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Topics - Geekboy1011

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1
News / Chat bridges are down until further notice.
« on: August 19, 2021, 02:21:21 pm »
Due to some unforeseen circumstances the bridges linking our channels on various chat platforms will be down until future notice.
Apologies for any inconvenience,

The Admin Team

2
News / Bringing the community together!
« on: April 01, 2021, 12:28:31 pm »
We are pleased to announce Cemetech has approached Omnimaga and is looking to acquire the site. These talks have progressed to the point where we require community involvement in the acquisition.
As such, we are now looking for comment from community members in support or against the merger. As you can see, @KermMartian is very interested in this acquisition and would be an excellent choice to guide the spirit of this community:


Edit (Eeems): This was an april fools joke.

3
News / Happy Holidays Omnimaga
« on: December 24, 2020, 10:36:57 pm »
Wishing you all a happy holiday season this year.
Stay safe out there through the holiday season and into the new year!

4
News / CEmu - A CE Emulator
« on: December 30, 2015, 12:06:54 pm »
CEmu: What is it?
@MateoConLechuga and @jacobly have just released a portable and open-source TI-84 Plus CE and TI-83 Premium CE emulator.

It is currently still in the early stages but is coming along rather swiftly. It can boot Ti-OS and has an interactive debugger available :D
More info is available in the thread. Huge shoutout to the team that made this!


Download : Soon ! There is no binaries to download yet, you'll have to be a little more patient ;)
Source code on GitHub : https://github.com/MateoConLechuga/CEmu

5
News / Escheron: Twilight over Ragnoth Hits Alpha
« on: October 25, 2015, 01:21:46 pm »
An epic RPG by Iambian, Zera, and Geekboy1011 has finally hit alpha!


Iambian has been working on and off of the Escheron series for 6+ years now. With many changes and restarts and changes of the engine its core design and base story. Attempted versions have ranged from a full featured grayscale version all the way to what they have now. A full featured black and white version, and yes while that may seem like a step backwards. Zera worked his artistic ability to give you something descriptively ornate anyway with a touch of old style charm.

They are currently looking for alpha testers to help find and hunt down any remaining bugs in the system that they have implemented. The alpha currently features a fully populated and interconnected overworld. Containing 99% of the NPC's, 99% of the chests and an almost feature complete set of maps. It supplies multiple ways of travel, land, sea and air. The ability to swap leaders and have guest NPCs in your party. It also shows off a randomly generated 8 level deep dungeon and some bed bugs?!? Sadly the only major feature missing at this point is a title screen.... Oh wait I meant the battle engine. Well it does not have a title screen either :P .

If you are interested in testing head over to the thread and put in an application and show some support!

6
Escheron: Twilight over Ragnoth / E:ToR ~ Alpha Test thread
« on: October 23, 2015, 10:09:49 pm »
Welcome to the alpha testing thread for Escheron: Twilight over Ragnoth.


This is a closed alpha. What does that mean for you all? It means you need to be granted access to participate. Sadly there are also a limited number of slots due to a request by Zera to keep story exposure to a minimum. No reason to spoil the story to the whole community before the game is out

To be granted access to participate in this beta you must send me a private message detailing why you are good candidate for the alpha, and how much time you are willing to dedicate to the project. What we are asking for is below in the read me included in this post.

