Omnimaga
Omnimaga => Discontinued => Our Projects => Ash: Phoenix => Topic started by: squidgetx on October 25, 2010, 03:42:21 pm
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Well, this is what I've been working on since Cuberunner: Ash:Phoenix--an RPG
Storywise, I won't reveal too much, since I'd like the story to unfold as you play through the game. I will say that the main objective driving the storyline is to find the legendary bird of fire: the pheonix. You'll only have 1 character throughout (differing from other RPGS) , and all the battles will be 1 on 1 (like pokemon). Also, instead of having a list of spells, you'll have a list of (up to 8 ) different 'techniques,' some of which will be regular attacks, and others will be spells. There will be about 40 different total techniques, some of which are unlearnable depending on what class you choose to be at the beginning of the game. (There will be 6 classes: warrior (melee based), archer (melee based), mage (magic based), spirit (magic based), undead (mix), and shadows (mix) ) Techniques will have varying effects including boosts/drops to stats, recoil/healing, and regular damage
The map engine uses 12x12 tiles and your character is masked. All of the sprites I'm using right now are just temp ones that I threw together...(except for equipment ones: those turned out nice): the others will probably be redone sometime.
So far the map engine is partially done, and the item and stat screens are pretty much wrapped up.
The battle engine I have on paper, but coding it on calc is turning out to be...difficult.
Updates to follow throughout! I won't let this die (hopefully) ;D
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Wow I had Touhou Judgment in the Sixtieth Year ~ Fate of Sixty Years SSH cover playing at the same time as I opened this thread and it seemed to fit well.
Nice job so far, I love the look of it and the idea. But make sure to not make it too complex, especially the battle engine, because a RPG is a bit project and the battle engine is what most people seem to have the most trouble with.
Good luck!
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Looks nice. I really need to get back to Nostalgia... ;D
I know how hard an RPG battle engine can be in Axe, at least you only have one character to deal with, though. For mine it requires a dynamic party of up to 2 players and up to 2 enemies... Plus, I had that back-up corruption during the contest...
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well, looks very nice! A project worthy of a programmer of your high caliber ;D
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@Finale TI: yeah, that's one of the reasons why I decided to only have 1 character ^^ (although I give most credit to pokemon/dying eyes for the battle engine scheme)
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This is looking very awesome!
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This is really cool! , does anyone else think that when furthur, it should be in the Major Projects section? ;)
I really like how many Nethams appear in this year's games, blue lobsters are taking over! :P
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lol thanks. Yeah, the netham was just a temp item I threw in the database really quick for testing purposes (btw, it heals 9000Hp, 255 MP and costs 9000 gold) . Maybe I'll keep it there though...;)
Btw, your bag has a limit cap of 25 items, old school style. This means that you can have 25 different items, but it doesn't matter how many of each you have (proabably a limit of 99 each). Does this sound reasonable?
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This is really cool! , does anyone else think that when furthur, it should be in the Major Projects section? ;)
I really like how many Nethams appear in this year's games, blue lobsters are taking over! :P
Indeed. If this gets more progress it will certainly land there. :) (same for Nostalgia)
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lol thanks. Yeah, the nehtham was just a temp item I threw in the database really quick for testing purposes (btw, it heals 9000Hp, 255 MP and costs 9000 gold) . Maybe I'll keep it there though...;)
Btw, your bag has a limit cap of 25 items, old school style. This means that you can have 25 different items, but it doesn't matter how many of each you have (proabably a limit of 99 each). Does this sound reasonable?
25 items is a bit small... maybe 50 would be better (becasue typical RPGs have like <9000 different items...)
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lol thanks. Yeah, the nehtham was just a temp item I threw in the database really quick for testing purposes (btw, it heals 9000Hp, 255 MP and costs 9000 gold) . Maybe I'll keep it there though...;)
Btw, your bag has a limit cap of 25 items, old school style. This means that you can have 25 different items, but it doesn't matter how many of each you have (proabably a limit of 99 each). Does this sound reasonable?
yes, but you must keep Netham!
have like a cheat code that would let "Omnimagans" get >9000 Nthans saying the Game while playing Never AGonna Give You Up. :P
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Hm, I was just about to ask if you can delete external variables, then just before I posted I decided to check the docu just in case even though I was 99% sure you couldn't...and then I found out you can ;D. This will make things much easier (ie creating temp appvars for extra storage and then deleting them.)
I'll think about changing the limit: there'll be plenty of cushion time to decide since the only data in the save file following item data are quest flags (which I can use bits for if I want to lol)
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Nice looking game! I can't wait for more progress. Good luck. ;D
* ZTrumpet uses one (1) Netham... :D
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Minor update showing what I have done with the battle engine so far. I literally had to code this 3 times over because of some unexpected clears (ie, calc wouldn't turn on in physics until i took out all the batteries: I sit right in the front and my teacher kept looking at me weirdly. She can't say anything though, since I just averaged 99 on the last two tests lol ; and then later the game crashed when Axe forgot to tell me that I was missing a label)
Anyway, I put the stat screen in a window, and you can only use items (as opposed to equip/toss them) in battle. I also added a 'window' routine that wasn't that hard, but that I am proud of. It looks nice ;D So far all I have left to do in the engine is the actual battling part....
If you notice that I have duplicate items and moves, this is because the save file I'm using was written manually with a bunch of random moves/items...it's not a bug and it (hopefully) won't be happening in the real game
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Nice job. It looks great. ;D
I sit right in the front and my teacher kept looking at me weirdly. She can't say anything though, since I just averaged 99 on the last two tests lol
lol :P
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Hm, I was just about to ask if you can delete external variables, then just before I posted I decided to check the docu just in case even though I was 99% sure you couldn't...and then I found out you can ;D. This will make things much easier (ie creating temp appvars for extra storage and then deleting them.)
I'll think about changing the limit: there'll be plenty of cushion time to decide since the only data in the save file following item data are quest flags (which I can use bits for if I want to lol)
Yeah, creating temp appvars really helps. I actually use 3-4 different buffers in Nostalgia's battle engine (L6 and two appvars, plus the occasional use of L3).
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Wow that looks great! One thing you need to make sure for menus, though, is that key sensitiveness is not too high for when you start holding arrows down. Else, it might become a bit hard to control. Final Fantasy 1 for the Nintendo had this problem during battles.
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^Fixed now.
Progres is inching along; though I'm really busy this week so it should pick up speed by November. Move selection can now deal with <8 moves (before it couldn't) similarly to how the item system deals with <25 items. Also the interface for the battle screen has been polished, the enemy data is structured properly (no sprites yet though)and I've got pseudocode for the damage inflicting written out on paper. Hopefully by the weekend the damage code will be done and I can work on xp/lvl up, loot and battle sprites
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Cool! For 8 moves make sure when there are blocks like this:
O
OThat you cannot go between them when moving diagonaly. I think for that you need to check vertical and horizontal collision separately. Just making sure since I had this problem before when coding Metroid X.x.
Good luck!
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Oh, actually i was talking about the battle engine: when you are selecting a move before it would let you scroll all the way down the list you knew less than 8 techniques. So if you only knew 5 moves, the other 3 would be garbage/corrupted moves.
8 directional movement would be awesome if I could get it to work...on the other hand I think I'm going to be getting very close to the code limit with this project and the mapper runs fast enough so that you CAN hold down two arrow keys and move diagonally (right 1 square, up 1 square, right 1 square,etc.) so I think I'll only look at that later....
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Oh ok I thought you meant for a walking engine, my bad X.x.
As for the code limit, you could maybe use either an APP or you could use the Illusiat 13 technique with XCOPY. It would not be a pure-Axe game anymore but your executable code limit would rise to 164 KB on 83+, 480 on 84+ and 1540K on SE calcs. (If you run an ASM program from a BASIC one, the executable code from the ASM program no longer counts, so by splitting your game in chunks you can get around that limit. I guess that's one of the advantages of TI-BASIC :P
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Well I'll definitely be using an app, no questions about that. The battle engine with item/stat screens as subroutines currently sits at 6kb with estimated 1 kb of data that may be moved to appvars later. The map engine sits at 3kb with 500 bytes of data that will be moved to appvars later. NPC text, the rest of the sprites/tiles will be in external appvars as well, so I guess that leaves around 7 or 8k left for the rest of the battle engine, trigger tiles (NPC convos and bosses), warp tiles (doors, entrances etc.), and some menu stuff (which might involve a custom input routine :X ). Maybe I will be able to get to 8 dir. mvt after all ;)
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mmmm double post but AAAAAAHHHHH I GOT THE DAMAGE FORMULA TO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
my excessive happiness might seem...excessive but this is a major breakthrough (for me anyway). Coding the battle engine is all downhill from here :)
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Nice! Congrats! ;D
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This looks really cool! Good luck on it. And congrats about the battle engine, that always makes things a lot easier when things like that happen :) Keep up the great work.
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mmmm double post but AAAAAAHHHHH I GOT THE DAMAGE FORMULA TO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
my excessive happiness might seem...excessive but this is a major breakthrough (for me anyway). Coding the battle engine is all downhill from here :)
GLad to hear. I hope you did not get too much trouble getting around integer overflow problems (when your atk+the magic atk is too high for the enemy defense, it causes over the 2 byte range, causing damage to loop back in the negative ranges (since a 2 byte integer is -32768 to 32767). Some console RPGs got this problem.
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Well I tried as much as I could to keep it under. level 100 max attack/weapon/magic boosts (896 atk) vs something with less than 21 def with the best technique (15 power) would cause some overflow errors. However, 1) the residual damage (ie, if calculations reach ~70000, calculating off of ~5000) is usually enough to kill something that weak anyway and 2) it is very very hard to get max attack (255). I'm using something similar to the pokemon EV system which means that your stat gains are affected by what you kill. So unless you only kill certain types of monsters for the whole game, your attack will be much closer to 200 at lvl 100 which lowers the chances of overflows. Oh and 3) damage is always positive. No negative damage; I'm using a different set of code for healing/recoil techniques
speaking of which, most of the side effects of moves are now done :) including healing, stat boosts, recoil, and class advantage bonuses, although getting the turn rotation to work is being annoying. Hopefully I'll get a screenie showing off some animations by this weekend
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Oh and 3) damage is always positive. No negative damage; I'm using a different set of code for healing/recoil techniques.
So this means damage can go up to 65535, right? ;D
Hopefully I'll get a screenie showing off some animations by this weekend
Awesome! Good luck. :)
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Yes, damage can go up to 65535....if you hack your appvar to get jacked stats lol. The damage formula's highest amount of damage possible (normally) I think is around 35000 though.
