not in a vehicle at all and can walk up to any parked vehicle and take control of it. Thus also exiting the vehicle and having the ability to enter others or even go back to the original one. This was achieved by making all the parked cars customblocks. Now vehicles that have drivers in them already you could also hijack with the driver then becoming the passenger still in them. I really have taken a liking to this old system so I decided to scrap my Sprites prototype. While the sprites looked great since the vehicles were actually to scale in relation to the player, I find its far more easier just using robots and customblocks. Less bugs and Its quite fun actually just using workarounds for such a simplistic engine.

Here are some of the improvements I've made in the last few days:

- Each car has a unique maximum speed
- Each car can have a variation of 7 colors (they randomly spawn in different colors)
- vehicles will now slow down when they see something ahead of them
- vehicles will use their horn when they feel they have a right of way and are blocked
- getting hit by a vehicle will hurt the player and hurt other pedestrians
- running over pedestrians kills them if a player or a driver is going fast enough
- I have placed hidden markers on the board that tell the AI which direction traffic should go
- vehicles now randomly spawn out of view of the player all over the city
- sounds made by vehicles will not be heard if the player is out of view
- added sound effects for drift (if player is moving fast when steering right or left)
- driving into objects will destroy them leaving debris
- vehicles receive damage when they crash
- shooting at vehicles can kill the driver allowing player to commandeer their vehicles
- city board is now 1000 x 1000
- vehicles slow down when approaching an intersection
- vehicles that leave the edge of the map will respawn elsewhere as a different type of vehicle
- motorcycles and ambulances

What I'm working on now:

- If a vehicle becomes trapped, it will wait till the player is far out of view and respawn
- create a navigation system for pedestrians so they can use cross-walks DONE
- add player horn (detects what type of vehicle horn to play)
- better police AI for vehicles and on foot
- Pay and Spray will allow for the player to pay for a paint job
- Dialogue audio for drivers based on vehicle type DONE
- Dialogue audio for pedestrians same voices as the vehicles types DONE
- star item to reduce felony
- Hospital and Police station for player spawning if he died or was arrested. DONE

Later required work:

- Start working on missions and story
- Title Screen design
- Improve or remove map system
- Improve UI (move counters to black space)
- In game clock (used for missions)
- Create traffic light system
- AI reacts to player horn

If 100% Complete Beta is finished:

- Aggression system for drivers and pedestrians
- Trains with stops you can get on
- improve graphics
- radio stations
- animate items and weapons so they stand out
- Option Menu to change speed display from Kilometers to Miles
- Vehicle AI to u-turn out of blocked areas

I was originally going to use the V_Layer to include overhanging structures and bridges but have decided to keep this game very simple so it can actually be completed sometime soon.

I've also decided to only work on the graphics last once the game is mostly finished or 100% finished. I think i spend too long on graphics in the past and never got anything done. I'm hopeful with this one.

(screenshot shows arrows on the road that will be invisible in the final release)

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 12 February 2017 - 05:11 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Careful with performance issues on that 1000x1000 board. MZX has to process every tile of that every cycle.

[T-Bone]

Thanks for the advice, I've been unsure of how well it will preform once I throw in more robots. First time using a board size over 500 in height.

[Dr Lancer-X]

If you can do some cleverness to only have cars, pedestrians, whatever appear and active within a window around the player (like the GTA games do) that will help a lot. Plus there's a 256 robot limit and you could easily run into that.

[Old-Sckool]

Dr Lancer-X, on 06 February 2017 - 06:31 AM, said:

Careful with performance issues on that 1000x1000 board. MZX has to process every tile of that every cycle.

just use freezetime and the global robot to fix that. not that it's really a practical solution...

[T-Bone]

Quote

If you can do some cleverness to only have cars, pedestrians, whatever appear and active within a window around the player (like the GTA games do) that will help a lot. Plus there's a 256 robot limit and you could easily run into that.

Actually this is exactly what I was looking into today. At first just making them rest and wait for the player to get near. But that still would require them all to process. The better solution I've been considering is having the spawning occur just in side a bigger box than what is visible to the player. Also considered using cloning and deletion. So that no rouge robots are left on the board. This would also prevent having robots stuck blocking the player or other robots from moving.

Will poke at this more later for sure.

Updates:

Police Station and Hospital added. If player dies he is taken to the hospital and left with a hospital bill to pay. If the player is arrested he will be taken to the police station. Any ammunition on him will be completely confiscated.

Police on foot will try to tackle the player if he has 1 star felony. If caught you will be arrested and taken to the police station. If you have 2 stars the police will re-position themselves to shoot the player.

