A blast from the past

Onam, you nerd.

A lot of what SotS is to me currently is an echo of an echo of what it used to be. It’s been many, many years since I had the whole thing in my head. At best I think of it in broad strokes now. So I sorta wanted a refresher on the original. So I started massaging it into v3 as an exercise… and hoo boy, does our v1->v3 path suck.

I’ll spare the details. Here’s a zip of the Amaxis library, playable in v3. SotS’s original version had a lot of text in it!

Guards!

It’s the po-po.

I’ve decided that the testing and systems-shoring-up need to be done on the sully side of things, and that my SotS efforts should be directed towards making some playable demoage. Towards this end I pulled together my favorite versions of sprites from the previous build and have been upgrading them. Today’s entry: the Alden Castle Guards.

Now in three flavors!

The animations are completly done on this one, and he’s got three different flavors: Private, Captain, and Gold! These three sprites will be littered all over the castle, and provide a bit of variety without too much extra work.

Next up will be the Alden Mages, Amin, and Ilsdan. Once I’ve got those all out of the way, I’ll continue on by actually coding up an intro segment.

subversion, gdorf 19.

Please feel free, once again, to check out the current demo’s build over at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/.

Now it’s time to do my laundry!

I finished up Erikk, basing his cape’s folding animation on the up-walk on the FF6-style cape-crinkling. Hey, capes are hard and ff6 did a good job with it. I HAVE NO REGRETS!

After a bit of spriting it was time to prepare the makefiles.

Some lessons re-learned

The first thing I re-discovered was that v3′s character makefile format is extra-picky. For instance,

	d_walk F0 W25 F1 W25 F0 W25 F2 W25

Is invalid! Yeah, in fact you need to do this:

	d_walk F0W25F1W25F0W25F2W25

And don’t you dare think about leaving some trailing whitespace at the end of the string, and you’d better add an extra newline after the last line of the file, too, boy.

After re-learning that little particuliarity, I noticed that the W33′s I’d been doing in rhubarb roobarb to test looked terrible in-engine, so I went from 1/3rd of a second delay between frames to 1/4th of a second (W25). That helped, but I noticed it looked like you were sliding around at the start of your walk from a standstill. So to solve this I changed the first frame of the animation to not be the same as the standing still frame. To wit:

	# This is the idle "standing" frame.
	d_idle 0

	# (expanded improperly, so it is easier to read)
	d_walk F1 W25 F0 W25 F2 W25 F0 W25 

	# see, instead of starting on frame 0 on the down-walk, I start on frame 1, 
	# so you instantly animate from the frame you saw on the standing-frame. 

Hopefully that was clear.

Still going.

So, seventeenth update and still going strong. I recommend grabbing an update from the repo and running it for yourself, so you can see the kids all animating live in scene. I added them all to the party so you could see the glorious man-train in action.
As always, http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/ is where you get the goods. Anonymous/Anonymous for user/password.

In other news… Christ, I still don’t have internet at home. Heads will fucking roll. I mean, really now. It’s been like a month at this place. What kind of sham game are AT&T and Speakeasy running here. Kael and I both have wasted time waiting and on the phone trying to sort this out.

Goddamn.

…It’s late. >_>

Spritastic!

A bit more work on Erikk has come into being. I spend way too much time on someone so monochromatic, but what can I say? I’m gay for the little guy.

I’m also showing the now lower contrast tanata-hair to people. Y’all seemed to disagree with the previous version, so I’m getting a feeler for this new one.

Some random pimping of friends!

Doctor Zath to medbay…
Doctor Zath, medbay?

On a wonderful side note, the Astrad’s illustrious master maestro, Matthew Steele has released a video game remix of the always awesome System Shock 2′s Deck 4 theme. System Shock 2 is home to the fiendish SHODAN, of which GLADoS is a passive-aggressive knock-off… if an awesome entity in of her own murderous cake-loving right.

…

Go here to hear the tune! Also vote for it!

Sweet sixteen.

Sixteenth update, revision 33 for the svn repo. http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/. I still don’t have internet at home. What’s up with that?

The prince goes marching one
by one. hurrah! hurrah!

Today I completed the first version of the third major revision of Prince Onam Alden. That’s right: Onam 3.0. Unless you start counting at the recolored version of Edgar Figaro, in which case this is 4.0.

In either case, here he is: lower color, slightly larger, and not based directly upon any other game’s. That’s right, this little guy for better or worse was done sans template. I went with an asymmetrical stance based on years of admiring Chrono Trigger’s take (I still am in awe of how much they packed in so little space.), and use bright primary colors taking a cue from Lufia’s sense of design. As a result, the sprites are off-center and the sides don’t match up perfectly.

