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Miscellaneous

Retool Announcement

Yes I cancelled this build of WeaponBirth. I'm going to retool the engine into something smaller, better, and more sensible. However, it's still going to be an extension of the Acknex engine. I might look into upgrading into Acknex 8 as well since it's much faster and stronger and supports a much better scripting language based in C.

I'm not exactly sure if I'll be using my own scripting language for events though, and I'm leaning closer to an on-the-map approach to action RPG instead of instancing like I had planned. In any case, the end product will be a freely available plugin including source code that you can get..

But there is one catch. It seems the free version of 3DGameStudio (Acknex 8) does not support plugins. You'll have to drop 100 bucks for the Extra edition which will use plugins and also lets you compile your scripts into a straight-up .exe file.

These series of engines has been really good to me even way back in 2003, even from the basic edition. You've all been jaded by Enterbrain by their overpriced steaming piles of software I know, but this German company knows game engineering. You know, you could just make your own action RPG quite easily with the free edition and if you like how it's going you can get the extra edition (which gets rid of that annoying A8 at the corner of the screen and lets you compile your stuff so people can't edit it).

Of all the options, this is the most end-user friendly engine for modern 3D games out there. Back before I even knew how to program, I could use this engine for things. It's worth a shot in bringing back good old fashioned gameplay into the new age of technology in hopes of reviving what made games fun in the beginning of video gaming.

Miscellaneous

Retool

The more and more I think about this project, it's pretty much turning into a frakenstein's monster of a 3D RPG maker. I will finish RPG Maker 20XX, but instead of writing an editor for RPG Maker 2003, I have something else in mind to make for all of you and to make for this game...

Miscellaneous

Battle movement completed, going forward

At 20,630 lines of C/C++ code, I'm sure getting some really interesting things to happen. That's not actually very many lines of code despite what Vegeta would tell you. Anyway, you can move and run (double tap left or right to run in that direction) somewhat fine and smoothly. It feels really great actually, it's a bit loose and the sprite is always animated.

Battles take place on separate maps which act as the backdrops for whatever area you are in. Fun multi-person battles are hard to have anywhere on normal maps. That's not all, I can put whatever I want in these battle maps. It would be easy to implement destructible objects and traps to watch out for (just like Smash Bros.) that fit the area you are currently in. If I can offload object meshes to ODE somehow, I can even have Havok-like physics take over for things on the map. That would be too involving though, and I'd think ruining a library would still be fun with conventional game physics.

This is where the action in my game takes place so I need to be careful and put lots of effort into it. All this other stuff was just stuff you had to have in order to explore and manage your team.

Miscellaneous

[Art] Took me long enough



I've gotten all the required 8 frames down. These are the minimum frames you would need to have a battler. Of course, since enemies don't need a victory frame, it would be a generic third attack animation. Each frame is somewhat centered in the box because the actual sprite will move.

I haven't had so much time, so that's why I'm going really slow. It'll be slow for a while, which is too bad considering where I'm at right now.

Miscellaneous

[Art] Pardon My Pixels



What's been the hold up? Apart from back to back to back to back projects and papers being due, I'm actually drawing Tetsumori's sprites. She's kind of hard to animate actually and I've been fussing endlessly over getting her movement just right. I'm going to have to move on and finish her up, I've got her hurting animation, downed animation, left and right attacks to go.

I got a pretty good first hurt animation frame, I just have to figure out how to get her head to tilt down right. I want to make her middle move back with her arms and feet moving forward and her head tilting down like she got hit in the stomach with a cannon ball. Not as dramatic though.

I hope it doesn't look so off in the actual game, I've got to draw all the party members and enemies like this.



Miscellaneous

[Story] Kinds of Areas

As I've said earlier, the game takes place in this convoluted mess of space where there are many intersections connecting random planets throughout the universe. These vary in size, but it is stable for them to be circular. They're anchored to the gravitational field of the planets and follow each body on its orbit, spin, wobble, and whatever periodic movement they have. All the spaces can be called zones.

Normal Zones

It's fortunate that the collective atmospheres settled into a habitable series of zones. The air is definitely different, but you could walk around as though you were on Earth. There's nothing special about these zones. You only need one of these planets to have life for it to spread everywhere (even though a handful of them had life). You'll have societies of mixed technological advancement around these areas, and of course I had to employ the anthropomorphic convenience of these creatures being humanoid.. Perhaps the humanoid form is a good well-rounded form for a living being to take anyway, haa! No need to overdo the thought on this for a video game.

Chaotic Zones

Some zones are immediately habitable where you can breathe and live, but are in a state of disarray. There's lots of dangerous dynamics going on in these zones. Quakes, eruptions, collisions, destruction, etc. are all over the place. It's hard for anything to sit still in these zones. You'll have a hard time finding any sort of settlements here.

