[Risu2112]

It looks like this would be much less work than updating the old boards :\

[Risu2112]

Still could use a hand with story writing / content development ;_; stop making me beg people!

Sorry about lack of updates, little progress was made in the last 2 months, I'll be having more time to work on this now though

[Risu2112]

Still working on converting the pixel engine to work for space travel, progress is currently slow and painful.

[Risu2112]

Risu2112, on Jan 7 2008, 09:33 PM, said:

Still working on converting the pixel engine to work for space travel, progress is currently slow and painful.

Rejoyice!
Time to dust this project off! Sadly the sata drive that has the most recent work on the game I was not able to repair. Reverting to back ups!

Current status of the game: Unbelievable (complete) disrepair.

Now accepting words of encouragement.

[Koji]

Good luck.

[Risu2112]

I'd just like to thank the DMZX staff again for maintaining this site over so many years, notes I've made in here have proven invaluable countless times, and greatly softened the pain of having to revert to backups like I'm doing now

This post has been edited by Risu2112: 09 May 2008 - 01:57 AM

[Mr. Apol]

i won't be able to get an erection by the time this game comes out

[Risu2112]

For the first time ever there is actually now a pretty solid story in place, needs some more alien races though... LFM concept artist haha

[GetDizzy]

Mr. Apol, on May 9 2008, 07:16 PM, said:

i won't be able to get an erection by the time this game comes out

How many years ago did this game come out then?

[Risu2112]

[10:28] Risu2112: koji do you realize what you've done?
[10:28] koji: what?
[10:28] koji: no
[10:28] koji: no I don't
[10:28] Risu2112: you've just convinced me to give the player a modular ship
[10:29] koji: oh god
[10:29] koji: no no no no!
[10:29] koji: NO!
[10:29] koji: STOP!
[10:29] Risu2112: this is going to put the entire starport and output screens into revision
[10:29] koji: SHHH
[10:29] koji: ken, don't
[10:29] koji: just stop talking for a minute
[10:29] Risu2112: MAKE IT SO


Exploring the feasibility of this as we speak.

[Koji]

Forgive me guys, I was just trying to get him to clean up the HUD... I didn't intend this, I'm sorry

[Risu2112]

Noise generator finally works well enough.


1024's showing off on the fly aperture control yay
http://kenohki2112.homestead.com/files/SFm...s/1024map1a.PNG
http://kenohki2112.homestead.com/files/SFm...s/1024map1b.PNG
http://kenohki2112.homestead.com/files/SFm...s/1024map1c.PNG
Still has a few artifacts, not really sure if it's even worth fixing them. (probably not)


1024's are currently taking about 35 minutes to generate on the laptop, CPU (intel T7400 core 2 duo 2.16ghz dual core). Should be able to get that down to a more manageable amount of time.

Plan right now is 200-500 planets in the game, almost all of them randomly generated, key planets will likely receive some after generation touch ups.

more to come

[Risu2112]

Critics of the demo will be pleased to know I have taken your concerns seriously, and so have decided to completely re organize the HUD.

Top is the old one
bottom is the new mock-up HUD




The actual data presented to the player hasn't changed much, it's just now displayed in a way that actually is some what comprehensible.

Note the enemy display will now be showing percentage based bars for armor and hull, as well as a % readout for shields. This way the actual stats behind the enemy ship will remain hidden, but you're still able to gauge the effectiveness of your attacks.

I should point out, the armor bar will recede until gone, then be replaced by the hull bar shown in red instead of yellow. These bars will be pixel sensitive sensitive to about 2% changes.

The only bit of info that I regret not having room for any more is the target windows, failing another change the only way to determine if there are more targets is to try to cycle through them using tab, (or visually spot them) As it is right now I don't think this will end up being a major problem, I'll probably add a combat message that displays when a fight starts that says something like "X Hostile ships have warped into combat range" or something there abouts.

Edit: also note the font was revised, mostly to do with lower case letters being previously very ugly, new lettering looks much cleaner due to the now static dimensions.

This post has been edited by Risu2112: 20 December 2008 - 03:44 PM

[Galladin]

Looks good, sounds good, feels good.

You just might want to do something about those colours, I feel like I just got my first ever epilepsy attack looking at that screenshot.

[Risu2112]

Thanks,

That would be the default palette in it's full glory, kind of a kick back to the original. It will probably be shipped like this, but will likely contain a toned down palette the player can have loaded via an options menu.

This post has been edited by Risu2112: 20 December 2008 - 05:48 PM

[T-Bone]

I agree about the colors. Some of those colors just ar'nt working together. Purple on green has never looked good.

If you use less colors, so that there is a color theme of colors used and not just all it would look a hell of a lot better. I like the structure you have though. Keep it up!