Quote

/---------Escheron: Twilight Over Ragnoth ~ Alpha--------------
|
|                  Rodger "Iambian" Weisman
|                 Tim 'Geekboy1011' Keller
|                           Zera
|
/----------- All these dots must fit on one line. -------------
|
|..............................................................
|
/---------------------------Preface----------------------------
|
|  This is the initial, and first official, semi public release
|     Of E:ToR. Welcome to the world of Escheron!
|
/---------------------------Scope------------------------------
|
|  In this alpha test we are looking for you to run around and
|     try to break all of the things. No seriously I mean it
|     We want to know all of the bugs you can find. So we can
|     fix them and make this a better game for everyone.
|
|
|  On top of all of that we want your opinion, yes you have
|     one. We want you to let us know what you think of the
|     maps, user interface, Dialog display issues and well
|     anything.
|
/----------------Known Issues And Incomplete areas-------------
|
|   I: Why is there no fancy title screen, Those are the best.
|   S: Because that is a project killer! Would not just want
|          "Another Fancy Title Screen Demo v9001" again do
|          we?
|
|   I: Fey Wood is not a puzzle yet.
|   S: We know it will be implemented in beta
|
|   I: While using NoClip X.....
|   S: Yeah anything abnormal in noclip mode will be ignored
|          Or marked as wontfix. Seriously its for debug use
|
|   I: Why is it not smooth scrolling?
|   S: Pepperidge Farms rememebers we tried that once.....
|
|   I: Using DevBlock while on the (air)ship makes me fly/sail
|          indoors.
|   S: Yeah we know. Its fun right? Call it a feature.
|          (Its a debug item people....)
|
|   I: I can't take items/delete spells on the Guest NPC's
|   S: We know, it's coded that way to save you from deleting
|          important items as we do not track their inventory
|
/------------------------Controls------------------------------
|
|  2nd = Comfirm
|  Mode = Back
|  D-Pad = move
|
/----------------------Debug Controls--------------------------
|
|  Y= Debug info, Toggle Noclip mode
|  Del = Generate and spawn in a random Underdeep map

/-----------------------Debug Items----------------------------
|
|  Devblock = Use it to return to the debug map from anywhere
|
/---------------------Additional Notes-------------------------
|
|  The battle engine is not completed. Instead you get a popup
|     saying what you would have encountered. You can figure
|     out what you encountered in Src/Data/EnemyFormations.z80

|  We want to know what you think of the flow of maps. Do they
|     feel appropriatly sized and spaced, Not confusing etc.
|
|  The underdeep is 8 floors deep. Using Del will reset you to
|     floor 1
|

/--------------------Thank you for testing!--------------------
|
|Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee
|      Rrrrrraaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!~~~~~~
|

Those of you accepted into the alpha will be granted access to "supported" Alpha dev builds. After the alpha period is over we will gladly send you a new build to continue testing as we add new feature and what not. All you need to do is ask. Hopefully that is some good incentive for you all to apply!

Seriously everyone if you have the time apply. We are not looking for any specific skill set in this. We are just looking for some people with the time and inclination to scour the game for bad/messed up content, because quite frankly we have been staring at this for way to long and have a long time to go. So some fresh eyes are really welcome!
 

I will add a list of accepted alpha testers upon me making that decision. Currently I have received 3 request for participation.

7
News / Welp....
« on: August 10, 2015, 09:13:39 pm »
It has sadly been brought to The Admins Team's knowledge that one of our staff has, of his own accord, vandalized a fellow community site. We do not condone such activity, and with this knowledge we have no other choice but to demote this staff member back to a normal member, until a time where he can be proven he can be trusted again.

- The Omnimaga Administration Team.
 

8
Computer Projects and Ideas / Using arTICL on an MSP430 Launchpad.
« on: July 27, 2015, 04:02:41 pm »
Talking to calculator over external hardware has always been a fun and challenging task. With article you can easily communicate on more then just the AVR platform. Using Energia, which is a modification of the Wiring and Arduino framework for use with Ti's Msp430 micro-controller line, One can use the arTICL library with minimal to no modification. The only change required was to change a NAN to a 0 for Energia seems to not understand NAN.

Using an msp430 launchpad with a MSP430G2553 MCU I was able to run one of the Example applications included with.


After flashing your MSP with the example code. Wiring up to your calculator is as simple as On the arduino. Pick out your digital pins. I used pins 9 and 10.


The final functional setup! My Ti-86 was used here for the sake of good picture quality. The CSE back-light was to bright for my camera. That being said it was tested on an 83/4+SE 84+CSE as well as this 86!


So using other hardware to interface with our beloved calculators, Easier then we thought. Using arTICL makes it much easier to the point of where using different hardware is almost trivial? Whats next? Maybe some wireless shenanigans. OR some really low power data logging. The MSP430 series line is a great set of chips for more low power applications which could be easily power right from the calculator with minimal impact on battery life.