Forbidden Zones

These are zones where you would simply die. There's no air. Or the air is highly pressurized and/or very caustic, or it simply doesn't have oxygen. Most of the time there's just no good atmosphere. You could walk into these zones for a bit until the air gets light, but any further and you would pass out. That, and the temperatures tend to get extreme (cold or hot). You'll need special equipment to explore these and/or be a non-living thing.

Placid Zones

These are zones which are pretty much untouched by anything, but could be inhabited by anyone. There's nothing interesting and the land is pretty bare and dull. When areas like this lie in the way of two major zones, they tend to build things like trains or ships to skim over these areas quickly. You won't really see these in the game too much, if at all. There's only very few cases where these zones block the way of somewhere important. The danger of these zones are the fact that there is simply nothing, it's easy to collapse from dehydration, etc. Plenty of space though, some people will slowly expand their zones into these to get more real estate.

Miscellaneous

[Art] Battle sprites

I've been going over the movement in battles, and figuring out how the frames will be formatted.



Players and Enemy Sprites

So far I've got something like this:

Standard:
<S1><S2><S3> Standing animation (some sort of battle stance)
1 2 3 2
<W1><W2><W3> Walking animation (press any of the four directions to walk)
1 2 3 2
<R1><R2><R3> Running animation (double press any of the four directions and hold to run)
1 2 3 2
<D1><D2><D3> Damaged animation (if you got hit hard enough, you get staggered and this animation plays)
1 2 3 2 hold on 2 for a bit
<K1><K2><K3> Downed animation (either you were knocked down or you lost all HP)
1 2 3 hold on 3 unless getting back up
<V1><V2><V3> Victory animation (after you win)
1 2 3 hold on 3

Everyone also has these attack animations:
<Rt1><Rt2><Rt3> Right attack
<Lf1><Lf2><Lf3> Left attack

Which are typically used for striking with weapons and are reversed if you face the left (so that the right attack remains correct and you don't have the switching-sword-hands look. All of them play instead of your normal animations once and then resume back to your normal animations. If you have to charge an attack, it holds on frame 1 until the attack is ready.

Now there are a number of additional attack animations specific to each player (or enemy) which could be used for any abstract action that's special. They will have names so they can be referenced when you make skills in the compendium.

Weapons

Weapons are displayed either over or under sprites (which are set per animation). Unlike RM2K3, there has to be at least all of the required battle animations frames above to match. In fact, weapons and battle sprites are the same kind of resource. The difference is only defined in the compendium. If you really wanted, you could still make a weapon the battle sprite of a player and the effect would be the weapon floating around all by itself.

The sheets will have 64x64 pixel frames, but only the center 32x32 will see the most action. The extra room lets me draw the sprites a bit outside of their normal boxes to show lots of action.

There will be additional options because I want Tetsumori's magnet to float behind her back loosely until she actually attacks with it.


So many options! But first I will implement the 64x64 sheets with no options. The rest is easy once this has been done. You know, it's going to take me longer to actually draw Tetsumori fighting just right than it is to program it.

Miscellaneous

[Download] Version 0.115a released!

You can get version 0.115a of the engine from the source code and downloads page up there. I updated the documentation too. There's a couple of issues with this latest version:

- It might randomly bring up a crash dialog on exit, this is only because the sound thread isn't 100% attached yet. Nothing bad though, just annoying.
- If your video card doesn't support shader model 2, this engine might freak out.

I'll be writing the short mappers' tutorial to give you an idea of how stuff gets done in this engine. I'm only releasing compiler versions now until the final release, so you can also edit all the other stuff.

Or you can just browse the sample level with the bricks I made by running weaponbirth.exe

Miscellaneous

[Art] ..But I don't want to actually get rid of that error because..



See here, this is what the weird triangles of bright light came from. In this case we have a higher-poly cylinder I rotated to face the "sun". I'm using a hack to keep the very flat block from getting triangle raped like you saw before where I set the block to detail. This also improves its dynamic lighting (fireballs flying around, torches, etc.)

But the cylinder, I want that same thing to happen because it helps make it looks more round than it actually is. When I stick things in it and build on it, I want it all to look rounder. But on flat sheets of quads that result when you do this for boxes get turned into whacky triangle artifacts.

This is all really fun though. You literally make the maps as though you were playing with toy blocks or legos. I barely even knew C-Script, if at all, but I could make maps like these. Those of you too shy to give this a go might want to stick around for when I write short crash courses to make maps.

Especially here were some people get aroused over good mapping skills. Let me say you don't even have to fake the illusion of depth, you literally get depth. Go toss those plastic eyeglasses in the trash though, people should have learned from the Virtual Boy.

Miscellaneous

[Art] ArrrrRRRRRrrRRRRRR!!

Version 0111a; Update 2



I don't know what you're all talking about going all OOO and AAAH when the normals keep being interpolated abruptly creating tons of ugly seams like this! I explicitly instruct the engine to do flat shading and it still keeps interpolating my normals, it's insanity. I'm trying to get rid of the stuff circled in red, that's obviously not supposed to be there.
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