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Well I tried as much as I could to keep it under. level 100 max attack/weapon/magic boosts (896 atk) vs something with less than 21 def with the best technique (15 power) would cause some overflow errors. However, 1) the residual damage (ie, if calculations reach ~70000, calculating off of ~5000) is usually enough to kill something that weak anyway and 2) it is very very hard to get max attack (255). I'm using something similar to the pokemon EV system which means that your stat gains are affected by what you kill. So unless you only kill certain types of monsters for the whole game, your attack will be much closer to 200 at lvl 100 which lowers the chances of overflows. Oh and 3) damage is always positive. No negative damage; I'm using a different set of code for healing/recoil techniques
speaking of which, most of the side effects of moves are now done :) including healing, stat boosts, recoil, and class advantage bonuses, although getting the turn rotation to work is being annoying. Hopefully I'll get a screenie showing off some animations by this weekend
Ah I see, glad to hear. :)
And nice progress. Can't wait to see more progress. Hopefully it might eventually get its sub-forum if it gets signifiant progress (engine done and just more maps/story to add) :D
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Yes, damage can go up to 65535....if you hack your appvar to get jacked stats lol. The damage formula's highest amount of damage possible (normally) I think is around 35000 though.
well... now i'm going to hack the appvar lol
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That's exactly what I thought. ;)
Maybe we should post it when we do... :P
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i'll probably post a program allowing you to change your stats. i've already hacked the impossible game (just to find out what the secret is. i reset my scores afterwards).
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Lol. In the TI games walkthroughs section such glitches are not allowed anyway so they would be moved out. :P The farthest "cheating" that is accepted in there is if you quit while saving at the right moment or stuff like the glitch world in TVF. :P
Maybe I could add a cheating/game hacking section but again I'm a bit relunctant, since everyone would rely on it and games wouldn't be as fun anymore. :(
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Yeah, plus it would take the fun out of figuring out how to hack it yourself. :P
I remember when I first figured out how Illusiat 11's stats were stored. It was my first successful hack of a TI game. (And my favorite calculator RPG at the time).
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That said, there could always be a section just for people with high post counts. :P Initially the walktrhoughs section was gonna be for 5 post users, with certain things for 25-50 posts users, but finally I couldn't figure out how to do that. Now I know, I think.
As for my games, it has been so incredibly long that I forgot how to hack some of them D:
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As for my games, it has been so incredibly long that I forgot how to hack some of them D:
I can do Illusiat 11 and 13 hacks! ;D
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I never tried hacking 13, but I did pretty well at hacking 3,6,7,8,11 and did some hacking for 12. ;D
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One hard game to hack, if I remember, is ROL3, unless you load a save file, exit, change stuff then run the menu program. In Reuben it's a major pain due to some encryption and in Mana Force series there are a lot of checks being done before loading the file to detect cheat save files. :P
In Mana Force, I think you can still mess up your save file even if you quit the game after loading a file then save by running the appropriate program, because when saving it doesn't fix data to be valid, so you will still be redirected to the new game screen when loading your file. :P
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Well stats will be recalculated when you load the game, but all that means is that you change the numbers that the stats are calculated off of. I wonder how easy my stats formula is to figure out...;)
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One hard game to hack, if I remember, is ROL3, unless you load a save file, exit, change stuff then run the menu program. In Reuben it's a major pain due to some encryption and in Mana Force series there are a lot of checks being done before loading the file to detect cheat save files. :P
In Mana Force, I think you can still mess up your save file even if you quit the game after loading a file then save by running the appropriate program, because when saving it doesn't fix data to be valid, so you will still be redirected to the new game screen when loading your file. :P
That reminds me, I also did a little hacking on ROL1.
Well stats will be recalculated when you load the game, but all that means is that you change the numbers that the stats are calculated off of. I wonder how easy my stats formula is to figure out...;)
Guess I might have to check the source....
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Bad news and good news:
Bad: the battle engine flipped out on me and refused to stop working
Good: I fixed it
Bad: It wasted an hour
Good: I still made a little progress
Bad: But not much
Bad: School quarter is ending this week so my teachers are all giving insane amounts of work
Good: Long weekend coming up so I'll have time then :)
TL;DR
Bad: Probably no screenie/decent progress today or tomorrow
Good: Definitely by the end of next week ;)
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bleh doublepostwhatever New update:
Seems like I had more time than I thought, so now the battle engine core is basically finished. Damage formula, stat boosts, supereffective/halfeffective damage, 'damage' to MP, healing spells, moves with recoil, turn picker, items, attempting to run away are all complete. You can now 'fight' a battle against a preprogrammed enemy, although there are no animations whatsoever and the AI just randomly picks a move out of its arsenal.
What I'm going to work on next
-AI being somewhat smart
-Animations
-HP bars
-Dynamic enemy generation (this is the hard part-I have to be able to take an enemy's level, base stats, and enemy ID and calculate stats and a reasonable moveset for it)
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Yay for more progress :D
As for enemy AI it doesn't need to be too complicated. Most RPGs calls random moves anyway. Of course it's nice to have the enemy counter certain moves with others, though, or have certain monsters cast different spells at certain HP levels.
Keep up the good work! :)
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or have certain monsters cast different spells at certain HP levels.
that's always the worst :P a cactoid that, just before dying, casts 1000 needle and kills you in one hit, etc.
also, squidget: i am seeing this thread for the first time. you made the smooth scrolling gray look very nice! how is it on real hardwarez?
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Lol yeah. In Illusiat 2, the final boss casts Ultima and does heavy damage before dying. IN the original version the game is completly broken, though, so it's easily manageable. I don't remember if any other game I made for calcs got such attacks. I know some bosses changes forms after a while, though, then start doing insane attacks. There's a boss in one of my game who increases in strenght and defense every turn and if you don't kill him fast enough, he eventually can kill you in one hit. I think that's in Illusiat 12.
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@shmibs: it looks even better on hardware. Scrolling gray is a huge PITA which I solved by doubling the frame scroll speed but changing the Dispgraphr command to For(E,0,6) : Dispgraphr : End
Also minor update: adding HP bars made the battle engine break AGAIN, but it got fixed. AI wise, all I'm gonna do is make sure they don't pick moves that are half-damage-effectiveness, and that's it. Battle engine still needs some finetuning though, before I can call it finished (it is very close to done though :D- i know in sig it only says ~50% but that's because the other stuff is just sprites/animations--but those aren't too hard to code)
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Yeah scrolling grayscakle was always an issue on the 83/84 calcs. It just blurs so much that it looks horrible. Even experienced ASM coders got troubles with that. Nothing much can be done aside from lowering the framerate and increasing the scrolling speed. I'M sure it's still gonna look great, though. Good luck on finishing the battle engine! :)
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Wonderful. Great progress squidgetx. ;D
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Well. Ran into a few issues with the battle engine--not because of coding issues, but because I realized that it makes absolutely no sense for a player to be able to shoot arrows while he has a sword equipped. However, due to the fact that I had no time with my calc today (college tours yay), and got to spend the travel time thinking about it, I've figured out a solution to this problem that will not add much to the battle engine. So you guys will still be able to expect a more official update announcing the pseudo-completion of the battle engine (hooray!) this weekend.
On another note, I've also started brainstorming NPC interaction, and I've come up with a really cool idea (that probably has been already thought of somewhere but oh well). Besides not only storing the NPC text as data, I've decided that I can use other ASCII characters to signify certain actions; the NPC interaction will be a type of code in and of itself, and the NPC interaction engine will parse it. For example, this data :"Hi, I am an NPC ↓ Would you like an item?"
:[03] [01]
:"i" //this is the imaginary i
:[01][01]
:"Here you go"
:[01]
:[02]
:"Ok then"
:[02]
:[00]
would have the NPC say "Hello I am an NPC", pause, then ask for an item and a yes/no box prompt would appear. If the player selects yes, then he will receive 1 of item #1 and the NPC would say "Here you go" and pause. If the player selects No, the the NPC would say "Ok then" and pause. Then the conversation would be over. Hopefully, through this method, NPC interaction will take less than 1000 bytes in the executable
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Oh! That will be great! I didn't thought about that one but I thought about having NPC movement patterns stored as data once. This should keep your data much smaller :)
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*drumrolls*
THE BATTLE ENGINE IS FINISHED
;D
Featuring...
-Your character sprite changes depending on what weapon you have
-Unique enemy 'hit' sprites
-Moves that have recoil, heal, and change stats of you or your enemy
-Moves with varying class-associations; super effective and half-effective damage
-unique and complex damage formula
-armor, shields, weapons, necklaces, boots, and hats
-fully functional item use
-running away
-....and some other stuff.
random changes:
-your bag now holds 50 items instead of 25
-you only get 6 moves instead of 8. however, the first 2 (which I call 'skills') change with what weapon you have. You can level up weapon types and gain better and more powerful skills with your weapon.
Current Specs: 10500 byte app ; ~15000 in archived appvars, requires 4000 free RAM to run.
/me breathes.
I know some of the sprites look a little wonky (especially the slashing animation), but those are just for demonstration purposes; they won't look as crappy upon release.
I need to optimize a little bit (already used up 63% of my app space), but otherwise, I am ready to move on! Battle Engine 0, squidgetx 1 ;D
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Oh my god, this looks so fantastic! Cant wait for a release.
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Oooohh....
This looks really nice :D
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Wonderful! Great job squidgetx. It looks awesome. ;D
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Woah, so great looking, especially the animations and layout (I like the HP/MP bars). You really did a great job so far and I am glad you finished the engine. I hope you made a backup because it would really suck if your calc RAM/Arc cleared on you X.x
I can't wait to play it when it comes out :)
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Looks nice! I can definitely see the pokemon influence. =)
*edit* I missed the animation for the character taking damage at first glance. I REALLY like it.
*edit2*I can't shake the feeling that the character looks like Harry Potter... Did you "borrow" the sprite from a Harry Potter game? :D
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Holy graphics batman, that game is amazing!
Want demo!
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Looks nice! I can definitely see the pokemon influence. =)
*edit* I missed the animation for the character taking damage at first glance. I REALLY like it.
*edit2*I can't shake the feeling that the character looks like Harry Potter... Did you "borrow" the sprite from a Harry Potter game? :D
Actually the sprite came out of when I was raging at my sprite editor and drew random lines. Then he ended up with a cape type of apparel that I thought looked cool.
Woah, so great looking, especially the animations and layout (I like the HP/MP bars). You really did a great job so far and I am glad you finished the engine. I hope you made a backup because it would really suck if your calc RAM/Arc cleared on you X.x
I can't wait to play it when it comes out :)
made a backup today on PC :)
Hopefully I should be able to get out an engine demo in a month or so, then an alpha with a bit of real storyline after that. Glad to see everyone likes it so far :)
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THIS. IS. EPIC./me can't wait. ;D
I'm seeing another feature in the future. :o
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Looks nice! I can definitely see the pokemon influence. =)
*edit* I missed the animation for the character taking damage at first glance. I REALLY like it.
*edit2*I can't shake the feeling that the character looks like Harry Potter... Did you "borrow" the sprite from a Harry Potter game? :D
Actually the sprite came out of when I was raging at my sprite editor and drew random lines. Then he ended up with a cape type of apparel that I thought looked cool.
Woah, so great looking, especially the animations and layout (I like the HP/MP bars). You really did a great job so far and I am glad you finished the engine. I hope you made a backup because it would really suck if your calc RAM/Arc cleared on you X.x
I can't wait to play it when it comes out :)
made a backup today on PC :)
Hopefully I should be able to get out an engine demo in a month or so, then an alpha with a bit of real storyline after that. Glad to see everyone likes it so far :)
Cool to hear, don't rush yourself, though :)
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WIN. That is all I'm capable of saying right now.
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Wait, so, will the battle engine support multiple sprites? I don't mean at once, but different enemies. It seems like that would take up a whole lot of space. Or, are you planning on having one per type? That would make the most sense to me.
