| Tuesday, October 30, 2007 |
  general randomness | 
Posted - 10/30/2007 6:19:21 PM | [random]
lessee now. i just beat zelda: phantom hourglass over the weekened. i played it a bit more yesterday to clean it out some more, but i think i'm pretty much done. been playing my hard copy of FFA at work on breaks and i'm up to level 92 with Samurai Armor/Helm, Aegis Shield, and XCalibr. stats are 93, 98, 88, 93, gonna cap them all to 99 at lv99. there really isn't any reason to do that, i can easily finish the game with the stats i have now, but for completeness sake, i'm gonna do it.
i'm a little worried about hitting lv99 because i remember when i was fooling around with my Trainer that the exp-next doesn't change at some point and you wind up being stuck in a level-up loop. i'll wait until i'm at lv98 with a couple thousand exp left and run elephants for a bit without saving just to make sure. i'd hate to take on the end guy's 1st form and earn exp enough from him to throw me into the loop.
i'm going to pick up Rune Factory when i get my credit card up and running, (and that subscription to nintendo power i've been wanting to start up again) and that'll hopefully be good.. but aside from that, i don't have anything i'm really itching to play. i haven't beaten ff3 yet, but meh. maybe crystalis..
i was watching an incomplete speedrun of crystalis on youtube and it got me to thinking about two things: level requirements vs bosses, and element/equipment requirements vs monster classes. i'm thinking i'll do a blog on those sometime soon, they're things i want to invest some brain-time on.
[actionrpg]
lastly, i'm working very slowly on ActionRPG. the last thing i did was, i set up a camera structure and now i can scroll the tilemap around. i tied all of the objects to it as well, and the hero scrolls it when he reaches a threshold - i was bright enough to figure out how not to tie him to the middle of the screen all the time.
i'm looking at how i'm going to do the inventory right now, i'm thinking of putting it on the side instead, and leaving it open the whole time. i'm also thinking of doing a button-show system like the newer zeldas have, you show an arrangement of buttons similar to how they are on the joystick, and on top of the button pictures, an icon to show what is on that button. i figure that i can give Square, Circle, and X to the player to equip whatever they want (weapons/shield/spell) and use Triangle for context-sensitive actions. If you can do something with Triangle (given an appropriate situation) then it's displayed up there, like they've been doing in zelda lately
the only thing right now is that i haven't entirely figured out how i'm going to do item dropping and general management. i want to start with zelda: minish cap as a template and replace the container with a diablo-style inventory. the trading system (press button to swap) won't work so well if you need to be able to rearrange non-swappables like armor and jewelry.. so i need an item-in-hand mechanism that the zeldas didn't really need to put in.
gonna keep plugging away at it..
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| Thursday, October 25, 2007 |
| updates | 
Posted - 10/25/2007 7:32:02 AM | [actionRPG]
I didn't finish the inventory screen yet, the last thing i did was throw in a cursor. last night, i decided to throw down tilemaps and put the inv on hold for a sec.
you can't scroll around in it yet, i'm going to do that tonight (maybe even after this post) and just lock the hero in the center of the screen (i don't like that idea alot but it'll do). even less exciting, only the first floor gets a tilemap right now  once i can scroll it around and see the whole thing, i'm going to look at generating some rooms at random - and then all 16 floors will get their own tilemaps.
i (re?)learned a couple of things last night, doing this:
- drawing the tiles as a big batch of sprites is really slow. i felt i had to get them onscreen as fast as i could, and that i did. when it was killing performance, i decided to look in my mdx9 kickstart book. save yourself some time and just go right to vertex buffers. i didn't. i couldn't help myself!
- remember to set the device's vertex format before you DrawPrimitives. my book didn't mention that i had to. i had to agonize over an InvalidCall thinking that my code was wrong. it was all exactly right, i just was missing the line that the book was missing. took me an hour to track that one down. stupid book with its stupid not-current information. 
i know the barrels aren't lined up with the tilemap, they'd be considered sprites right now. if i made them a part of the tilemap, i'd gain even more performance. enh, we'll see.
[FFAsavTrainer]
not sure why i bother mentioning anything about this. i'm up to version 1.0.3 now. i have no idea how to version.
i've added a couple of new tabs. one of the tabs displays the regions of the sav file i haven't completely figured out yet, and the other has a couple of checkboxes that are being updated with info that i figured out. it's just a couple of event flags right now.
i added the status ailments to the stats tab, and you can update that word with the appropriate flags by checking/unchecking the boxes you want. i left in the upper three bits even though they don't do squat.. i'll probably take that out when i do some polishing at a later date.
a couple of other minor changes: the music selection textbox was replaced with a dropdown, and i filled in the collection with (somewhat) appropriate names for the songs. i also took the equipped magic/item control trio and threw them over in the magic tab, there's alot of room in there and not so much in stats. makes a little more sense to be there anyways.
i'm putting this project on the back burner now that i can use it for what i wanted originally. i grabbed out the dragon sprites and this program was instrumental in that. i want to get the werewolf/mole claw sprites for the dragon, too. i'll probably be going back to it once in a while because of my morbid fascination with the unknown.