I’m mostly pleased with them, and if y’all have any feedback, please: feel free to email me. Or post on the general discussion board of verge-rpg.com. I promise one day I’ll implement comments here. I just have too many projects and not enough time…

More done than expected?

One of the side effects of the simplified sprites of this revision is that it’s a bit easier to cook up a finished sprite. The previous version had five frames per direction, whereas this new version has only three. That’s a total of 12 versus 20. In addition, I limited the colors I used intentionally to further speed the coloring process. With less colors, there’s less fussing over how best to shade some newly exposed area. So with 40% less frames and each frame taking less time to color, I was able to fully crank out Tanata here from scratch in under 40 minutes. Stuff like this matters when you’ve got a limited amount of time…

Tanata here is a major character that has yet to be seen in a released version of The Astrad. For those of you lurking since 1997, she’s the princess of a the kingdom of Allrusen, which was on the other side of the mountain pass my final “real” demo ended at. I’ve always liked women who could kick ass, and Tanata here does just that. She’s the only character in the game who lacks magical abilities, and plays the role of the tank and the physical damage powerhouse.

She is also black, which… has rarely been seen in sprite characters. Shockingly, I will be breaking from RPG tradition by not arbitrarily making my dark-skinned characters speak ebonics.

14 weeks, still suverting.

This is my fourteenth consecutive gruedorf entry, and I’m showing no signs of giving up this ghost. What would a gruedorf be without a grue, after all? As always, my revisions can be snatched and audited over at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/. I’m almost finished settling into my new place in Mountain View, CA (home of teh google). So hopefully I’ll be kicking ass and taking names in short order.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

So, after doing a whole bunch of stuff (my first week at a new job in Silicon Valley, getting up during the morning every day, saving humanity from demon-alien nazis, etc etc) I started doing some minor fleshing-out work, adding some “local color” to one of the completed maps that won’t need major changes: Amaxis city. This whole idea of adding linear progress was Andy’s, as he has a variation on the time-vested:time-used formula I came up with many years ago to justify these endeavors.

Anyways, I converted a bunch of old sprites to v3 entities, and then scripted them out in the vc.

Then I loaded it up, it compiled fine, and as I walked into the town: whoops. I forgot that I broke my local maped3 weeks ago and haven’t fixed it yet.

If only I were a gangsta. Then I could feel good.

I totally need to do some swoll gruedorf next week in the form of repairing maped3 some. It’s obvious I’m corrupting my mapsaves in some minor, but annoying, way.

On the other side, please note I’m physically in California now, and this is the second post done via remote desktop into my computer in Austin TX. Locally it’s 11:47pm on Sunday, Dec 16th. I SO DO NOT LOSE. :D

…Ahem. Carry on.

Seriously, can that be any brighter?

Last week’s entry was only a bare minimum of an hour’s work, the lion’s share spent on properly reforming the sully SVN so I could work on a branch while keeping the trunk sane. Thes lesson there is that infrastructure work is worth noting, and worth doing… even if it ain’t flashy.

This week’s entry has a lesson in three parts:

1. Using Remote Desktop Connection to develop is painfully slow.
2. Some small amounts of work are a lot more satisfying than others
3. Sometimes you just gotta throw old work out.

I’d explain further, but frankly I’m exhausted and my plane’s taking off in 10 minutes. The short story is that I was working on rehabilitating the old SotS forest maps until I decided that the map layout is incredibly terrible and cannot be reused. Map layouts are important to try and reuse since it takes far more time to make a decent map than it does a decent tileset. Unfortunatly, you’re really not saving any time if your map’s foundation is entirely indecent.

So there you go. Anyone paying attention might be wondering why I was doing superficial work this week after infrastructure last week. Well, I want to roll new ideas out with some homeboys in my new digs concerning the battle system, combined with the fact that I’ve been nearly swamped with moving across the nation and visting family this week. Nonetheless, I found time to work on the project.

After all… the alternative was losing.

The third ontaran cave map.
Now with less garish colors!

I wanted to keep what I was going for recently with SotS under my hat until it was fully finished. However, in the debate over implementing it the hard, but possible, way or the better, but needs-engine-work way, I chose to go the longer-to-implement route.

Confused yet? If you’ve played any of the 16-bit games I’ve played, it should be apparent from today’s screenshot what I’m adding into the game.

However, to properly pull this off requires a bit more than just obs, zones, and tile indexes… which is all of the in-script data we’ve had at our disposal so far. We’re going to need… metadata.

Luckily, I’m not the only one tinkering around with v3′s innards at the moment. Ioachim and Andy have both been hanging around #vergedev on lunarnet and we had a pleasant chat while maped3′s source was merged together. Now, this whole metadata adventure hasn’t yet started in earnest, but trust me and my leaky dev-blog hear: you’ll all be the first to know when it does.