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Wait, so, will the battle engine support multiple sprites? I don't mean at once, but different enemies. It seems like that would take up a whole lot of space. Or, are you planning on having one per type? That would make the most sense to me.
2 sprites per enemy (one for a taking damage sprite. The Troll's taking damage sprite in the screenie is lame so it's kinda hard to see, but look carefully and you'll find it) ;) Yes that takes a lot of space, but it'll be all in an archived appvar that'll be *only* 14k in size
Cool to hear, don't rush yourself, though :)
Engine wise I am quite close to being finished actually :). Only NPC stuff, a lot of data, and map switching needs to be added and I'm ready to piece together a demo :)
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2 enemies per fight or 2 sprites per enemies? Right now the enemies are much more than 2 sprites ???
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Augh, that's a lot of space
Edit: I think he means 16x32, or whatever they are, sprites, not 8x8.
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2 enemies per fight or 2 sprites per enemies? Right now the enemies are much more than 2 sprites ???
oh, by 2 sprites I meant 2 24x24 sprites. So I guess total 36 sprites lol
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Actually the sprite came out of when I was raging at my sprite editor and drew random lines. Then he ended up with a cape type of apparel that I thought looked cool.
Cool, feel free to rage some more awesome sprites out any time! ;)
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Augh, that's a lot of space
You won't like the numbers for the battle animations then :P :)
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2 enemies per fight or 2 sprites per enemies? Right now the enemies are much more than 2 sprites ???
oh, by 2 sprites I meant 2 24x24 sprites. So I guess total 36 sprites lol
Ah ok. 2 sprites per enemies including both layers? Or 2 enemies per battle?
Also Willrandship I think it doesn't matter if the game is massive. 1) It's a RPG, 2) if the game is great that's what counts. I prefer playing a massive RPG with enough features than a small one that lasts like 10 minutes or arena-based RPGs where all you do is level up all your way to 99 to beat the champion.
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^There will only be 1 enemy per battle (i would like to add more, but a) screen size limitation and b) space limitation) So each enemy sprite has 2 layers, since its grayscale, and each layer is 24x24. (or 9 8x8's) so in total that is 18 8x8's. Each enemy has its own "getting hit sprite" that is the same size. Hence, each enemy's sprite data totals 36 8x8's, or 288 bytes.
On a completely unrelated note, I've begun working on the NPC engine that I talked about on the other page, and so far I've finished the basic text display and the simple control structures. :D
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Ah ok, I see now. :)
Keep up the good work! :)
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Woooo text parser thing is going great. Basically, I'm writing a sort of parser that reads NPC data and interprets it as code (key words: sort of). This will save a lot of space both in the executable and in the NPC data appvar (I hope)
Currently can : read/display text. wait for input before advancing, ask the player yes/no and write to conversation flags (thanks Hot_Dog, Runer112 and nemo!)
This is the data used in the screenie:
"Hi. This is text. Pressa key now " [07] "Do you like cheese?" [01][02] " Awesome" [04][03] " Why not?"[04][07][14 0207][02]"DONT TALK TO ME"[16 0207][04][03]"I TOLD YOU TO STOP BOTHERING ME"[04][00]
The commands I have right now are
[07] pause
[01] yes/no box returns 0 for yes and 1 for no stored to A
[14] check bit specified by the next two bytes: the first byte is the pointer to the byte + L4, the second is the bit#. Returns 0 or 1 stored to A
[16] write to bit, same syntax as [14]
[02] Effectively, it's If A=0
[03] If A=1
[04] End
[00] End conversation
Planned commands will be a newline command, a print player name command, initiate battle, and give item.
With this method, I can/will be able to have about 200 unique NPC conversations, averaging 100 bytes in length (about 4 lines of text)
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Very nice!
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Wonderful! Great job on a nice engine. ;D
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I love the way your text box system is structured. Very nice!
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Wow great! For the Reign of Legends 3, I use some special script I made for displaying NPC convos, but mine only has pauses, line-breaks and going to next screen. It doesn't have selecting options and pauses in the middle of the text. No delays either.
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x.x lost the battle engine main program in a bad crash today....
fortunately I have a day old backup, and I didn't lose all the progress today since a lot of it are in external subprograms.
The battle engine (once I recode what I finished today) will be 1600 bytes lighter :D
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x.x lost the battle engine main program in a bad crash today....
fortunately I have a day old backup, and I didn't lose all the progress today since a lot of it are in external subprograms.
The battle engine (once I recode what I finished today) will be 1600 bytes lighter :D
Glad to hear you only lost a day's worth of work and not more.
And nice size optimization I must say. :)
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Oooh, that really sucks :(
Well, 1600 bytes is a lot to lose from the exe. Seems like the loss helped you! :)
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exe?
you mean file or so?
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exe?
you mean file or so?
executable code ;)
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ah
btw, [offtopic] THE GAME [/offtopic]
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O NO! you made me lose it again!
most times you restart coding the same thing, it will be much more optimized, so don't give up ;)
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yup, i was thrilled when I shaved off so much. The engine should now be under 9000 bytes, this is INCLUDING many major subroutines like the item system, menu stuff, and even some routines from the map engine. I'm happy that fitting this in the app is going to be a realistic goal. (current size of files: battle engine 9000 bytes, npc engine 1500, map engine 4000)
Since the NPC engine is in a different file, I worked on that a little bit and I'm happy to say it's pretty much done. A little note that's sort of interesting about the engine is that the typewriter style of displaying text is actually not an 'added' feature; it's part of the system. The engine reads one byte of data at a time and displays it, then moves on to the next byte. (If the byte isn't text it doesn't display). So ironically, taking out the typewriter effect would add to the program size lol :P
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x.x lost the battle engine main program in a bad crash today....
fortunately I have a day old backup, and I didn't lose all the progress today since a lot of it are in external subprograms.
The battle engine (once I recode what I finished today) will be 1600 bytes lighter :D
Yeah this is why I suggested a backup the other day X.x. I was worried that could happen at one point. Glad you didn't lose too much.
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It was scary; Axe froze while writing the app...I waited for 10 minutes, debating whether potential archive corruption was worth it. In the end I just pulled a battery; the only thing that happened was that the backup got deleted along with the program :P.
But no worries, PC backups ftw, plus I know all the code that I wrote so I should be able to rewrite it relatively quickly
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Please for the love of [insert deity of choice], use CalcUtil. Edit stuff from the archive and never lose data. Ever. No need to even use Axe's backup feature.
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Please for the love of The Game, use CalcUtil. Edit stuff from the archive and never lose data. Ever. No need to even use Axe's backup feature.
Yeah Axe backup feature is still not very safe. However, CalcUtil or not, still do some PC backups. I heard someone had CalcUtil crash his calc before. Maybe CalcUtil is 99.5% reliable, but bad luck happens. What if you're in the 0.5%?
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small update: All data/progress made yesterday that was lost was recovered yesterday in about 20 minutes :). Due to some progress on the enemy generation formulas, I didn't manage to recover the full 1.6 kb that I talked about earlier. The battle engine currently sits at 9249 bytes though :D (as opposed to the original size of 10500 bytes)
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Nice! Glad to hear! :)
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Yeah Axe backup feature is still not very safe. However, CalcUtil or not, still do some PC backups. I heard someone had CalcUtil crash his calc before. Maybe CalcUtil is 99.5% reliable, but bad luck happens. What if you're in the 0.5%?
The thing is, if it crashes your calc, all your stuff is archived anyway.
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Yeah Axe backup feature is still not very safe. However, CalcUtil or not, still do some PC backups. I heard someone had CalcUtil crash his calc before. Maybe CalcUtil is 99.5% reliable, but bad luck happens. What if you're in the 0.5%?
The thing is, if it crashes your calc, all your stuff is archived anyway.
That's not entirely true. If CalcUtil crashes when you are at the Save Changes? screen, you can lose the program you where just working on, because it gets unarchived to update the code.
One way around this would be to use this (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/411/41128.html). I love the Archive Undeleter. ;D
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I prefer its predecessor Archive Utility, (http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/411/41120.html) but I agree they can be very useful programs :). Gives you another chance if you really didn't want to delete that program/appvar.
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Yeah Axe backup feature is still not very safe. However, CalcUtil or not, still do some PC backups. I heard someone had CalcUtil crash his calc before. Maybe CalcUtil is 99.5% reliable, but bad luck happens. What if you're in the 0.5%?
The thing is, if it crashes your calc, all your stuff is archived anyway.
I think his archive corrupted too.
Yeah, extremly super mega bad luck can happen, too. I guess it's good to maybe backup in different ways. Example: Omnimaga site and database have a recent backup on my two hard drives, 1and1 (this one will not be as updated), an older one on my old computer and I plan to get an USB jumpdrive for that purpose too.
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Returning to the map engine now and working on interactive tiles. Turns out that inData() can't look for 2 byte numbers so I think I'll just write my own routine for it. This should be the last major part of the engine. After this, I just have to add shops/inns, and the level up system and the engine is finished :)
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Ah good to hear it's coming along pretty well. Keep up the good work! :)
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Returning to the map engine now and working on interactive tiles. Turns out that inData() can't look for 2 byte numbers so I think I'll just write my own routine for it. This should be the last major part of the engine. After this, I just have to add shops/inns, and the level up system and the engine is finished :)
Write a routine to change the number of byes allowed by Data?
Is that possible?
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Write a routine to change the number of byes allowed by Data?
Is that possible?
No, I meant that I would just hardcode it with a For() loop or something
Also, screenshot of current progress :P When stepping onto the fence tile, you are supposed to warp inside of the brick square
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Looks nice, although the grayscale seems a bit flickery when walking. Is it just due to Wabbitemu misconfiguration?
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It's a little flickery but is also due to wabbit (looks way better oncalc). Anyway, I have now fixed the problem with the RAM clears and so now warp tiles are pretty functional ;D. Now I have to add inter-mapfile warp tiles (they can handle warping to any map in one appvar, but I suspect I will have two map appvars, so I have to add switching)
edit: 400th post and 100th reply ;D
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Looks great! I recommend messing with Pt-Mask() or masking sprites. :) Other than that, it looks great! ;D
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Looks great! I recommend messing with Pt-Mask() or masking sprites. :) Other than that, it looks great! ;D
I *only* use Pt-Mask. however, the sprite's white outline is the result of a temporary bugfix that I will address later.
Btw, the map engine screenshot has no discernible changes from the first post lol :P
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It's a little flickery but is also due to wabbit (looks way better oncalc). Anyway, I have now fixed the problem with the RAM clears and so now warp tiles are pretty functional ;D. Now I have to add inter-mapfile warp tiles (they can handle warping to any map in one appvar, but I suspect I will have two map appvars, so I have to add switching)
edit: 400th post and 100th reply ;D
Cool to hear. Keep up the good work. :)
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Small update showing engine capacity:
Map sizes: I will have support for about 42kb of map. Can you say 84000 tiles? ;D
Tilesets: 256 unique tiles: 16 'themes'
NPCs: 200 unique NPC convos averaging 20 words each
Around 100 moves with about 40 unique animations
7 classes that you can play as
~50 enemies
~200 items
20 NPCs per map and 20 warp tiles per map
up to 256 unique maps (although total tile count can't go over 84000)
and maybe some other stuff that i'm forgetting :P
Alpha of the first part of the game hopefully will be released sometime early next year :P
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84000 tiles? :o That's definitely over 9000!