9
Escheron: Twilight over Ragnoth / E:ToR Planning - Outdated
« on: April 03, 2015, 02:37:13 pm »
This is outdated, Please see the main discussion thread for appropriate into for this project. This information is for an old iteration of the project.

Below is a rough outline of everything from the previous Escheron thread that is currently in planning for the newer "simpler" Escheron: BW. Most of this is paraphrased from Zera so bear with it its a little rough around the edged but the content is there.

I've been messing around with the idea of a monochrome game some more lately. I came up with something a little more "elegant" in its use of memory, and something that will hopefully respect the calculator's memory restraints a lot better.

I toned down the in-game lists and inventories so that there's 16 items per table - i.e. 16 different enemies that can be encountered, 16 different pieces of equipment scattered throughout the world, 16 different character and enemy skills, etc. That should fit neatly into memory without having to cross-reference multiple pages.

Echeron's original design has too much superfluous content, and much of it feels like an afterthought. For instance, you would often have your choice of 4 or 5 different kinds of equipment upgrades at various points in the story, but the stats and abilities of these items really aren't so different from one another. If Sword A and Sword B are almost identical, why give the player a choice in the first place?

Menus have also been grossly simplified. In fact, it's pretty much a clone of Dragon Warrior's menu layout. No more portraits, no more weird scrolling, etc. The whole menu system in grayscale Escheron is a beast that probably eats up most of the program, and all the little bells and whistles that make it that way aren't so spectacular that they would even make it worth the hassle.

The party system is very different. Battles are one-on-one encounters, and Maya is the only character you control. You can take a single guest character with you, but they don't have character stats / equipment of their own. What they do is tag along and occasionally (determined by pure chance) jump in and attack an enemy, or cast a spell. Enemies can't target guest characters, but if Maya is K.O.'d at any point, it's Game Over.

Guest character attack power is actually determined by Maya's own attack power plus a static bonus. This gives the illusion of guest characters being able to "level up" right alongside Maya. Maya's own stats are increased in a fashion similar to the original system I had planned - she'll gain random stat boosts after battles, as determined by probability checks. There's a default probability for any given stat increasing on its own, but wearing certain types of equipment will increase specific stats more often.

Nothing in the actual story had to be toned down. All the changes are mostly cosmetic and technical. Maya still encounters the same characters, has the same allies throughout the story, and the same major events take place. In fact, my script writing is a little more polished this time around. I shifted everything to Early Modern English grammar (i.e. Dragon Warrior) and started elaborating on each scene in much greater detail.


From left to right, descending order:

Chimera / Rhyos, Gremlin, Wasp, Vampire Bat, Lost Soul / Shrieker, (!)Labolas, (!)Shadow Lord, Zombie / Revenant, Skulldier, (!)Sea Serpent, Piranha, Bomb / Destroyer


Current World Map:7


Rosencratz


Dradmoore Swamp:
The first dungeon in the game, the cave in Dredmoor Swamp. The black tiles with white speckles are sections of swamp. Each time Maya steps in them, she's poisoned. In order to make it to the cave, Maya will have to trek through the swamp leading to the cave. Poison damage will kill Maya outside of battle, so she won't actually have enough HP to walk through the cave while under the poison's effects.

Note that there are no curative items in the game. What the player will have to do is spend a little time grinding for 400 gold and pay the magic guild in Ragnoth to scribe the "Whispering Wind" spell in Maya's spellbook. This will allow her to neutralize her poison status as soon as she makes her way into the cave.

Any chests marked "Gold" will always contain a random amount of GP between 24..48, and will respawn when Maya leaves the dungeon and returns. This is always the case, even for chests found much later in the game. If you don't mind trudging through poisonous swamps and random battles, this is a good way to grind for gold early on.


Indeed. I've made a mental note to place gold-bearing chests into the deeper sections of each dungeon so the player can't make a quick trip in, grab some loot, then exit and repeat. Some of the early dungeons are bound to be on the shorter side, but there will usually be obstacles such as random encounters and swamp tiles to make the trip much more tedious. Even so, gold will need to be somewhat plentiful. If you're K.O.'d at any point, you lose half the gold in your possession.