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| FFA sav Trainer v1.0 | |
Posted - 10/22/2007 7:23:35 AM | i've got enough functionality in this thing to warrant a release.
FFA sav Trainer v1.0 (172.85 KB)
requires .net 2.0
everything you should need except an emulator is in the archive, and i'm gonna guess that most of whoever's gonna download already has one installed. make sure to read the readme.txt, as there are a few things you should keep in mind as you play with it. when i'm bored, i'll get around to updating to cover that stuff.
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| FFA sav Trainer | |
Posted - 10/21/2007 12:33:47 PM | i've spent the weekend rebuilding my Final Fantasy Adventure sav Trainer. luckily i was able to cut/paste alot of the "difficult" code, so that sped things up. i'm sure you guys must be bored with this project, but i'm actually almost done it. i have everything implemeted except for the use-equip dropdown, and i haven't implemented saving changes of the items. i'll finish that up today.
what you can do:
you can change any of the stats, change the music that you'll load with, and change to a completely different map. AP and DP you can change, but every time you go to look at your equipment, it recalculates and you lose your changes.
as you can see there's a use-equip dropdown, i'll be implementing that today.
changes to the inventory won't be saved yet, that's what i'm going to do today. you can change the item type in a slot, how many you have of it, and whether the counter is to be shown. i'm probably going to remove the checkbox when i update, so that the items you pick will be ones you can find naturally.. and move the checkboxes to an advanced/experimental/whatever tab for fiddling there.
in the screen above, i've changed the last item slot to an Elixir with a count of 0 - so it will never run out - and turned off the show-counter flag so it doesn't show with the 0.
all of the equipment can be changed around. you can give yourself the most powerful weapon, XCalibr, to fight the first cat bosses with and kill them in one hit, if you want
this screen needs a little work - i should have just had toggles instead of dropdowns with every spell in it. technically you can have Cure in every slot, but it won't make any difference when you use the spell. just as with the equipment screen, you can give yourself Nuke and kill the poor kitty bosses with a single shot
so why did i bother doing this?
well, i built the thing because i wanted to zip around the maps and grab sprites. did i need all of the stuff? no. but it certainly helps not dying when i'm zipping around the end of the game. i suppose i could have focused on ripping the sprites and just figured out how to grab all of them at once, but i guess i was intrigued by other aspects, like "what can i access that they didn't put in the final cut?". well, there are a couple of songs you can select that aren't in it, some items that didn't make it (albiet they weren't translated and have wierd names like "rCE:-" - a spell item that does Nuke1)..
on top of all of that, i still haven't figured out what all of the sav file can do, and i haven't completely figured out the partner flags. so i'm also going to be adding a test tab where i can view and change the values i'm not sure about, to figure the things out.
sg out.
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| Tuesday, October 16, 2007 |
| ActionRPG stuff | 
Posted - 10/16/2007 7:28:53 AM | i got started on the inventory screen.
so far you can toggle it on and off, and it fills up when you pick up stuff. i just grabbed the map cursor from zla last night and magic-wanded/erased the backgrounds out of the sprites, that aught to be in the next screen i put up. after i get that in, i'll probably have a message pop up when you've got the cursor over an item to tell you what the thing is. after that, i'll be taking the four-enum array and changing it to something that can hold more information about items. that'll probably lead to generic-izing the item drops so they more closely resemble the inventory objects.. or just use the same structure for both.
i was looking at my old stuff last night. i actually grabbed the inventory panel from one week game, which i looked at (and played with) most. why did i stop working on it again? all i needed was to do some refactoring. shrug.
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| ActionRPG update | |
Posted - 10/14/2007 8:03:56 PM | got 16 floors of baddies now. looky at the pretty stairwells!
yeah, not that impressive, i know. especially since there's no reward at the bottom yet. i'd like to make a town map before i do the 16th floor boss, if even just to have a place to drop some people and shop(s). one of those two things are next.
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| Saturday, October 13, 2007 |
| ffa lolcat | 
Posted - 10/13/2007 2:37:58 AM | blar! i made a funny.
loofles!
i was thinking of making one for at the bottom where you wake up, and it'd display the Game Over text, "[name] fell..." but i don't think anyone'd get it. bleh to you all, and to all a bleh night.