In Nostalgia, maps only have a handful of tiles. Actually only three different tiles, not counting objects or NPCs.
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I count objects and NPCs in the 256 tile count :P, though I doubt I'll even be able to crank out 256 tiles :P (or 42kb of map)
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updaaate!!~~~
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/w00t_ashmap.gif)
-note: gray looks better on hardware :P
Warp tiles fully functional
NPC convos fully functional
First map tileset finished
-TO DO
-Level Up system
-Spoils of War (items/money gained from enemies)
-Add some stuff to NPC system
-Optimize stuff
-Cutscene routine (easy)
-Title Screen
Space remaining in App: 1250 bytes
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that looks amazing!
actually, it looks kinda like E:SoR. ;)
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Nice! It looks great. :)
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Map sizes: I will have support for about 42kb of map. Can you say 84000 tiles? ;D
Tilesets: 256 unique tiles: 16 'themes'
Wow nice, what is the max size of one individual map?
Also, by 16 themes, I assume you mean half-byte tiles and palettes of 16 tiles, right?updaaate!!~~~
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/w00t_ashmap.gif)
-note: gray looks better on hardware :P
Looks great! Nice job so far!
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Max size of an individual map is 100x100 right now, but I'm thinking about shrinking it to 50x50 and using whole bytes instead of nibbles...
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Ah ok, you are running out of tiles per map, right? :(
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Actually I am working fine (right now) with 16, but I think extending that would be helpful ;)
My main problem is size/speed issues with the walking engine :( (detailed further in the smoothscrolling tilemapper thread)
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you might want to try making it 48x48 or 64x64 or some other power of two to pull some more speed from it :)
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you ninja'd me across two threads :o
edit: actually maybe I'll make it 64x64 instead...
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Nice! Epic ninja :D
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I would also move the char by 2 pixels rate so the speed is similar to other RPGs.
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He is moving by 2] pxls rate :(
I need some epic optimization
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Weird, in the screenshot it seemed like 1 pixel ???à
I didn't look well, then. I guess 4 pixels, then. X.x
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he just moves slow because he is fat
Lol j/k though, yeah the map engine needs serious optimization :P
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Good luck. I hope you can manage to make it run as fast as you wish or close.
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Steadily working on optimizing. I have a lot of code that I can "subroutinize" for space, plus I've got the grayscale to be way less flickery. I'm probably going to stick it into Sourcecoder and print it out so I can look at it all at once and organize it a bit better :)
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Nice! It's good when we can find optimizations for speed and size. :)
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Ouch, I'm running very tight on space now. Combined everything fits into the app with about 600 bytes left x.x. must...optimize..more...lol. I think I'll return to the battle engine for a bit and optimize that because it has some chunky stuff in it too ;)
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Ouch, I hope you don't have to do what Builderboy might be forced to do with Portal (use the BASIC launcher trick). X.x Good luck!
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Well, it seems like FinaleTI and Runer have figured out a potential workaround here (http://ourl.ca/7958#top) so the workload might just have been cut by >9000% (if it works, which it appears to do). All I have to do now is move the tile data out of the map engine to an external appvar which will save me like 1200 bytes off the map engine, then I can use that space for the routine Runer gave in that thread
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Small update: Yup, moved everything out and now we're at 5667 bytes for the map engine ;D Although it increased the amount of free RAM needed -.- I need like....4 buffers for menus, a 192 byte chunk for sprites, and a 1024 byte chunk for tiles. And a 4096 byte chunk for the map. And an undetermined amount for the external programs it'll be running (hopefully not more than 2000 more x.x). So that's like 10384 bytes... not too bad I guess ;D And we're back at 1.4k left in the app :), so hopefully this'll start moving faster soon
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Cool to hear! Hopefully you can fit more stuff. Btw do you know how many maps there are in the game approximately? (based on 12x8 chunks)
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12x8 chunks?
Not sure what you mean there, but I do know that I can have about 10 or 11 64x64 maps to make around a total of 42000 tiles. I also have the engine structured to support an indefinite amount of map appvars (currently I've set up 2 of them, but theoretically I could make as many as the archive could fit :P) However, not all maps will be 64x64: a lot of places like shops and rooms will be 16x16 and places like castles and such will be 32x32, so there could be a lot of different maps and map sizes.
Oh and the map engine is down to 5100 bytes now and runs much faster :) , but there are some weird bugs that I have to fix first x.x
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5100 bytes? That's pretty good, considering you're doing 3lvl and smooth scrolling between tiles.
I'm at 2467 for Nostalgia. ;D Of course, maps are 1536 bytes... I'm gonna have to see about RLE compression or something. It does support animated water tiles, though.
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woah, nice, animated tiles. Does this mean you redraw every frame? Don't forget that this size includes the NPC engine as well, which is like 1600 bytes :P
My maps are 4096 bytes x.x x.x x.x. What dimensions are you using? Are you using nibbles?
lol that's a lot of questions :P
Also, unrelated, I've figured out that shops/inns will be much easier than I thought, since I can just modify by NPC routine to add a command that allows any NPC to sell/buy stuff, and one that fades out, heals, and returns :) I love my NPC engine ;D
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Yep, I redraw every frame... I'm gonna go request some better water tiles than what I've been testing with though.
As for my maps, they can be up to 96x64, support wall, floor and ceiling tiles, as well as the aforementioned water tiles. My maps are basically the equivalent of two pictures, the first is used to determine the tile: If the pixel is off, draw a floor tile; if the pixel is on and the one below it is off, draw a wall tile; if the pixel is on and the one below it is on, draw a ceiling tile. The second pic is used to determine if the tile is a water tile. If the pixel is on, draw a water tile at the current frame. Then OR both layers over each other so you can't walk through water, etc.
The current map layer is stored on the back-buffer, and the current screen is on the main buffer.
I'm working on NPCs too. I'm just unsure of how I want to handle them, like do I want them to walk around, do I want them to just turn around in place, or just stand still? Nice about that shops/inn thing. I'm thinking of styling my NPCs after the way you did yours.
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Woah, that's creative.
I don't think I'm going to have my NPC's walk around, I don't have enough space x.x (although I could make them walk around once you talk to them...maybe)
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12x8 chunks?
Not sure what you mean there, but I do know that I can have about 10 or 11 64x64 maps to make around a total of 42000 tiles. I also have the engine structured to support an indefinite amount of map appvars (currently I've set up 2 of them, but theoretically I could make as many as the archive could fit :P) However, not all maps will be 64x64: a lot of places like shops and rooms will be 16x16 and places like castles and such will be 32x32, so there could be a lot of different maps and map sizes.
Oh and the map engine is down to 5100 bytes now and runs much faster :) , but there are some weird bugs that I have to fix first x.x
Ah ok, well I mean, divide your maps in 12x8 pieces. How many of those would you have? Or maybe you could state it in bytes. Assuming in your maps, one tile = 1 byte, how many bytes of map do you plan to include?
As example, Illusiat 13 had about 65-70 KB of map data, but several maps were reused multiple times for different purposes (such as the desert area). Had I not done this, I would have about 80-100 KB of map data. Each map were 16x8 large, by the way.
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Oh, I see. Well my maps don't cleanly divide into 12x8 pieces, so I don't know how to answer your question that way.
To answer in terms of bytes, I have currently about 42kb of map to use. I am thinking about going back to nibbles to decrease the amount of user RAM and the amount of space the maps take up, so you can say 42000 bytes = 84000 squares then. However, depending on how large I decide to make the game, I could easily add or remove map data, so you could expect the final game to use anywhere from only 22kb to 66kb (I don't think I will need more than 66 kb...with nibbles that is 132000 squares O_O)
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squidgetx, could you post the data for a typical map? I could try to find a decent compression method for it.
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It is completely uncompressed :P so it's just an array...like
[7777777777777777
0211111111111110
0200000000000000
0200000000000000
0000000000000000
00A0000000000000
00A0000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000000000000
0000000030000000
0000000000000000]
or something similar where each nibble/hex digit corresponds to a tile.
(0,1,2,3,4 are all walkable tiles, the rest are solid tiles)
The example map posted would be mainly empty, with a random door towards the bottom, some rocks in the upper left corner, some trees on the top row, and some other random tiles towards the mid left
As for compression, I'd favor routines that are smaller in size and compress less over those that are larger but compress more :P
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Darn that seems impressive. I like long RPGs and exploring stuff
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Would most maps be filled with mainly one tile like this?
EDIT: How about RLE? I made a program (ASHCOSRC) to compress nibble tilemaps with 4-bit RLE for you :) To use it, change the width and height variables present at the start of the source program to what you want and put the hex for the uncompressed tilemap under GDB0M. Then run the program and the hex for the compressed map will be put into Str1. Your example tilemap compressed very well, from 120 bytes to 24. ;)
And of course, what compression algorithm is any good without the proper decompression algorithm? ASHDESRC is the decompression program. The part of it that is the actual algorithm, which is all you would want, is the code under the tag ".DECOMPRESSION" excluding the Disp "DECOMPRESSING..." line. The decompression algorithm is only 113 103 bytes.
F70002C11002E002F0F00AE00AF0F0F0F0F0F0F04003F060
I hope I made it straightforward and user-friendly enough that you can simply stick all your maps into ASHCOSRC one at a time and easily retrieve the compressed map data. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
EDIT 2: Uploaded a new, further optimized decompression program. The algorithm is now 103 bytes instead of 113.
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Compression would be a good idea if maps have a lot of plain areas like this. Just decompress them to use them, though, else I assume this might be slow. :P
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...That is very sexy Runer.
Thanks ;D
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That looks great! Thanks Runer. :D
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Ok, update :) Thanksgiving is coming up which means that I'm going to be getting a lot of time to work on this :)
Updates
- Merged map engine and battle engine into an app that is only 13kb :D
- Ingame menu works
- Saving and loading also works
- Map engine is faster and less flickery
- Free RAM requirement dropped to 6288 bytes
- Character can change direction he is facing without moving
Planned updates for this weekend:
- Make character sprite 12x24 to make it look better and improve animations (he will bob up and down with each step :D)
- Battle transitions!!!! (looking at E:SoR for help on this)
- Improve status screen to display current skills and give option to unequip equipment
- Move status screen program to external appvar to test the copy-from-appvar-to-program-and-then-run-it-from-app method of circumventing the code limit
- Fix tiles so they look better (have the dunes pattern 'behind' them to make it look more realistic)
- Shops/inns
Also behold: the corrupted save file ;D
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Looks nice, despite the glitches. The glitches reminds me some Pokémon TAS on Youtube ;D
Are you planning to put water around those rocks too or is it just a random map caused by a glitch?