[Risu2112]

Just so you know the top image was the old one, there is no longer any use of green on purple or purple on green

It's been cleaned up a bit more since then, main difference is the boarder changed from c0fwhite/c01blue to c08darkgrey/c07grey.

Thanks again to the people that offered to help test the new board.

Oh also, the system travel board is finished, it's beautiful. Getting to work now to get the hyper space board working in a similar fashion. In case you weren't aware, the system travel board represented a huge hurdle for the development of the game, I was not certain I would be able to get the pixel engine to handle large objects like it is without another complete rewrite, however it seems to have handled it like a champ.

[Risu2112]

The new hyperspace and inter-system travel boards are now both fully functional, some cosmetic work is still going to be done to each but I'll take care of that later.

Moving on to repairing the orbit screen and relinking it to the game, after that a more basic revision to the planet surface screen to make it compatible with the new maps, not entirely sure how much work that last step is going to be yet.

[Risu2112]

Hey for you guys that were complaining about the ~50mb save files SFmzx is going to create, I thought I'd let you know it looks like the game files them self unpacked are going to be over 1.1gb. Seriously, packaged only around 10-15meg it seems though.

[Koji]

Ken, I don't know what you're on. What have I told you about simplifying the game?

Your one saving grace is that MZX will be able to load content from within a zip vfs so a player won't have to sacrifice over a gig to play an MZX game. Consider yourself lucky, because I'm sure many MZXers, myself included, wouldn't sacrifice over a gig of their hard drive for just one MZX game. How much space will your music take up? You better not have unique songs for each planet, and if you do they had better be chip tunes.

This kind of bulk is ridiculous.

[mzxgiant]

Koji, on Dec 28 2008, 06:29 AM, said:

Ken, I don't know what you're on. What have I told you about simplifying the game?

Your one saving grace is that MZX will be able to load content from within a zip vfs so a player won't have to sacrifice over a gig to play an MZX game. Consider yourself lucky, because I'm sure many MZXers, myself included, wouldn't sacrifice over a gig of their hard drive for just one MZX game. How much space will your music take up? You better not have unique songs for each planet, and if you do they had better be chip tunes.

This kind of bulk is ridiculous.

While I do agree with you in principle, koji, I think Risu has really stumbled upon a fairly serious issue with how MZMs have been saved in the past. They take up an obscene amount of space and if anyone tries to do large/advanced graphics that happen to use a lot of MZMs, this kind of bloat happens. I applaud ajs for being willing to do the zip vfs in the future to help alleviate this.

[Risu2112]

Koji, on Dec 28 2008, 03:29 AM, said:

Ken, I don't know what you're on. What have I told you about simplifying the game?

Your one saving grace is that MZX will be able to load content from within a zip vfs so a player won't have to sacrifice over a gig to play an MZX game. Consider yourself lucky, because I'm sure many MZXers, myself included, wouldn't sacrifice over a gig of their hard drive for just one MZX game. How much space will your music take up? You better not have unique songs for each planet, and if you do they had better be chip tunes.

This kind of bulk is ridiculous.

I am simplifying the game at almost every turn actually. I do this by increasing the automation in content development, this has in fact been the primary goal of this recent push, and it has been quite successful thus far.

With regards to the music, currently I'm planning to have less than a MB or so, but this is subject to change since some of the music hasn't been finalized yet.

[Risu2112]

After a 2 day clusterfuck trying to create a new orbit screen I finally gave up and went back to my old army of robots. Turns out modifying that mess to support the new high res minimaps was quite easy and I should have done it from the start. I'm now patching the rest of the orbit board together and should have it linked back up to the world in an hour or two

Now, the big development:

I've finally figured out how exactly to balance the planet lander and hazards, I'll briefly summarize:

ship/lander

#1 the player ship no longer lands on planets, it just dispatches landing craft, this obviously means the lander no longer must return to the ship to leave the planet, and can freely leave the surface and return to the ship at the players request.
#2 the lander now has a fixed (upgradable) amount of fuel, no more recharging batteries, once it's out of fuel it must return to the ship before being dispatched again.
#3 the planet lander's armor is being increased by a factor of 1000-10000 to increase sensitivity to damage for the new hazard types
#4 the lander now has a heat gauge on it, depending on the ambient temp. on the planet surface you may periodically have to stop moving to have the lander cool off. (this is mostly a non-issue on planets in temp ranges at or below median earth temperature).

These two are a big change indeed, keep in mind now each time you dispatch a lander you will be charged ship fuel depending on the gravity of the planet, rather than making multiple trips with the lander out from the ship at the same landing site.