Here are a few "Features" that are currently being planned:

 - "Trap rooms." Entering the door places you in the center of the room, as opposed to near the entrance / exit where you should be. Every tile in this room is a forced encounter with challenging enemies. It should be noted that you do have an emergency exit spell at your disposal, but it returns you all the way back to the last monolith you used.
 
 - Looping warps. You'll often find yourself walking down endless hallways, which are actually just warp tiles that seamlessly and repeatedly transport you a few steps back.
 
 - Invisible paths, especially into complete darkness, complete with looping warps.
 
 - Warps to inescapable rooms. Just make sure you have your emergency exit spell before entering a dungeon. If not, there will be swamp tiles so you can kill yourself and be resurrected at the last monolith you used.

 - Invisible warps to trap rooms and inescapable rooms; warps that take you back to the entrance of a dungeon, and look deceptively like the exit you spent 30 minutes trying to reach; trick rooms that look like earlier rooms, giving the impression that you just backtracked or went in a circle.
 
 - Enemies are fond of instant K.O. spells. There are a couple of ways to resist instant K.O. - either by grinding your HP past a certain threshold, or finding a rare item. Both methods will likely occur very late into the game. There's one method for Maya to be resurrected during battle, but it can be put into effect only once per battle.
 
 - The best equipment is outrageously expensive. You'll need to have nearly the maximum allowable gold you can carry before you can purchase anything good. On the other hand, most of these items can be found in dungeons, albeit very well hidden.
 
 
Save System:
The save system is a bit complicated, and if not executed carefully, can cause some serious mental stress. I think I'll need a few paragraphs to explain this detail alone.

To save your game, you have to interact with one of the various monoliths found through the world, usually in towns and dungeons. What happens is Maya makes a prayer to the Fates, the three goddesses who govern time and the predestination of all things. The Fates make a record of Maya's exploits up until that point, and should Maya be killed, the Fates will transport Maya's body and spirit to an earlier point in time. In simpler terms, it's just like any typical save game scenario - you pick up where you last saved.

Now, the Fates are very particular about how the player uses this system. The Fates will instruct you to return to them and make an additional save before ending the game and shutting down your calculator. Failure to perform this procedure will screw with the very fabric of time. Suffice it to say, the Fates don't take kindly to this.

What the game does is secretly set a flag in your SRAM file the moment you load a save. This flag remains intact until you use a monolith to save the game and shut down the program from within the game itself. If you do this, then the flag is removed. If you shut down the program without going through this procedure, then the flag remains intact.

The flag lets the Fates know whether or not you followed their instructions and shut down the game within the game, or if you just abruptly turned off your calculator. If you abruptly quit, then prepare for a 10-minute lecture on why you should respect the Fates and take their powers more seriously. If you <i>habitually</i> quit the game without first saving, then the Fates will start to inflict actual punishments on you, such as removing all your items, stranding you in an inescapable room and disabling your escape spell, or wiping your SRAM data entirely.

The purpose of this is to prevent save scumming. If you find yourself in a difficult situation and death seems inevitable, you basically have no choice but to surrender to death and deal with the penalties that follow. If you simply shut down the game and try to reload from your last save file, the game <i>will</i> detect your efforts to circumvent the penalties of dying.

In the event of battery failures or other unforeseeable circumstances, the Fates will give the player a few grace warnings, but after the player screws with them several times, the Fates will no longer accept convenient "battery failures" as an excuse.

That said, be sure to follow their instructions exactly.


No worries about experience grinding, though. The growth system is similar to FF2j for the Famicom. Instead of gaining experience points, there's something like a 16/256 probability that any of Maya's ability scores will increase by 1 point after a battle. The probability for certain score increases goes up when Maya is equipped with certain items. e.g. Outfitting her with clothing or robes will help her boost her Agility score more quickly, while giving her much heavier armor will boost her HP instead.