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The glitches are actually caused by the loading of a nonexistent save file; it doesn't yet check to see if the save file exists or not :P
The random tiles towards the top of the map look like random pieces of memory, and they are, due to the fact that my mapping engine (to increase speed) doesn't bother checking if you're walking/viewing outside the map ;)
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Looks great! I really like the fade in/out upon saving. ;D
my mapping engine (to increase speed) doesn't bother checking if you're walking/viewing outside the map ;)
You may want to change this for the final release. ;D
Use this transition: http://ourl.ca/4114 :P
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The glitches are actually caused by the loading of a nonexistent save file; it doesn't yet check to see if the save file exists or not :P
The random tiles towards the top of the map look like random pieces of memory, and they are, due to the fact that my mapping engine (to increase speed) doesn't bother checking if you're walking/viewing outside the map ;)
Ah ok. Would adding checking for map boundaries slow down the engine a lot? If it does, I generally just do like FF1 through 4 and keep the character in the middle of the map and simply add a few more tiles at the top of the map.
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I'm not sure how much it would slow it down by, but I don't really want to add it in, especially since not all the maps will have the same dimensions, so it would be a bit of a pain :P I'm just going to design all my maps so that it you can't get to the edges anyway.
So my calc needed a full mem clear last night :( because of a mysterious bug. However, it is fine now (I had a very recent backup) and progress is moving again. The title screen/save file loading works perfectly now, so now I'm off to work on shops/inns and improving the graphics a bit
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Ah ok. Personally I'm fine with the char staying in the center. It is a bit more realistic and it's more old-skool since most old RPGs worked like this. The only problem is that depending of the map design, sometimes you don't know when you're about to exit an area like a forest.
Also sorry about the mem clear, I'm glad you had a recent backup, though.
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Both an update and a way for me to keep track of what I've done/have to do
Completed:
- levelup/xp/gold gain
- Dying loads data from $8000 into the save file
- Map engine is almost done
- Worked on world map/story a bit
- Command [08] in the NPC engine does a full MP/HP restore and saves the save file to location $8000
Stat formulas done- prompt for character name when starting a new game
To Do:
- Shops
- Learning new moves/weapon XP
- Enemy Generation
- Reformat map data filesystem
- Redraw the tiles for the wasteland tileset
- Make cutscene routine
- Finish entering data for items, moves, enemies, and battle animations
- Make some maps
- Make NPC's face you when you talk to them
- Finish revamping the status screen
- Fix stat formulas
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screenie pleasz? I want MOAR
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I don't really have anything screenie-worthy atm :P
I'm setting a demo release date: Jan 1 2011. At the very least it will have the first couple areas of the full game, and the engine should be fully complete by then :)
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Nice update! Try to not be too tight on release dates, though. That can give a lot of pressure, especially if you are busy. I hope to see a demo soon, though. :)
Also what will be the average battles required to gain one level vs monsters of even skills?
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Awesome! Good luck. ;D
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Hmmm...for an enemy of even skill...does ~24 battles seem like too much? (that's the way it is set up right now, but it could change later :P)
And I think one month is sufficient to finish up the engine: then I can use you guys as beta testers/bug finders ;)
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i'd bump it down a few, to like 16-20.
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I'll change the factor from 16 to 12 for now; but hey, this is what the demo'll be for: feedback on bugs/balance issues ;)
I actually have an update I want to post too, but I'm really busy tonight so maybe tomorrow :)
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This game is gonna be fantastic.
Will it contain different playable characters?
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Hmmm...for an enemy of even skill...does ~24 battles seem like too much? (that's the way it is set up right now, but it could change later :P)
And I think one month is sufficient to finish up the engine: then I can use you guys as beta testers/bug finders ;)
It depends. If battles are fast paced, or at least like the SNES FF games, 24 should be OK. However, if it's slow paced like Final Fantasy I or IX, it should be about 15-20. If it's like The Reign of Legends series, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII or Chrono Cross, where a lot of loading times occurs between battles, 7-10.
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Woooh, pseudo-update
Most battle transitions are done, along with the stuff I wrote at the top of this page
There are 9 different battle transitions (shown in screenie here)
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/ashtransitions.gif)
Title screen and stuff are all done, and next up is working out enemy generation (currently is showing a garbage enemy; that's why the sprite is all corrupted). Map engine has been improved tremendously, although I still have to fix some of the tiles :P
(http://img.removedfromgame.com/imgs/ash6.gif)
Stat generation, while broken in the screenie, works now thanks to Runer's help :)
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Nice transitions...
But you didn't use this one (http://ourl.ca/4114). :(
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Wow this is really coming along really nicely! I am liking all of the transitions :) I think they add a great feel to the game ^^
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Wow I like them as well, especially the one with the circle. Nice job!
Will the transitions be randomized, by the way, or will they be based on what kind of enemy you encounter? (boss, final boss, mini-boss, normal enemy, enemy stronger than you, enemy weaker than you)
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I think I will have them be randomized, but for some bosses I might create some special transitions. FinaleTI, I haven't forgot about that one....I might use it for the secret boss ;)
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reminds me of:
gotta catch 'em all -PO-KE-MON!
looks great so far dude. reminds me of pokemon mixed with dying eyes mixed with other good stuff!
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I think I will have them be randomized, but for some bosses I might create some special transitions. FinaleTI, I haven't forgot about that one....I might use it for the secret boss ;)
Ah cool, so like FFTOM, then. I would remove some of them if they take a lot of space, though. Otherwise you should be fine. :)
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They take up (virtually) no space in the app-200 bytes at most, I'd say. Hooray for executing external programs from apps :D
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Okay, felt like doubleposting, but hey, it's a project update :) So I finished one of the unique transitions for the secret boss ;) Run Asm(prgmA1) to see what it is
As a small status update, i'm now working on entering all the move data into the database because that has to be done before I can implement enemy-generation and learning moves. Some other things I also have to work on are gaining items from battles, shops (still), making NPC's change their appearance (turn to face you, have switches change from 'up' to 'down' positions, having the NPC change tiles in the map (not too hard), and the event/cutscene routine. That is literally all the coding left for the engine :D: after that it's just a bunch of data-entering, spriting, and map designing :)
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That was the fastest rickroll I ever seen. :O
Nice one. :P
Also great progress! :)
EDIT:
Axe Raycaster: 0.1%-just tinkering around....
O.O
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Yeah, I'll make a separate topic for that soon ;) (Note it's up to 1% over .1% now ^-^)
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Cool, I can't wait! :D
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lol :P
I like how the text inverse flag is still on. :P
What's the real transition going to look like?
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I'm thinking about having a separate, hidden, difficult to get to area, which will be full of memes and the secret boss WILL use that transition and his sprite will be a 24x24 version of Rick Astley's head. ;)
And, actually, I'm not kidding. (But it will probably be the last part of the game made)
I haven't made any new transitions, as I'm mainly working on the different moves and making sure every class is relatively balanced (ie archer types won't get crappy moves whereas mage types get awesome ones)
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Hah that would be funny. I always love bonus dungeons but one with plenty of Internet references would rock even more. Just make sure it's also pretty hard.
By the way are you done with all magic/skills animations?
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Done with animations.....I wish x.x
First I have to (again) decide on all the moves. Then I'll have to make the animations >.> of which there are a lot of. (around 40 I think) I want to get the balance of the game *relatively* even before I make animations, which means i have to figure out how to take an enemy's type, class, and level and generate its moveset accordingly. This I've been putting off for a little bit, plus i got distracted by the raycaster lol. I'll get around to it though, probably when I'm bored in class sometime this week
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I see. Good luck with them :)
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Small update: finished a lot of conceptual work with the move system, so now the real coding can resume :P. There are a total of 90 different techniques in the game.
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Wow that's a lot! In Illusiat 13 there are 54 magic attacks and in Mana Force 2 49, and that's because most look similar accross each experience level (for example, Fire 2 would be the same as Fire 1, but the animation is longer). I'm glad to see coding can resume. :)
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Well I cheated a *little bit* Let me give out the specs for the move system:
First, the first 2 (or maybe 3) moves available in battle depend on what type of weapon you have equipped. You can gain experience with a certain type of weapon, level it up, and learn better moves with that weapon. The main level up system is independent of this, and raises your stats on level up (like in normal RPGs) It's like in real life, if you trained a lot with swords, you would eventually get good at using a sword, but not at using other weapons. However, you'd still get stronger and faster no matter what you're training with. The save file can remember all the different moves you have with each weapon, so you can alter your moveset by switching weapons.
The other 3 moves available to you I call 'skills,' which are learned upon leveling up to a certain level (or using a scroll) are constant independent of weapon and unique depending on your class.
There are 6 classes of weapons/characters/enemies etc. There are 5 main weapon skills that each class of weapon can learn, and all of these moves are the same except for their typing. =30 moves
Now there are 3 types of move for each weapon class that can be learned as well, as well as 2 levels of each move =3*2*6=36 moves
Now each class also gets 6 skills that they can learn independent of their weapon = 36 moves.
Woops, there are actually 102 moves ;D
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Uncircumventable roadblock: the MAX SYMBOLS error :mad:
To fix this I'm going to put the whole battle engine into it's own separate program/appvar/virtual page thing. That way many of the battle engine's exclusive subroutines will be contained in another program and thus not count towards the total symbol limit
However, currently the battle engine and the map engine are sort of intertwined, plus it's been a little while since I've looked at the code so I think it will be fairly difficult. However, once I have managed to do this, everything (and I mean everything) will be a LOT easier to work with since in the app I will have gained like 4k of space, decreased the symbol count significantly, and given the battle engine an extra 4k of space (if I ever need to add anything).
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That's gotta suck.
[sarcasm]Rewriting the battle engine is loads of fun. Trust me. It's even more fun than writing it the first time.[/sarcasm]
Seriously though, good luck.
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lol. I just realized that for some reason I wasn't quite awake when I wrote that post. The battle engine is >9000 bytes; how could I put it into a virtual page?
:banghead:
Anyway, I'm going to move the npc engine into it's own program instead, which pretty much achieves what i need to do (free up space in app and decrease symbol count) except it is much easier. Hopefully I'll be able to stick to my 1/1/11 demo date ;)
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This sucks, I hope you can manage to get this issue worked out. It would suck if the project died due to this. X.x
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If I may quote from the first post:
I won't let this die
NEVER!!!!!
progress continues. I've regained some of my motivation :). I've finally started on dynamic enemy generation, and many of the NPC extensions are coded (but not tested yet :P)
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Good to hear, I was just worried because certain limitations or bugs on something can kill projects or force the user to switch to a new language, which means a restart from scratch, which often kill the project in the process. X.x
(Actually for some reasons, even if the person just decides to switch midway into development even if the project would've been fine in its original language, I notice that the project always die. An example is Simplethinker's Chips Challenge clone. X.x)
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Hmmmm you speak of virtual pages? Are you talking about virtual pages like what i am doing with PortalX?
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This looks really cool. :)
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Hmmmm you speak of virtual pages? Are you talking about virtual pages like what i am doing with PortalX?
Sort of, but a bit simpler :P
Since this is an app, I don't have to worry about the hosting program's existence in RAM (at least, I don't think so). So all I have to do to 'add' things to the engine is use a bcall to run a specified program from RAM, then return to the app. For example, all of the transition effects are in their own program which is in an archived appvar which is copied to a temp program then run whenever a battle starts.
@csprinkle: thanks ;)
@DJ yeah, the MAX SYMBOLS limitation is a hard one to deal with. I ended up just deleting some subroutines that I only use twice or three times, plus moving the NPC engine to its own program helped a lot.
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Enemy generation works now.