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| Thursday, October 11, 2007 |
| zeldaDS! ow my wrists! | 
Posted - 10/11/2007 6:59:59 AM | so i bought zelda: phantom hourglass. between that, diablo1, and ffa, i'm not finding alot of time to finish up that backend coding i need to do. i wound up using the texture source or sprite batching rectangles for my clipping rectangles, and i need to go through and seperate it. the goal was to get away from all of the hard-coded specialized functions i hacked together, and drop as much of the data into generalized structures as i could. eventually i want to be able to use the same drawing and clipping object types for every object. after that, i can start working on my list again.
again i hear people saying "why diablo1?" -- even my girlfriend, who knows nothing about the games..  diablo2 does everything better, sure. well the game is simple, right? 16 floors of monsters and various item-holding objects, with maybe a special boss on a few of the floors? well, thats pretty lofty goal for me, as simple as it is.. but its one i feel i can attain in a reasonable amount of time, with a reasonable amount of effort. simple as that. and also, i like diablo1. once i get to that point (or a reasonable facsimile) i can keep moving forward and expanding on that.
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| Saturday, October 6, 2007 |
| FFA Playthrough | |
Posted - 10/6/2007 12:35:48 PM | added episodes 9-12, and one tips&tricks
i decided to drop all of these links into an html and just link to it in the journal's header. i might drop messages in here about updates from time to time, but i've tagged when the latest update was. if you're interested in this, keep your eyes up there.
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| code grind | |
Posted - 10/5/2007 9:24:59 PM | the most boring part of game coding has to be code maintenance. the point of how i was going at the code this time was to just get stuff done, and only make things more complicated when they need to be cleaned up. well, my first cleanup is rearing its ugly head. i can't work on anything new until i get this part done, so i won't be updating on it until i'm done the backend cleanup.
blah.
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| Thursday, October 4, 2007 |
| Wednesday, October 3, 2007 |
| new? computer! | 
Posted - 10/3/2007 7:25:02 PM | both a blessing and a curse, i've obtained my dad's old rig. used up most of my day setting up a wireless network and copying over my stuff from jenn's. i hope the box gives me a couple of months at least. XP already bluescreened on me, so we'll see. i've got my stuff in the office (my room durr!) so i've got a haven now. yahoo!
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Display Chip type: RADEON 9100 AGP
Display Memory: 128.0 MB
Sound: SB Audigy 2 Audio [A400]
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| Other stuff | 
Posted - 10/2/2007 10:04:30 PM | back on my feet, the gf's got work again; i get some undistracted time at the console again. i actually haven't been squandering all of my time though.
Final Fantasy Adventure youtubes
my fascination of Final Fantasy Adventure continues on! its not enough that i'm using ripped graphics from the game, no no. some guy made a Final Fantasy Legend II playthrough and i thought, why don't i make one for adventure? i can point at it when i need to describe something to someone, and anyone who doesn't want to put the time in can still get through the entire game like i did with ffl2. so far i've only got 2 episodes up, but i'll be doing the whole game eventually. links:
FFA Playthrough 1: Intro
FFA Playthrough 2: Girl and Topple
if the links don't go anywhere, try my youtube profile. yes, i know the sound is off by the end. if anyone knows why i can't get hits in the youtube search on either of these, please let me know! maybe i should add SteelGolem as a tag?
Everything Else
i watched a playthrough of final fantasy legend 2, some funny stuff there. started ripping sprites from it too i watched a playthrough of kingdom hearts 1, i can't seem to get anywhere in that game for some reason. don't have to now, woohoo! i did that so i could start playing kh2, i didn't want to be completely in the dark about things.
the only other thing i can think of right now is that i finally got my hands on dad's cd/tape player. i've got these japanese tapes that i had no way to listen to, and now that i finally can, i'm all over it. it sucks that they're geared more for practical (read: businessman) use, but i'm still pulling some of the basics out. its a far cry from an actual class or (to-die-for) immersion, but i'm learning more japanese than i knew before. \o/
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| ActionRPG Update | |
Posted - 10/2/2007 9:40:54 PM | 
whoop-de-doo i added barrels. hey, its progress, however miniscule. they're pretty much free kills/drops. i broke one of them already to pick up a free sword upgrade. i know diablo barrels might splode or spawn skellies, i might come back to that stuff. other variants of barrels are treasure chests and corpses. i already know what sprite i'll be using for the corpses. i wonder if willy and hasim were brothers..
most of the next additions on the list right now are more or less pushing the game towards diablo1. on the list:
- treasure chests
- steps to next floor down or up (or to "town")
- a "town" with some people to interact with
- attributes on weapons
- inventory
- money drops
- a boss on the bottom floor
either treasure chests or stairs and floors is next. for what its worth, i'm leaning toward having persistant items. when you leave a floor it'll be the same when you come back. when it's time to expand away from tristram, i'll have to reconsider that.
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Posted - 10/4/2007 6:48:30 PM