To keep the player from getting perpetual increases from weak enemies like Gremlins and Wasps, there's an enemy ranking system in place. Each enemy has a rank from 1 to 8. What this does is determine exactly how many increases Maya can receive from fighting particular enemies. For instance, once all of Maya's ability scores reach a value of 32 or higher, she won't gain any more increases when fighting enemies below rank 3. Gremlins and Wasps are both rank 2. By the end of the game, the only way Maya will be able to gain any additional score increases is by fighting very tough rank 7 and 8 enemies, such as Chimeras.

The best comparison I can think of is the NES version of Dragon Warrior II + Final Fantasy II (the original Famicom game previously not released outside Japan) + some rougelike-lite elements.

FF4 Hard Type should be easier than Escheron. You can always grind your way to victory at any point in that game, whereas Escheron has a cut off point determined by so-called "safe zones."

You're not safe to leave the current area you're in until you've reached the highest stats the game will allow you to attain by fighting the enemies encountered in that area. At that point, you can move into a new area with tougher enemies, and these new enemies will allow you to resume grinding your stats to higher values. All of this is controlled by the rank system mentioned earlier.

If you try to venture into a different zone too early, not only will you not even be able to damage any of the enemies there, but they'll probably kill you with a single attack.

There are a few other things worth mentioning that really kick the difficulty up a notch:

 - A lot of enemies at different stages in the game have access to instant K.O. spells. Resistance to this effect is determined the target's maximum HP. The weaker K.O. spell is no longer effect against a target when it's maximum HP is above 40, and the strongest K.O. spell won't affect targets with over 128 HP.
 
 The early to mid-game sequences will be pretty daunting for this reason. Maya should have over 128 HP by the time she reaches the final dungeon, but due to cut offs and safe zones, she definitely won't be able to attain that much HP before then. Just hope you don't get ambushed by any spell-casters half-way into a long dungeon.

 - Armor has a weight factor that penalizes reaction speed. Reaction speed determines battle turn order, preemptive strike rate and probability of fleeing an encounter. If you aren't careful, you will not only ensure that Maya is consistently ambushed by every enemy she encounters, but that she also can't flee from them.

 - If Maya tries to attack fire-based enemies directly, she'll be burned. This is a pretty straightforward counterattack mechanism. To make things tricky, there are a few enemies that are not only fire-based, but have ridiculously high defense power.
 
 This counterattack formula is based <i>only</i> on Maya's raw attack power, not a percentage of how much damage she actually dealt to the enemy after its defense power had been factored into the equation. In other words, Maya may be able to inflict maybe 1 or 2 points of damage with an attack, but she'll suffer an upward of 120+ damage as a result of coming in contact with the enemy's flames. Thankfully, critical hits don't return additional damage against Maya.
 
 Magic spells ignore defense power since there's no special type of defense against magic, so these enemies aren't extremely challenging as long as you have plenty of MP to get you through hoards of random encounters with them. Alternatively, you can just run. You'll be doing a lot of that anyway.

 - The attack formula used by undead enemies is different from the standard attack formula used by both Maya and most typical enemies. Undead attacks shave off a direct percentage of Maya's maximum HP, ignore her defense power, and heal the enemy in return. This means undead enemies encountered in the very first areas of the game are still just as deadly even after you've been to the final dungeon and back.
 
 On the other hand, undead enemies have frail bodies, little HP and the lowest defense power in the game. As long as Maya is fast enough to get the first attack, she doesn't have to worry. Undead enemies are mostly a problem early on when they appear in large groups, because Maya won't have access to a multi-target spell until the middle of the game. But...
 
 - There are (rare) enemies that are both fire-based and undead. The counterattack damage will render your HP critical, then the enemy's actual attack will probably finish you off. If that doesn't do the trick, then their instant K.O. spells will. :P

10
News / Project Periodical - "Pimath Promoted?!?" Edition
« on: March 03, 2015, 04:58:35 pm »
Seems Pimathbraniac managed to miss some stuff in his last project periodical, So before we call him out on that we, the Staff here at Omnimaga, are proud to announce that Pimathbrainac has been promoted to Editor! May he continue to deliver well thought out, completed :P and enjoyable content to our front page!

Now with out further ado the remaining Project Periodical Highlights!