In the map file, there's 4 bytes that tell you the level (plus or minus 2) of the enemies that may appear, and 3 that identify 3 different enemies that inhabit that map.
When the battle occurs, the enemy's base stats and level are used to calculate its stats. Its level is then used to calculate its movepool. I'm fairly proud of this system ;D
To-do for demo release in 16 days
-test (and fix) all the NPC extensions that I've recently added
-do a lot of spriting
-make some maps
-add luck to the battle engine (I forgot about it lol)
-add a chance of obtaining items after battle
-add in the data for items and stuff
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Nice, seems like a cool enemy generation system. I can't wait for the demo. Good luck! ;D
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<small update>
Ok, I finally finished entering all the data for the items.
There are about 90 items, although I'm thinking that I will add more later.
Also I fixed a bunch of bugs in the enemy generations system that I had missed earlier :)
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Wow that's a lot! O.O Are there any examples of items you can state? Will some be listed in the readme?
Keep up the good work man!
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Around 15 of them are healing-type items, while the other 75 are all equipment type items. There are around 30 different weapons, and then a whole lot of assorted armor, hats, shields, boots, and amulets.
Example healing item: Steak: heals 30 hp and 0 mp, costs around 75$ at the shop (it's certified organic ;) )
Example equipment:
Maple bow (archer type), gives +50 attack, and +10 magic attack, costs like 1000$
Iron plate (armor), gives +20 def, +20 mdef, costs 300$
All the equipment and their stats will be listed in the final readme, but I don't know if I'll have time to put them in the demo readme :P
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Oh ok, seems cool. Can't wait for demo. ;D
Also you use dollars for money currency?
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Well the only way you can tell they are dollars is because I use the dollar symbol. Otherwise, there's absolutely no relation, all the prices I have aren't very realistic at all. I just didn't feel like inventing a name/symbol for the currency, and the $ symbol is all ready and easy to access in the built in ASCII set :P
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Sounds great! I can't wait for the demo. ;D
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I see squidgetx. What is the currency name actually? You could maybe use the first letter but modify it a little by adding a strikethrough or something.
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I really don't know :P I think the $ symbol is ok though, because I don't think I will ever reference the actual currency name in game, I will always use the symbol $ which is easier to do than creating my own symbol (unless there are any good candidates in the ASCII set...I don't know)
Also I have another smallish update: Obtaining items randomly after battle works now, and I've finished the second tileset and other misc stuff. :D
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If for example the currency is Nethams, you could use pi symbol, like what I did in Omnimaga on-calc logo (the one in the banner is the same but the pi symbol is one pixel longer). And cool to hear about the small update. I remember I had this in some of my Illusiat RPGs and ROL series, I think, but I removed it in Illusiat 13 because the amount of item slots was capped and I didn't feel like forcing you to trash items after every battle. D:
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Hmmm...I'll try and think of some unique currency, because you're right, the $ symbol is a bit boring ;)
Also yeah the items have a cap here too (50 of them) but this cap only applies to the amount of different items you have, not how many total so I think it should be fine (ie you can have 200 steaks and you'll have room for 49 more different items :D )
I am excited since the engine is practically finished now (The only major thing left to program are scrolls; items that let you learn moves) ;D and I have about 1200 bytes left in the app for that. The source is now total 76kb O_o
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Ah ok. In my older games there was no real cap. Each slot were for an item in particular. Example, potions always went in slot 1, so you could have 99 of each. In Illlusiat 13, each magic orb or item take one slot. I did that to add some sort of challenge to the game.
And wow I'm glad you almost finished. By 76 KB of source this include data too, of course, right?
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The source is now total 76kb O_o
O.O
Wow.
Progress sounds awesome, squidgetx! ;D
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How long does it takes to compile, by the way?
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It takes around 30-40 seconds to compile :P
I'm around halfway done with the "indoors" tileset now, drawing tiles takes much longer than I thought :P
The NPC engine suddenly broke on me today, but I've made some headway in fixing it. The NPC part works again now, but for some reason though, it likes to corrupt all the tile data, making the game's graphics glitch severely after any NPC convo >.>
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X.x, I hope it isn't too hectic when debugging/adjusting something like text centering and you have to use trial and error x.x. And yeah drawing tiles can take a while. X.x
I would backup your tile data outside the calc, IMHO, in case. X.x
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Hm, I should probably post some screenies ;D
Showing off here my new map-linking routines and new tiles :)
Also, as a note, there are 16 files you will have to send to your calc. They all go into archive though, so it should make the installation process relatively easy. The total size is around 140k, but I'm anticipating at least 50k more data that needs to go in. However, there's currently no compression, so hopefully the filesize will go down.
How much archive does the 83+ get again? I forget X.x
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Wow, that looks fantastic! Very nice work! =)
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Looks nice! I like the house and village layout so far. For some reasons, the village reminds me of Illusion of Gaia. Only suggestion would probably be to add outlines for the houses outside, but I assume this would increase the size of the sprite data too much, right?
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Wonderful! That looks great squidgetx! ;D
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Wow. That's a lot of work. This looks really nice, too! ;)
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Thanks everyone :)
Ok, a little update before the demo:
I've FINISHED all the maps and tiles that I'm planning to go into the demo. This entails 7 different maps linked together, with 96 different tiles. The demo as of now will enclose the first village shown in the screenshot in the last page as well as the first dungeon/boss (the wastelands). If I have time, I will add a route out of the village (an Eastern Mountain Pass) and possibly the next city over (Maghada) (I have a world map laid out on paper, so I sort of have an idea of the order of events and such)
NPC's have lots of new abilities now, one of the coolest ones I think is one that enables them to write temporarily to the current map. For example, if I wanted to have a guard blocking a door, I could make it so that talking to him "unlocks" the door. Other ones that I've added are the capability to heal, shop, and start battles.
I've also finished the cutscene routine that will be used at the beginning of the game (and in some other places in the final game). Cutscenes are basically slideshows of 3 lvl gray pictures linked together by a nice fade animation, accompanied by text run from the NPC engine. I will be able to promise some reallly nice pixel art here (96x64 is a lot after spending hours drawing 12x12 tiles :D)
Also, I've optimized a lot. Remember when I said I was going to move the NPC engine out of the main program? The NPC engine took up about 2k then, and at that point I had 1200 bytes left in the app after moving it out. Currently, the NPC engine is BACK in the main app, and I have around 700 bytes left :)
And I finally added luck to the battle engine. If you're twice as lucky as your opponent, you have a chance of inflicting twice as much damage than usual, etc. ;)
Things left to do:
Move animations for at least the first few moves
Scrolls (a type of item) to teach moves
Allowing NPCs to teach moves
Finalize the opening cutscene (this means work on story a little bit XD)
Oh...and does anyone remember when my calc was having that weird ERR: LINK thing? When it would throw that error every time I turned on the calc? Well, heh heh, it's happened again ;) Fortunately I could still connect it to the computer so I didn't lose anything but...this makes it, what, twice now that this project has made me do a full mem clear? LOL
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Sounds awesome!
I can't wait to play.
(Boy, do I need to start kicking on Nostalgia again!)
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Awesome! I'm glad this is coming along nicely, can't wait for the demo!
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Wow, nice progress! I'm looking forward to checking out the demo. =)
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Oh...and does anyone remember when my calc was having that weird ERR: LINK thing? When it would throw that error every time I turned on the calc? Well, heh heh, it's happened again ;) Fortunately I could still connect it to the computer so I didn't lose anything but...this makes it, what, twice now that this project has made me do a full mem clear? LOL
That's such a weird error. I had it happen to me once too: http://ourl.ca/4109/75862
I can't wait for the demo! ;D
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Just as a note, due to the Cage Match the demo MAY be postponed to 1/11/11. However, I am still going to do my best to get it out on New Year's Day. Since I've already finished the (very) basic framework of my cage match entry (it worked on the first compile ;D ) however, it is still more likely than not that the demo will be released on Saturday.
I've now basically finished almost everything that needs to be coded for the demo, but I haven't tested all of it. So now I'm going to see how easily everything can be debugged (hopefully it'll work on the first try)
EDIT: UPDATE: I *think* I've finally finished debugging all the important stuff. You can learn moves now without RAM clearing, hooray! Now on to battle animations and the cutscene script
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Ah ok, well try to not let other projects delay this too much, though, authors tend to lose interest on a project if they stay away from it for too long (example, if you started participating in every single cage matches and contests). Good luck whatever you decide, though. I'm really looking forward for a demo. :)
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Yeah, I noticed that too with the raycaster. It took me a few days before I started working on this again after I started the raycaster, and at that point progress was a little sluggish. However, I don't think the cage match will affect this too much since its only a week. Also since I'm only eligible for axe in the contests, theres only a small chance that I'll be participating in future ones
On another note, I finished all the level 1 move animations, which is (probably) all that you'll get to in the demo (since the monsters ingame are fairly low-level; it'll take a lot of grinding to get your char to learn higher level moves). The move animations are projected at 43kb, which is a lot smaller than I had expected, although I'm sure it's a bit larger than what some of you would prefer lol. Oh well, the whole project is like 200kb anyway, it's all relative, right ;)
Now I'm going to do some last cleanup stuff, fixing one last bug, etc. (which unfortunately involves sending axe .4.6 to my calc, compiling something, then sending back .4.7 :( ) The demo is going out tomorrow for sure.
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Ah right, I guess it should be fine if it's just one week, then.
Also I'm glad to hear the animations are done for level 1 moves. :D About grinding, try to not overdo it, though. It's not good if a game is 10 hours long, but 80% of the entire gameplay is just grinding.
What do you mean about Axe 0.46 and 7? Do you have stuff that only works on 4.6 and others on 4.7? Or are you converting code?
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Axe .4.7 doesn't support lines that are drawn off screen, which I need for some of my transition effects (like the checkered diagonal fade). Luckily since those are contained within a separate program outside the app so I can use a different version to compile it.
All I meant regarding the grinding was that it doesn't matter if I don't finish other animations since it will take a lot of grinding before you can learn those because the demo only has low level monsters that don't give very much xp if you're at a high level. I mean like, maybe it will take 10 battles to go from level 5 to 6 fighting these monsters, but it would probably take 100 battles fighting these monsters to go from 15 to 16 for example.
Also, in the final game I think there will be not be very much excessive training required because of the 65535 xp cap
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Ouch, I see now. Doesn't seem like something easy to deal with (The line issue). :/
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Development shall now continue.
To do list, sorted by priority:
- Fix shop bug
- Make walking speed faster/grayscale less crappy
- Fix other minor bugs
- Optimize a lot
- Add scrolls to teach moves
- Allow NPCs to check for certain items
- Continue spriting and mapmaking
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Good luck!
On a semi-unrelated note, you might want to fix your forum signature, because I can barely read the Ash Phoenix 40% text it it ???
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Nice. :) Good luck! ;D
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Mmmmm...randomly corrupted program+random freezing during defrag.
A few things were lost, but not too much.
I've successfully increased the walking speed and I *hope* I've fixed the shop bug, though I can't tell for sure yet.
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Sorry to hear, I'm glad not too much were lost, though. Glad to see you managed to increase walking speed. Did it increase framerate too? That might improve the grayscale as well.
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Update-ish!