Planets
Gravity: A planets gravity at this point will only affect the amount of fuel is required to dispatch a lander. The lander it's self will not at this point be hindered otherwise. Keep in mind gravity can vary greatly from planet to planet, this fact can greatly impact the profitability of mining on a certain planet.

"Heat class" is being removed and replaced with an ambient temperature gauge, your lander can only safely operate at up to certain (upgradable) temperatures. Cold planets will allow you to roam freely without having to worry about temperature, earth-like temperature ranges will make the default lander have to occasionally take breaks to bleed off heat (again moving slowly generates heat) There will be plenty of planets with ambient temperatures above the safe level for your lander, on these planets the lander will sustain damage while on the surface depending on how far over it's safe limit it is at.
Ambient temperature will depend about 95% on the star type in a given system and the distance from the star said planet orbits at.

Tectonic class: only main change here is a significant reduction in the size of quakes, but also a similar decrease in the range from the player they spawn. This will make a more attentive pilot more able to dodge the effects of incoming quakes, instead of previously how it was basically just a damage/time threat to the player.

Weather class: Weather class now acts as multiplier against the planet lander's fuel efficiency. Higher weather classes will significantly impact the total range your lander will be able to travel on a planet. Higher weather classes will also increase the time it takes for your lander to launch off of the planet to return to the ship (from 1 sec base up to around 10 sec). In that time the lander is still vulnerable and can be destroyed by planet hazards.

Elevation: The elevation level the players lander is at will affect a number of of the planets characteristics, this is a bit generalized but for example, ambient temperature will be lower as elevation increases, negative effects from weather will be more noticeable as elevation increases, and tectonic activity will also increase as elevation increases. As a general statement, exposed minerals (the things you're usually on the planet for to collect) will be significantly more plentiful at higher (non-snow cap) elevations. Static collectible biological objects (special use resource type) will be more common at lower elevations, and pretty much exclusively on terran planet types.


Upgrades:
standard lander upgrades remain mostly the same, only slightly changed, you can upgrade the lander's:
*cargo capacity
*fuel capacity
*total armor

there will also be special upgrades that increase your lander's specific resistance to each hazard type.

Edit: I should point out also, currently all types of terrain, water or other liquids included are traversable by the lander, but each will have a base fuel cost to move over. That in mind, the lander currently can travel about 50 times as far on low lands grassy areas as it can over an ocean with the exception of hydrosphere, efficiency is generally lower as elevation increases (even before weather is factored in)

This post has been edited by Risu2112: 28 December 2008 - 08:51 PM

[KKairos]

Even if it were a gig, I'd donate the hard-drive space at least temporarily. But I don't usually use up craploads of hard-drive space otherwise (I've usually got at least a few gigs of space free.)

[nooodl]

What's the estimated playing time for this game? It might just be the longest MZX game ever

[Risu2112]

nooodl, on Dec 28 2008, 01:42 PM, said:

What's the estimated playing time for this game? It might just be the longest MZX game ever

I imagine completion times will vary greatly from one person to another. Potentially if some one was very focused and/or knew exactly what to do they would be able to complete the game quite quickly.

Some random elements might be added in to force the player to do some sleuthing to obtain key items, not 100% sure about that just yet though.

This post has been edited by Risu2112: 28 December 2008 - 10:54 PM

[Risu2112]

Orbit board is finished and linked up. Spent most of today resolving initialization issues, but as it stands now starport,system travel, hyperspace and planet orbits are all linked up correctly. I know that might not sound like a major accomplishment but I assure you it was quite a bit of work. From here I'll be moving on to the planet surface board, there's quite a bit of cosmetic work to be done here (complete HUD revision to bring it into line with the new HUD for the rest of the game). From there I need to update the starport and game menu boards to reflect changes made elsewhere in the game, mostly having to do with mineral types, some ship stats and costs for upgrades etc etc. Starport will be receiving a minor update graphically but honestly I still feel pretty comfortable about how it looks (it has aged pretty well unlike many of the now replaced engines). There are a still minor continuity fixes that need to be added in to some of the new boards still, but other than that all of the new engines are holding up superbly.

I will be marathon sfmzxing throughout tomorrows DoZ with the ambitious goal of completing the planet surface board and linking it up.

[djtiesto]

Soooo... how much longer, Ken?

[Risu2112]

djtiesto, on Dec 29 2008, 10:41 PM, said:

Soooo... how much longer, Ken?

Still plenty of work to be done

Also yeah that surface board's not done yet, progress initially has been very slow. What I really need to do before I can get that HUD fixed is standardize the new collectibles.

[Risu2112]

Been a few days now, I'm starting to think the surface board just isn't going to work without an actual rewrite.