The other thing I’m considering tinkering with is how verge, well… renders! As soon as I’ve got some more time (some big things going down in the gruelife atm), I’ll be spawning a new branch of v3 with the intent of adding a more programmer-friendly rendering system. Like adding non-entity sprites into the entity’s sorted rendering layer! And stuff. Maybe. I need to think about it all more.

Teh Gaem

Blah blah http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/ , blah blah SotS SVN.

A view of maped3 showing the obs.
click to biggify

Okay, so in keeping with tradition, as soon as I make a boastful claim of future work, I of course don’t get to complete it. However, since I have many years of experience with this sort of phenomenon, I kept the boastful claim REALLY SMALL and still got work done towards it. However, you’re all going to have to make due with more map maintenence for now.

Today’s precious update is the Ontaran Mines, which is the last zone before you exit Alden Kingdom. The base of this map was first seen by the public in a bunch of public domain tilesets I released a few years ago. I was going to redo the entire cave sequence, but I decided that, although the layout was a bit flat, it was something I could work with…

Doctor TwopointohLove

(or: how I learned to stop worrying and love rounded corners)

TEH WIRLD IZ SKWARE

One of the main problems with this map’s original incarnation was it’s harsh 90-degree corners. If you open up the old version (which isn’t in the svn, and I can’t currently find in the repo (goddamnit)), you’ll notice it’s mainly just twisty 90-degree passages. Visually dull, annoying to navigate, and really kinda flat. BAD!

Enter: the Corner.

The solution to this first visual issue was to use the already-existing diagonal wall pieces gratuitously. with the addition of a very small number of new transition tiles (something like 6 new tiles), I managed to soften the harsh edges, diversify the number of shapes on the screen, and overall improve the boring parts of the map a few hundred percent. Once I was done smoothing out the maze, I created a new obstruction tileset, and made everything utilize v3′s diagonal-slidey abilities (see first screenshot of the post) which is one of the stupidly fun things there is while walking around. Who knew sliding across a wall would be so fun?

This map has a lot to go before it’s done, too, but the initial changes are a good start. I hate it several orders of magnitude less already!

In other news, I’ve been using a debug version of maped3 running from Visual Studio itself, which has been fairly illuminating. I’ve fixed two bugs so far… which is about a hundred less bugs than Andy’s fixed in it lately.

As always: the goods

In full accordance to the grutopian policy of full disclosure, today’s updates can be seen (as always) in the svn. Remember: user and password are both “anonymous”!

http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/ – the Astradian Repositorium!

Fenslyd Holy Mountain:
Now duochromatic!

Today’s post is way shorter than I planned. But rather than be a twat and whine, here’s new (albeit more mundane than I was planning) work.

This update mainly shows the fruit of several hours after I posted last sunday’s entry, wherein I decided to make the Fenslyd Holy Mt. more interesting visually. The first part was to change up the floor tiles… which wasn’t so much a success. The other part was my old standby vineset. First appearing in Edenburg.map (which was from an abortive attempt to get Hahn to work on Blackstar (Ie, the “real” game starring the Sully Chronicles cast) by giving him art), these vines have crept their way into many, many tilesets of mine. The reason is simple: they break up monotony nicely, and vines are at home on rocks, on buildings, hanging from trees, etc etc. So that looks nicer.

Really, this happened.

A million points to anyone who figures
out what my quicklaunch icons do
(click to biggify)

So, why the reason for the spare update? (and hey, that’s a few more hours of work over last time right there! Mapediting is time consuming!) Well, circumstances prompted me to reformat my main drive and reinstall windows, which ate a bunch of time, and after the reinstall I, like a fool, accidentally installed my Saitek Gaming Keyboard’s drivers, which are apparently incompatible with verge as it says “hey, verge, the up key is being pressed always!”. Hanyways, I went to Fry’s and got a keyboard (and a spare laptop to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Yeah, let’s go with that as the reason! >_>) and then my roommate wanted to go to Ikea and then wanted to eat and then to Best Buy… so now it’s 6 pm and I’ve been up since this time yesterday.

So I want to sleep.

[17:07:20] <Kildorf> I see
[17:08:17] <Thrasher> you lose. the end.
[17:08:28] <SDHawk> how can a keyboard be incompatible with something
[17:13:37] <Kildorf> this is a question that Grue was asking this morning

Oh, also there’s newified mountain music modernized by The Indomitable Zathras. It’s totally hot.

Since this is mainly just a visual update I didn’t feel like making a full download zip. Anyone who wants to can feel free to grab the current build from the Subversion repository at http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sots/ (u/p anonymous/anonymous).

I am going to sleep now. Expect a way better update in a day or three. An update that’ll ROCK YOUR FREAKIN’ SOCKS OFF.

That’s right. I’m setting expectations. I’m that confident. And/or full of myself.