Hardware
Z820: A z80 computer with blinkenlights and serial communication. By Keoni29
FrostAPC328: A computer made with an arduino, an LCD display, and some buttons. By Spyro543
Dysphoria: A Knex ball machine of substantial size. Features plenty of curves. By Sorunome
Visicom Textphone Reverse-engineering: A reverse-engineering project of a textphone for deaf people from the 80s. By Keoni29
Light Detecting Oscilloscope Like Device: A light detector that graphs its output, similarly to an oscilloscope. By Spyro543
Sound Mixer: A homemade sound mixer, made with a breadboard and featuring a small speaker. By Sorunome
CBS 6000: A small 8-bit computer, now with serial loading and various other small computer features.

11
Computer Projects and Ideas / IoT Led Marquee
« on: February 22, 2015, 11:18:53 am »
So over the past few years I have been working with an led marwuee panel reverse engineering the panel and figuring out how to make it work again. We have acheived this goal.



Now a bit of back story. This marquee was given to me by an old friend of mine with the intenet of making it better. It used to run an old z80 based board that was just slow and unuseable.

Lo and behold I got a spark core at maker fair last year and have now made some hardware to go with it and now I have an IoT connected Led Marquee.

Led Marquee assembled

Led Panel Front

Assembled and installed New Controller
So whats next. I plan on making it a Vu-meter and a Post/twitter reporter. Why because why not!

Questions Comments? Poke my brain this was a fun learning experiance!

12
News / Sorry for the down time!
« on: December 08, 2014, 05:49:52 pm »
Sorry guys the host did a hardware migration over the last 2 days and ran into some technical issues getting the networking backup for the site. All is moved and well for now. There will be another instance of planned downtime in the not so far future when we move hosting platforms with the provider (leaving OnApp) which will hopefully solve these annoyingly repeated downtime instances. A news article will be posted before this happens.

Thanks for bearing through it with us.

Geekboy1011 & The Admin Team

13
News / Downgrade For Ti-nspire os 3.9 released
« on: November 02, 2014, 04:40:18 pm »
Released today, the tiny utility "DowngradeFix 3.9" finally allow lets you reinstall OS 3.6 on your TI-Nspire CX or TI-Nspire CX CAS running OS 3.9 (3.9.0.461 or 3.9.0.463). And indeed before you ask, the old black & white TI-Nspire ClickPad and TouchPad are not supported yet.

Installation is very simple - as explained in the how-to below, you will simply need to open the file, reconnect the USB plug, and send OS 3.6 !


Therefore, today is the day Ndless 3.6 is brought back to life !

Students are again able to properly do their school work for computer science with Micro Python and its editor pyWrite, exams candidates to test the new PDF document reading solution with nPDF, and everyone will be able to relax with the Nintendo Game Boy Advance emulator and nDoom!

Source : http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=172099

14
News / The Status of our Staffing and the changes That are being made
« on: October 26, 2014, 09:51:55 pm »
So internally there has been a debate on our hiring process and our current staffing roles and regulations. So with the forum upgrade (yeah I know this is a little late!) we are rearranging how the staff teams work as well as the permissions of the Team Members! Most users wont really see a major change as its all internal to the moderation

To Our staff members. This update is being rolled out, This post will be edited as the changes are applied. That being said when its done if you notice things are really wrong. Please Let me know!!!!


What this means to the rest of you? Maybe there will be a hiring run soon. So keep up the good project work and be active!
Thanks in Advanced!


All changes are done... That being said if you get permission denied on something please put in an issue on the form above and I will fix it ASAP!

15
ASM / Python z80 documentation generator
« on: October 11, 2014, 08:20:37 pm »
So me and Iambian have been working on projects and one of our biggest issues has been keeping everything even remotely documented.

So I whipped up this python script to parse specially formatted comments and spit out a text file containing all the information in a slightly organized fashion. In an attempt to force us to at least put some kind of documentation down.

Also supports Spitting out a to do file.

I plan on making it support some kinda HTML output at some point. But I have yet to figure out how I want to do that. (CHMs would be nice but google failed me :()

Python Script :
https://bitbucket.org/Geekboy1011/pythonz80doc

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