Actually not really, just posting a screenie of the new walking speed and of what the shop looks like, for those of you who can't access it. Although if you watch all the way through it still gets messed up at the end... <_<
The grayscale didn't improve as much as I thought it would, but i'm planning to fix that...
edit: oh and I optimized off 150 bytes today :D which is good, seeing as how before the app was 16377 bytes large....lol
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Cool, looks better now :D
I like the new walking speed. In RPGs, I think the standard is being able to move from one tile to another from 2 to 4 times per second.
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Walking speed looks much better now. =)
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The new walking speed is great :D
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I like the new walking speed. It's hard to tell from the gif but grayscale still looks fine though.
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That looks amazing! Btw, how are you doing he scrolling?
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Thanks everyone.
Basically I'm running a loop 4 times, during which I horizontal/vertical 3 times. I also redraw the tiles in the last column or row as well as the tiles the character is walking onto, the tile he is walking on, and the bottom half of the tile above him. All the tiles are masked 12x12 tiles that are really 4 8x8s that have the outer edges transparent. It's kind of inefficient but still better than redrawing every frame.
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I wonder if you could maybe store the two sprite rows/columns layers in L1 or another SafeRAM area and when scrolling the two game buffers, you simply copy/conj that data in L3 and L6 instead of recalling the tilemapper every frame while scrolling? Not sure if this would be hard to achieve, though, as I didn't try.
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Looks wonderful. I like the new walking speed. ;D
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updates: successfully patched the name input-screen, the stat screen (if you hadn't noticed, it would corrupt your move data if you used it in battle), optimized a bit more (30 bytes) and patched the npc scripter. Unfortunately, the shop remains unstable :(
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BREAKTHROUGH: The shop is now fixed :DDDD No more crashes, no more random rectangles even. I am psyched
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=D
I wonder if you could maybe store the two sprite rows/columns layers in L1 or another SafeRAM area and when scrolling the two game buffers, you simply copy/conj that data in L3 and L6 instead of recalling the tilemapper every frame while scrolling? Not sure if this would be hard to achieve, though, as I didn't try.
i think that might actually work well, but only for vertical scrolling. ima test this out, dj!
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BREAKTHROUGH: The shop is now fixed :DDDD No more crashes, no more random rectangles even. I am psyched
HOORAY! :w00t:
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BREAKTHROUGH: The shop is now fixed :DDDD No more crashes, no more random rectangles even. I am psyched
HOORAY! :w00t:
++
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Yeah, turns out that one of my pointers (my suspicions were correct >:) ) was for some reason getting corrupted during the transfer from the main app to the shop routine (although I don't know why...but redefining it at the beginning of the shop routine fixed all the problems :P
Anyway, now on to fixing the battle engine up a little....
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I'm glad this is still progressing nicely :)
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So basically, I fixed the battle engine :hyper: Turns out I was making the same mistake that I helped shmibs with a few days ago...stuff->{pointer}+other stuff->{other pointer} doesn't work very well at all XD
Now I have a few minor bugs I want to fix, and then maybe figure out a word-wrapping routine for the NPC engine if it'll fit, and the engine is done :D
edit: Actually, no wordwrapping routine. I thought about it, and it would be extremely difficult/inefficient. Instead, I'll just add a command that skips down to the next line. And I'll also make the text spaced normally like the TI-OS does it (Yes, variable letter spacing and a typewriter effect 8))
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XDDD
yes, i'm sure you can spare one character to signify a newline.
i don't think i've said anything yet, but i am very liking this project, squidget!
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Thanks.
Today, I finished up my makeover to the NPC engine; now it looks very nice. It has variable font spacing so the letters don't look as weird, and it *looks* like it has word wrapping (although it doesn't ;))
Of course, also I found *another* bug with the battle engine....I think it's fixed now but I'm not sure yet :P It occured after talking to NPCs whose conversations with you would exceed 50 characters O.o Programming this large of an RPG makes me see really how easy all those glitches in Pokemon Red were to overlook...
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RAWR fixed so many bugs i can't even remember them all... :D..Only a few left...Anyway, here is a screenie of the new NPC thingy. I also was going to post one of the battle engine actually working, but then Wabbit screwed up :P
I will make another release within the next few days..."the way it was meant to be played" ;D
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Just aweseeume !
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This really looks great Squidgetx. This is definitively gonna be featured on ticalc.org when it comes out.
As for text, do you use a method similar to ROL3 for text? There was a character acting as linebreaks, another acting as pause+erase+move back to line 1 and another to quit the text routine/erase the text box. This prevented me from having to do things like "HELLO WORLD HOW ARE YOU" with so many spaces between words when I wanted to go to next line.
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EPIC. Are there any other RPGS for Z80 in 3 lvl greyscale thats as complete and good looking as this? (other than ROL)
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Thanks yunhua ;)
@DJ, yes, that is sort of what it is like :) For example, the kings speech right now looks like
"Hello, young traveler"
[07] //dictates a pause and clear (-1 indicates a line break. If we're already on the second line, it will also pause and clear)
[140103] //check if flag 3 of flag byte 1 is set
[02] //if no
"What? You're looking for-1the Phoenix? You'd need to go to the-1Maghada Library...-1But the only way there is-1through the Eastern Pass-1...<stuff>
[04] //end
[03] //if yes
'What? You've retrieved the key?-1Amazing..."<stuff>
[04]
[00]
Update wise, I'm very close to releasing another demo, this time with practically ALL BUGS FIXED :O All I have left is some balancing (ie, the robed bandit "boss" has a move that heals himself which makes the battle unnecessarily difficult <_< and then i'm going to add the mountain pass region :)
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Cool. I unfortunately did not have time to try the 2nd demo, so I will probably wait until that one, though.
Also nice text script. Mine wasn't too efficient. If I ever do a new one I will have to recode it.
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Looks just ossume! Really cool ;D
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Progress moves along... I found another bug with the move learning engine...but it shouldn't take too long to fix at all: I think I just need to add a +5 somewhere...
Meanwhile I'm working on transferring the project over to axe 0.4.8 which involves...some messiness (By how much was L1 moved between 0.4.6 and 0.4.7? Was it 54 or 56 bytes?) . Also I've begun to tile the next area shown in the screenie:
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Nice. The only suggestion, though, would be to have the houses so the sides have an outline too, so it looks less like they're floor tiles. (especially with huge houses)
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Yeah, I'll add them if I can't think of any other tiles I want to add
Update: Thanks to Runer112's 1337 haxing skills, I now can use the latest version of Axe with this project. Hooray! Now onto fixing some more bugs, and adding EVs to the experience system lol.
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Did he hack Axe parser app or did he make an axiom? O.O
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Nah, he just somehow rewrote the transition so that it worked (and also halved the size of the transitions' executable in the process O.O)
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I see, that's cool to hear :D
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Now that the engine is practically finished (there's one last thing I have to add) all that stands in the way of this project's completion is the entering of a crapload of data. I've been putting it off, working on sandland, etc., but really this is very close to being finished. sort of.
So yeah...uh...I'm going to try and pick this back up and finish it. Heh heh.
/me goes back to making tiles
oh, and if there are any spriters around who'd like to help me get this done quicker, have a look at this thread (http://ourl.ca/8943) and see what you can do. Thanks ;)
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Hah thats always the most grueling part ;D good luck! Can't wait to see the finish line!
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This looks amazing :D. I bet it's going to be one of the front-runners for the POTY (if not the winner). Nice job!
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I hope you keep being motivated to finish this. It will be great when this comes out. I hope you do not run into too many logic errors when entering data and events. That's one annoying part to debug because when fixing errors you introduce new ones, in-game events stop working, etc. X.x
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Thanks for the support ^^
Currently I'm working on adding lots of awesome features to my map editor to facilitate the ease of entering said data. Basically, the current process I have to go through to add a new map goes like this:
1)Create map entry in a program
2)Compile program and run to write in new data
3)Compile sprite editor
4)Make tiles, paste hex into another program
5)Compile program and run to write in new data
6)Make map and write out NPC convos
7)Compile and run 2 programs to update NPC data
8)Write down all the tile coordinates that are warp tiles and their destinations
9)Write down all the NPC tile coordinates
10)Enter all of this data into the map data program
11)Compile, run it.
12)Debugging requires repeats of entire parts of the process.
As you can see, this is not good for my flash chip nor my sanity, so my new mapmaker will hopefully be able to boil down the process to this:
1)Hit "Create New Map" and enter appropriate data (tileset, name, etc.)
2)Make map and tileset
3)Select warp tiles graphically (with the map viewing engine, to save hassle on writing down numbers and stuff)
4)Select NPC tiles the same way
5)Use old process for NPC convos, but that's ok i guess
Also, I posted a new release in the release thread, so check it out if you were having any bug issues before :)
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*Bump*
Well, I got my new map editor up and running, imho, it's really nice :D. It probably improves my efficiency by >9000% XD
I can edit any and all of my tiles without annoying recalling of strings or recompiling any programs, I can edit a maps' name, tileset, enemies, etc. in addition to the actual map itself, and I can pick and choose trigger tiles (warp and npc convos) and where they lead to. Prepare for some epic progress soon >:D
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Wow O.O That is a mighty complicated map editor! This sure looks like it could make some huge progress very quickly! How do you manage to bypass recalling hex?
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What is going on on that screenshot? Are you editing a map? (scrolling around it)?
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The tile editor writes directly to the tile appvar :)
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Wow, that's incredible. I'm amazed. ;D
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The tile editor writes directly to the tile appvar :)
OOHH It's a tile editor, I can get it now, I thought those little images were part of the map (in fact they are but in another way).
Great!
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Good to hear about the progress! ^^ Did you manage to update the grayscale engine any in the process?
I'll take a look at the sprite thread and see if there is anything I can contribute. =)
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Eyecandy time. Thanks to shmibs for many of the beach and forest tiles :)
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Wow, that looks awesome! Nice job! ;D
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hey, cool!
the water could do with some fixing and the forest grass seems a little too orderly and flat (i should have tried that one out in a repeating pattern before posting). i like the way the others turned out on calc, though.
i also really like the look of your laboratory. how are you managing map switching?
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Yeah, I'm working on some different water tiles too (for the forest set).
Map switching works as follows:
1) Check if tile you are standing on is value 3 or 4 (warp tile)
2) Go through a predefined 20x5 array. The first 2 bytes of each entry are the position of the tile. Check for any matches.
3) If we get a match, the 3rd byte is the map to switch to and the next 2 bytes are the X and Y output.
4) Load these 3 bytes into current map and current X,Y
5) If no match, load the last area and x/y coords that you had warped from. (pretty much all the warp tiles in the houses for example, are not defined and will take you back to where you were before--which was outside the house--when you step on them)
6)Activate fade effect and reload map data
Edit: Also, I thought of a bunch of optimizations that I could do....and also, I'm going to work on compression too, to get down this insane filesize. Does anyone know a good (maybe RLE?) routine for sprites/tiles before I go off and write one myself?
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*Bump*
Well, I got my new map editor up and running, imho, it's really nice :D. It probably improves my efficiency by >9000% XD
I can edit any and all of my tiles without annoying recalling of strings or recompiling any programs, I can edit a maps' name, tileset, enemies, etc. in addition to the actual map itself, and I can pick and choose trigger tiles (warp and npc convos) and where they lead to. Prepare for some epic progress soon >:D
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5014.0;attach=6099;image)
When Ash is finished, you should really release this editor for use for different games, with 8x8 and 16x16 support O.O.