Hitting a police car with your car will result in an increased felony star. If the police cars manage to stop the player in his vehicle and are next to it, you will be arrested (busted) and taken to the police station.

Pedestrians now use cross walks. They also randomly walk around the city in a more fluent manner. Running over or shooting a pedestrian increases your felony stars by 1.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 08 February 2017 - 10:15 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

By the way, T-Bone, did you see that Brazzers took the name of one of your games and used it for a porno?

[T-Bone]

Hahaha that's hilarious I was just looking at the old project only minutes ago to see if it was worth reviving or purging. I'd be afraid to know what a porn entitled "Metal Rear Solid" would actual consist of. I find that hilarious though.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 24 October 2017 - 04:18 PM

[T-Bone]

Been a while since I made my last entry into this age-old journal.

Its been great seeing the continued development and enthusiasm still kicking around the MegaZeux community. Gives me a bit more confidence towards completing anything here worth while and still relevant. While I see many amazing new changes and features added to the MegaZeux engine, I may not take full advantage of them all to complete my projects. As I'm quite flooded with a lot of work as it is; outside of MegaZeux.

I am often very busy with working till 7pm each day and I have to also continue development of my Fallout New Ronto mod which has developed quite a fanbase. I unusually start work on it at 8pm till 10pm. The developers from Fallout Cascadia (FO4) and Fallout Frontier (FNV) are on me near daily waiting for progress via our creators discord. So I certainly feel the pressure from the partners, collaborative programmers, 3d modellers, voice actors and fans. The mod I'm working on is pretty much the same size as the Boston world map that Bethesda has created. So its a lot to take on. Started off as a hobby and just blew up with a lot of expectations I wasn't at all prepared for.

Fallout New Ronto for Fallout 4


Its something that may never see the light of day, but it is something I work on at least 2 hours a day on. When I'm not working on that mod, I'm actually working on an open world RPG I've been creating completely from scratch in an engine that I support in. the game currently has no title but relies on the classical RPG elements and survival elements. Its something I have a lot of fun working with; As I create my own 3D models, shaders, scripts and just have a lot of creative control over everything I'm doing. I'm obsessive about details so being able to create my own open world game has always fascinated me.







Its a game I for sure can see myself completing since I'm not limited by anything technical behind it nor is there a huge expectation behind it. In fact nobody really knows about it so its going to probably remain as some dark secret project I only reveal when its actually done or if I need any funds for better models or voice actors I may bring it to Kickstarter if need be.

As for MegaZeux there are of course many projects I would like to complete but only a few i could actually ever see getting finished. While that old Mario game may come off dated once released and may get slammed horribly in the reviews for not implementing it better... it still is one of the first games I ever attempted to make since MegaZeux was launched even back before sprites. So that project file has seen the ages of time. From my teenage years into adulthood. I think completing it would be more rewarding my myself than anyone actually playing it. I plan to add a few hours a week into my schedule to push that one out while I'm still alive />

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 24 October 2017 - 04:42 PM

[Graham]

It’s good to hear from you, T-Bone. I’m glad you’re doing something enriching and fulfilling with games, keep it up! The screenshots are quite beautiful.

[T-Bone]

For anyone that was following my MZX Project Updates section of my old website. This link has now been discontinued.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 09 August 2018 - 04:48 PM

[T-Bone]

It's interesting to see the journey my MZX projects have taken.

Not even talking about progress, there is none.

From floppy-drives to disk drives, to CDs, hard drives, external drives, USB drives, servers.... a two-decade journey traveling throughout my life.

I've taken better care of the safety of these files than anything else in my life.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 17 July 2020 - 10:41 PM

[T-Bone]

Ive made some recent very small updates to Virtris

https://www.digitalm...how.php?id=1330

Waiting for the updates to be included in the main download.

The updates include just a few fixes to the pixels on the walls and music that was suppose to be added to the Title Screen.

I will be going through some of the other past games uploaded to do some minor fixes as well.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 13 March 2021 - 06:43 PM

[Maxim]

Virtris looks much better now. But there is a safe spot on the bottom of the screen next to the center spike. You can set the game to speed 1 and rack up points infinitely. Adding spike columns between the center spike and the ones next to it would fix this.

[T-Bone]

Thanks for testing it out! I hope to get some time to go back and re-do the paths of the incoming obstacles so its more obvious what direction they are going. As well as make it so that all areas are covered to ensure the player has no places to hide.

This post has been edited by T-Bone: 19 March 2021 - 02:42 PM