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5014.0;attach=6125;image)
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5014.0;attach=6126;image)
(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5014.0;attach=6127;image)
Looks very great, as always. Did he take some of these from Zelda, by the way? SOme of the tree tiles looks familiar.
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Yeah, Shmibs said some of them were from Zelda.
Today I optimized off 140 bytes off the app :o and worked more on the map editor: among other things, the tile editor now displays 4 of the tiles you are editing so I can judge whether or not it looks good in a repeating pattern :)
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phantasmic!
i second that request for a release of the editors, although it may take some doing to adapt them for standard usage.
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Really nice, and I love your maps too. :D
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Thanks.
I may finally be getting my calc back today (long story) so I'll be able to work on this again.
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*Bump*
Check out the sexiness. I owe you, Builderboy :D
I had to turn the title screen into its own external executable, which added about 1k to the overall game size. But on the bright side, it brought the app size under 16k again, which gives me room for some good compression routines.
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*Bump*
Check out the sexiness. I owe you, Builderboy :D
I had to turn the title screen into its own external executable, which added about 1k to the overall game size. But on the bright side, it brought the app size under 16k again, which gives me room for some good compression routines.
Holy Snap! That title screen! :o O.O That is amazing!
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O.O That's an awesome title screen!
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Wow that looks epic :D It must look even awesomeer on calc too ^^
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Haha, thanks guys. I uploaded a screenie that shows the menu select animation better, for those that didn't want to watch the other screenie all the way through. It looks pretty hot :D (OK, I need to stop with these puns haha)
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That looks great! Wonderful job, squidgetx. ;D
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ooh, shiny.
you made it an external program? does that mean programs can be jumped to and returned from during app execution?!
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From App Execution it's easy, its doing it from another program that is the difficult part. If you are in an App, its just a matter of calling a few BCALLs if i remember correctly.
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I don't know how you are maintaining that under 16kb. I'm trying to keep it under 32kb for TAO. Granted I don't want any external programs, though. Graphics take up so much memory, methinks. It looks very nice, though.
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Ah, the app itself is 16kb, but I have close to 200kb of appvars that accompany the app. :P I'm working on compression now though, so hopefully that will go down a lot, as it is currently completely uncompressed. Also yeah, its easy from an app. I should link that in the tutorials thread...
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what do you have in those appvars? :o
also, since when did Axe support multi-page apps? (sorry if this question was answered elsewhere)
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Axe doesn't.
The appvars...
M1 holds the map data
MaD holds more map data
The 6 An appvars take up the most space, each being 7k (move animations)
ItD items
MoD moves
ND NPC data
ND2 NPC offset table
FsD cutscene stuff/title screen
AES enemy sprites
EnD enemy data
AnD character sprites and other random stuff.
And then a few external programs disguised as appvars
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oh, wait, for some reason, 16kb registered to me as multi-paged. :P
I'm just used to 8, I suppose. ;)
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oh, wait, for some reason, 16kb registered to me as multi-paged. :P
That's because 32 is. It's 2 pages. ;)
Graph's making that App in pure Asm. :)
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no, I meant squidgetx's Ash:Phoenix, its 16kb, which is one-page
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Been slowly chipping away at the mountain of data to be entered. Finished up a few tilesets, and I've been working on the story a bit as well. The next village is almost done, just have to add the NPC convos.
Also, optimized 150 more bytes off the main app, and the amount of free RAM required is about to take a dip as well :D
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(http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=5014.0;attach=6259;image)
O.O that looks too great! It really reminds me BBtD title screen but with your image it has an even better effect. Nice job. Also glad to see more progress since I last checked last week. :D
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Wow, simply amazing squidgetx. This will be a contender for POTY for sure :)
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Thanks everyone.
I'm currently working on the NPC conversation editor...(which was what gave me the idea for Notepad...). The editing part works fine, but I can't get it to save the data properly...
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Cool. TOo bad saving doesn't work yet. Hopefully you can fix it soon. I personally always had troubles with saving stuff when trying to create editors in Axe. X.x
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Ok I got it to work finally. I'm kinda on a roadblock for game elements though. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions for stuff they want to see in the game?
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GOod to hear, as for game elements do you mean like enemies, magic spells, features? I really need to try the demo at one point because I only tried the first one then got busy. X.x
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Sorry, I mean like, I dunno, mission types, quest ideas, character personalities, ideas for certain areas or dungeons or anything. I have a worl map laid out and I rough game outline made up but I want to hear some ideas before I start implementing it.
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Oh ok, well, for quests, don't forget the optional boss that is almost as hard as the final boss but gives a very strong spell or item or something. :P Maybe an invisible dungeon entrance on the map or area where you can find some stuff. Secret item spots would be cool. :D
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I have always been intimidated by the number of posts, so I never knew what this was.
It's amazing!
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How about customizing your ship's looks? Also, maybe have a One-hit failure mode, so you have to be perfect.
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some random guy on the street that tags along and turns out to be a very old wise mentor ready to teach you anything. :D
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Have a creepy guy pop out from behind a dumpster and give you an important item.
It's in Pokemon, so it must be appropriate. (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Flash#Trivia) :P (next to last bullet)
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disguised treasure chests
e.g., hidden in a pool of water, in a tree, something like that
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random dancing :)
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Monsters-in-a-box treasure chests, but try to not be too rash on these traps.
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It's alive!
This project is now off of its unofficial hiatus and back onto active development.
Fixed a few bugs and continuing to create tiles and maps :)
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It's alive!
This project is now off of its unofficial hiatus and back onto active development.
Fixed a few bugs and continuing to create tiles and maps :)
yay! it's back :D
good luck :)
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YAY! Can't wait for more updates!
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It's alive!
This project is now off of its unofficial hiatus and back onto active development.
Fixed a few bugs and continuing to create tiles and maps :)
So many revivals :w00t:
Can't wait to see this!
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Thanks. I need to finish this. Like seriously. I'm just kinda posting to motivate myself, sorry if you were expecting an update. I do have a question for you guys though.
Would it be all right if I left the current move animations as they are (one unique one per class) and didn't add the others like I had originally planned? Initially I wanted to have one new animation for every 2 weapon skills or something, but it's going to take up too much space, plus I really really don't want to....unless someone does it for me....
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Hmm personally I am fine with this. Just make sure it's not like Final Fantasy I, where all 48 magic spell or so had the exact same animation. O.O
In Illusiat 13, some magic looks similar at different levels.
Also I hope you don't kill this project nor lose interest in calc stuff. I noticed you've been posting less project updates lately. :(
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Well as far as animations go, there'll be probably 8 distinct animations...warrior attack, mage attack, archer attack, shadow attack, spirit attack, undead attack, heal, and stat up/down, so it shouldn't be that bad.
I haven't managed to get that much done...I need to crack down on the story and figure out all the details so I can figure out how this game is going to work together...
As for my other projects, I am working on something "secret"..although I think a few of you might know what it is...It's pretty hard though, and I'm actually starting to warm back up to this project again (since it's been hibernating for a while...)
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Wow, has it really been a month since I've posted here? O.O
Anyway, I do have some updates for you guys to read. This project is back on active development as my #1 priority calc project (Tiny wings is being uncooperative atm). I've worked out the area that i had been stuck on (that's what happens when you plan poorly), have constructed many tiles (Currently I think we have around 208 different tiles), etc. Also, the total file size has been made to take around 117k of Flash, uncompressed :)
Currently (in addition to map-making and script-writing) I am working on a part of the NPC scripting system to allow the flag-setting mechanism to be a flag-toggling mechanism, so I can make fun lever puzzles a la Zelda
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Nice, I'M glad this was revived, I was starting to have worries that it was dead D:
Also I like the flag setting idea. It would be nice to see some puzzles in the game. Just make sure they're not too hard either, though. :P
Any luck with computer issues?
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Eh, some good/bad news regarding comp issues
Bad: I/my parents have been too busy to put TI-connect onto this computer
Good: My regular computer will be fixed in about a week :)
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That's great! Computer issues suck :P
Glad this is alive and well :D
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Glad to hear Squidgetx :D
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I am a good bit late but I downloaded the demo PURE awesomness :D
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I am a good bit late but I downloaded the demo PURE awesomness :D
Thanks.
The contest is over. I'm going to start working on this again.
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I am a good bit late but I downloaded the demo PURE awesomness :D
Thanks.
The contest is over. I'm going to start working on this again.
YES!
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I am a good bit late but I downloaded the demo PURE awesomness :D
Thanks.
The contest is over. I'm going to start working on this again.
YES!
Awesome! Good luck. :D I can't wait for more updates. :)
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I hope this isn't dead. It looked great and I would like to see it finished at one point D:
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I hope this isn't dead. It looked great and I would like to see it finished at one point D:
Me too :'(
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I hope this isn't dead. It looked great and I would like to see it finished at one point D:
Me too :'(
Well if you want, there is Embers: Phoenix (http://ourl.ca/16269/311478) ;)
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which happens to remove the turn-based battles and has a distinctively different feel to it, though...
I'd love to see A:P continue.
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I hope this isn't dead. It looked great and I would like to see it finished at one point D:
Me too :'(
Well if you want, there is Embers: Phoenix (http://ourl.ca/16269/311478) ;)
I know it. I finished it and really enjoyed it but it's really short (it was for a contest so it's supposed to), and I really would like to play this one since the demo was awesome.
which happens to remove the turn-based battles and has a distinctively different feel to it, though...
I'd love to see A:P continue.
I second this.
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Yeah Embers was kinda short and had some weird bugs, although it was great. I wish Squidgetx didn't stop this though (IIRC it was due to speed reasons, although maybe he could just get rid of grayscale).
Did you try the demo by the way? I was sure there was one from Jan 1st 2011 or maybe even more recent files.
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Yeah, I noticed the bugs in Embers too. And I tired the latest demo, which was totally awesome. I also read this entire thread and noticed the overall progress was far more advanced than the demo. I hate it when people drop projects w/o leaving the source and doc to the community or another person so they can take over it. <_< I think the reboot was there for optimizing, but it seems dead too.
Edit : Wow, that's a lot of calcs you got here, DJ. When I think my friends laugh at me 'cause I have three...
Edit 2 : And if I had the sources and knew what Squid had in mind for the story, I could finnish it myself. That is, after my current projects are done. 8)
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Lol...hi.
/me looks around.
It makes me happy to see that people are excited/want this to continue, and apologize for the lifeless state the project has been in over the past year or so. I've been pretty busy lately though so I don't know if I will be able to reliably work on it... So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to dig up all the doc I can find from the old version, post it, start a reboot round 2 completely open source, and if it dies again it can be taken over :) Deal?
Edit: The reason why the old version died/was scrapped for a reboot was because of bugs with the game's structural integrity; ie couldn't be fixed without rewriting the whole thing anyway
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DEAL!
good luck =D
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Sounds good, however, I hope *you* are able to finish it. :)
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That's great! Both this game and Embers are the two games i'm most excited about :D
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Deal?
Absolutely. :thumbsup: