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Messages - Iambian
16
« on: June 13, 2016, 10:42:44 pm »
Update:* Physical attack animations added * Slight UI adjustments (text line height is now 8px) * Started work on a PC-side cutscene editor The following demonstrates dual-wield claw, single staff, and dual-wield sword attack animations.
The Quality Assurance Dragon, as seems to be the trend these days, ends the fight with a bang. The GUI for the app we have so far. The bright colors are layout placeholders made during testing.
The map is of the Celestial Spire, generated from the actual CalcGS tilemap/tileset files. Notes:Work on the app has been a bit slower than I'd have liked it to be. I wasn't originally going to do standard attack animations but you can see how that turned out. Second-wind and certain skill animations still need to be put in, but I think we can safely ignore those for now. For cutscenes, we decided it would be better to code a graphical PC-side editor and build cutscenes using that. We're using the Python GUI library Tkinter and the imaging library Pillow to drive the graphical UI side of the editor, with everything else being written in Python. So far, things are looking good for the app. Geekboy1011 comments that this app is already better than CalcGS based solely on its ability to allow decent window resizing despite the fact that the app literally does nothing else besides allow resizing and quitting. I truly wonder about that but maybe it's just frustrations of the team bubbling up to the surface? Anyway. I'm almost surprised at how fast this is coming together despite myself spending just a couple of days using Tkinter. Fun stuff. Python++ TODO:* Second wind and skill animations * Cutscene editor * Cutscenes * Stuff
17
« on: May 31, 2016, 04:41:15 pm »
[...] This screenshot is from the Dreadnought area. It appears that Maya should be able to walk through here, (It' wide enough) but she isn't aligned properly with the map in order to be able to do so. Not sure if it's an error with the map data, or if it's not intended to be walkable. If not, I'd probably block it of with some tiles.
Those are actually two adjacent wall tiles that, unfortunately, form to create an illusion of a path that might appear passable but isn't due to map alignment. Not quite sure how to fix that. * If we made them passable, you'd essentially be able to walk through certain walls (and thus bypass things and break events). * "Adding a tile" wouldn't work because this pathway is formed from the combination of two non-passable tiles. To fix this visual bug, we'd need to create two new tiles specific to this problem and I honestly don't remember if we can add more tile types to this map, or anywhere else due to possible engine limitations. It might be something to explore. * Alternatively, we could redesign the map. Maybe. idk how that would work, since no one currently on the project knows diddly squat about map design. Not to mention that calcgs is awful. idk why we still use it. Thanks for the feedback, tho
18
« on: May 15, 2016, 09:40:07 pm »
Update* Most magic animations are now complete. * Additional content added to Underdeep. It's now its own story arc. * User and script-adjustable typewriter effect. * Other things. Demonstration of typewriter effect and some of the magic.
We have more down but I don't want to spoil too much. NotesBattle animations would've/should've been done sooner, but some of these things take a while to animate in a way that satisfies the whole team. There's still a few things left to animate, but it won't be long now before it's all done. After that and a few visual/bug fixes we get to do... Cutscenes! Geekboy1011 is hard at work at the moment putting all the cutscenes together between the time you choose the "New Game" option to the time you gain control of your character for the first time. When I finish the battle animations and find myself satisfied with the system as a whole, I'm going to be jumping in somewhere in the middle to get the game's story stitched together. Zera/Escheron mentioned that the cutscenes he's been working on as of late are encroaching into Golden Sun-length territory. This could be a good thing. There's also now no way in hell we'll be able to fit this game onto a normal TI-83 Plus without modifications. There's just too much content we want to add and compression we have isn't doing a good enough job. I mean, it's doing a fantastic job so far, but we just have so much to put in. I'm entertaining the idea of creating a miniature OS that contains just the basic calc functions so I can reasonably distribute this game as an OS update instead of an app. Something that would, on the surface, look just like the TI-OS until you try digging into the menus and realize they're all empty. While I do want people to play this game, I also want their calculator be usable as ... a calculator. This is planned after a release for the TI-83+SE / 84+(SE) monochrome calcs. The Underdeep will have static floors interspersed between randomly generated floors which will also be randomly, but not repeatably, chosen where fun events can trigger and backstory can be told. Yes. The Underdeep now has its own story to it which further enriches the world of Escheron. I'm not privy to all the details for the same reason I'm not looking too deeply into the scripts for the game: I want to be able to enjoy playing this thing without too many spoilers once we finish coding the game. TODO* Remaining skill/magic animations * Cutscenes * Specialized transitions * Update the Underdeep mapgen scripts
19
« on: April 18, 2016, 06:14:21 pm »
Could you try compressing some of the code/data? A big lag occasionally is probably better than not being able to run the game at all.
(without reading the previous posts, I am assuming that size is the problem)
You *should* read all the previous posts. Almost all the compressible data is already compressed. What isn't is either unworkable or we don't have the RAM for a destructible copy of it. As a point of reference as to what's compressed (as obtained from the build process): Units in bytes. Tilemap in: 60262, out: 20101 Tileset in: 4112, out: 2772 Enemy spriteset: in 3072, out 2582 Text 0 in 1259, out 843 Text 1 in 4077, out 2382 Text 2 in 2661, out 1386 Text 3 in 567, out 277 Text 4 in 1268, out 622 Text 5 in 5977, out 3404 Text 6 in 2759, out 1724 Text 7 in 5950, out 4241 Default save file in 386, out 152 Admittedly, a fair chunk of the bloat is from awful programming, but that's not something we can deal with right now. The most important thing to do is to get a game released. EDIT: Console output from just the main build: Brass Z80 Assembler 1.0.5.3 - Ben Ryves 2005-2006
-------------------------------------------------
Assembling...
Pass 1 complete. (3550ms).
Font Table Size: 928
Routine allocs: 12, total memory allocated: 14893 of 8811 max exec.
-------
Page 0 bytes 15934 used of 450 remaining.
Page 1 bytes 16172 used of 212 remaining.
Page 2 bytes 9056 used of 7328 remaining.
Page 3 bytes 15833 used of 551 remaining.
Page 4 bytes 15637 used of 747 remaining.
Page 5 bytes 15618 used of 766 remaining.
VERBOSE_OUTPUT not defined. To show more info, define it.
-------
Pass 2 complete. (3454ms).
Writing output file...
Errors: 0, Warnings: 0.
Writing list file...
Done!
20
« on: April 17, 2016, 10:57:51 pm »
Update. * Map-to-map, and standard battle entry transitions were added. * Magic, skills, and second wind mechanics are fully implemented. Battle system is basically done. * Basic battle animations implemented.  TODO: * Magic and special battle animations. * A way for the cutscene script system to take control of battle progression. * Specialized transitions * All. The. Cutscenes. * Title screen and ending credits. Official TI-83+ support has been withdrawn for now. I needed the extra space, but you can still probably load the game onto that calc if you don't mind not being able to use the archive anymore.
21
« on: April 09, 2016, 10:38:31 am »
Update. * Fight command fully functional (save for second-wind counterattacks) * Magic mostly implemented.  We have most spells coded and correctly functioning as of this post, and some of what we have is demonstrated in the above screenshot in one of the game's more difficult optional dungeons (The Underdeep). When I did the initial testing, I was quite surprised at the sudden difficulty ramp now that they are able to use magic. I mean, I kinda sorta expected it but it really hit home when I actually went there and started a fight and tried (and failed) to keep Maya alive. Going into that place unprepared, even with almost all max stats (and a few above max), is basically a death sentence. Worst part is, it's possible to accidentally stumble upon the place relatively early in the game. Guess this is why you get two save slots, huh? What hasn't been coded yet is MP deduction in casting (testing purposes), four spells, enemy and guest NPC skills, special command abilities, items, and a few flags. Almost all of this can be tied into the same piece of code that runs all the magic. Animations are planned, but only if there's nothing else (we (really) need/want) to do. Not much else to say other than that there's a small debate among the team about just *how* we're going to accomplish animations and with what.
22
« on: March 26, 2016, 11:47:54 am »
Update. The "Attack" and "Flee" commands now process. Battles can now be completed by way of either killing all enemies or running away. The following are implemented as part of the Attack command: * Dual-wielding or 2H fight individual damage adjustments made. * Dual-wield second attack or enemy-flagged double-attack support. * Being able to actually damage the enemy. What isn't yet supported in the Attack command: * Elemental attack/resist calculations * Critical hits * Poison/sleep/KO status effects * HP drain effects * Counterattacks, including Second-Wind trigger abilities TODO: * Implement post-victory awards (gold, items, "exp", leveling up), storing relevant stats back to your character profile (HP, MP, etc). * Implement Magic, Item, and Parry, and character-specific commands So, here's a screenshot demonstrating a rather one-sided fight.  Note: The lack of automatic retargeting was a design choice. It's not going to be implemented. We felt that it added to the challenge and encouraged players to pay more attention.
23
« on: February 13, 2016, 10:44:07 pm »
Minor update. Battle system sets up and displays fight scene. Player actions are selectable for each character (but does nothing yet. Didn't get that far)  TODO: Get the options to push actions to battle stack. Get enemies to do the same. Parse and display results of stack processing.
24
« on: January 22, 2016, 08:33:47 pm »
One of the goals of this project is to make a great RPG that's still playable on the venerable TI-83 Plus graphing calculator. In order to retain the ability to use the archive for user variables (read: Save files), the app must not grow any larger than 6 pages. So yeah. 6 pages and we're going to keep it at that. While the app is currently 6 pages already, there's rather large gaps in some of the pages which allows us to fill in more content. The hope is that these are enough but... For more info, this is what our build output looks like. Circled in red is size information relevant to the discussion 
25
« on: November 07, 2015, 11:02:45 pm »
This is all with respect to revision 428. If any of this warrants reporting on Bitbucket, let me know.
- The Window, Zoom, Trace, and Graph buttons act like the direction arrows. Presumably it's because of how you're scanning the keys.
- When you can't obtain an item from a chest because your pack is full, the item stays in the chest but the chest appears open. If you come back to the map later, the chest is closed.
- It'd be nice if scrolling wrapped top to bottom, since it would make it quicker to access later items / spells.
- Exiting a map back to the overworld sometimes puts you on the space corresponding to the map, and other times one square in some direction which varies per map. It'd be nice if you consistently came out the same way.
- Exiting the boat onto the airship leaves you standing on top of the airship, while exiting a submap that moves you onto the airship makes you start riding it. This feels inconsistent.
- The speech boxes sometimes have little arrows in the bottom corner to indicate continuation. However, it's not a reliable indicator of that, since a good amount of multi-screen dialog doesn't always use them.
- Selecting a spell to display its description shifts the upper border down by 1 pixel, which I find distracting
- Using "equip" to change out equipment works differently from selecting an item from "items". It doesn't describe the item you're about to equip.
- It would be nice to be able to view the descriptions of equipped items without having to unequip them.
- If you can't equip something, an error message explaining why would be helpful
Good call. Many of these will be noted on the TODO list to be worked on, which will happen after I get a more automated selective sprite masking system in place. 1. That is indeed the manner in which the keys are scanned. Unless it becomes a major issue, I don't see myself splitting the keygroups. 2. Treasure chest behavior is by design, though everyone else on the dev team is against me on this so... yeah. I'll fix it. On TODO list. 3. Scrolling. Sure, will check on it. On TODO list. 4. I'm a bit late on responding to that. Oops. 5. Haven't noticed that behavior before. Will look into it. On TODO list. 6. This is by design. It was also explained in a post while I wasn't looking. Yay Omni and its warning about other postings. 7. Spell descriptor window. Noted. On TODO list. 8,9,10. Rolled into the TODO list item: "General equip system overhaul to be more helpful." ------------------------------- Update to revision 438 (9cd9e394d813) default branch. Its commit message is terribly nondescript. Here's some meat. NOT FIXED: General equip system overhaul to be more helpful. Magic formulae need to use derived INT, not base. FIXED: sprite automasking Inns now checks for empty slots instead of corrupting memory. Treasure chests should not be open if you can't get item from it Item/magic scrolling should wrap top to bottom Spell descriptor is incongruent with spell list by 1 pixel. Fix it. Exit locations to overworld and badlands are on top of submap entrance WONTFIX: Exit location to on top of airship autoboards airship. This behavior is critical for Asnoth and Arcanian Summit exit.
26
« on: November 07, 2015, 08:51:26 pm »
Holy necropost, Batman! Erh. Anyway... Totally dumb question- does it work with the ti-89 titanium? If it isn't compatible, would you consider making a similar emulator for the ti-89? I thought that this emulator was very easy to use, and I would like one for the ti-89
(1) This does not work for the TI-89. (2) I can't answer that, but I can definitely say that TI-Boy is written in z80 assembler and is designed to run on the TI-83/84 Plus SE. The TI-89 has a completely different architecture (68K) which makes what is currently written incompatible on nearly every possible level. After a quick Google search, this looks like that would solve your needs. Try it out and tell us if it helped.
27
« on: November 06, 2015, 09:58:23 pm »
@calcdude84se@Chirlian@merthsoft@pimathbrainiac Bug fixes pushed in revision 427 (c3730ade74ee) Magic shop display bugs Mana costs Airship: Maya should face up Lighthouse event fixed. Yes/No event repaired. Underdeep warp location moved Walking around while poisoned should hurt. Ragnoth root cellar, typo (missing quote) Item description consistency fix Item shop description scrollability AGI and INT should update in status screen wrt equipment Note: Underdeep and shop bugs were not reproduceable due to Escheron using a non-clean build.
28
« on: November 05, 2015, 12:43:32 pm »
At around the end of October, Geekboy1011 pulled together E:ToR into a closed alpha and started accepting applications for that. During that period I decided to take a small break from that project but I didn't want to announce that anywhere for fear of pitchforks, torches, and rolled-up Sunday newspapers. The signup period lasted roughly a week, so I decided to try for a project that would take about that much time. I thought about Geekboy1001's rendition of Scognito's Scogger game called ScoggerT and figured it would be easy enough to port to the CSE. I already had a level editor (which was made for Geekboy1011) and the important bits of NaCaniS to work with. The rest of the dev team (Geekboy1011 and Zera) was pretty much waiting on the signup period to end, so we decided to tackle this project in the meantime. The end result? Scogger CSE (download link)That's what I call it but the title screen says it's Scogger+. I didn't bother correcting Zera (the project's graphics designer) since I didn't really want to rearrange things again.  This game features all original 100 levels, formatted to fit in the game's 8x6 grid (originally 8x8). Thankfully, all the levels were editable in such a way that it changed nothing about how each level was solved. The editor that I wrote and used (which is included with the game) looks like this:  You'll need AutoHotkey L installed to run the editor since it's written in AHK. The game also features 50 extra levels made by Zera in Scogger+ mode, which includes two additional tile types to enhance the gameplay.  There's a bit of a load time when the game starts, but as far as my testers have been able to tell me, it plays well and plays beautifully. Although Wabbitemu doesn't do a perfect job emulating the CSE's half-res mode, I was able to grab this animated screenie using an external screenshot tool:  The game also provides basic amenities such as recording your progress, marking it (red level numbers are levels not completed, green are those that are), and being able to delete it. -------- For those of you who are interested, the download contains everything you need to rebuild the project, aside from Python 2.7, PIL, and a WinXP+ environment (which are mentioned in the readme). The level editor is included, but you'll need to jump through a few hoops and hurdles to actually play them since Scogger CSE does not support external level packs. That's also detailed in the readme. Instructions for using the level editor itself is not included, though pushing F1 with the window in focus can help. The source is openly available. I am not responsible for any adverse health effects caused by reading such awful code. You have been warned. Other than that, enjoy! EDIT: Grammar + missing word
29
« on: October 21, 2015, 06:20:13 pm »
Two days ago, we were supposed to release E:ToR as a closed alpha, but then Zera had to ask a question that went along the lines of "Can we switch party members yet?" That led to delays when I attempted to implement that feature since doing so revealed some other bugs that absolutely had to be dealt with. What was added and fixed: * Added party management and leader management by way of talking to various NPCs  * Fixed empty character slot handling across the whole menu system. * Added actual guest NPC loading and support * With that support, locked out the ability to change magic/equips for guest NPCs. * Added an event, fixed various spritemap locations, and ... something else? So, where are we now? Aside from other things that I may have forgotten about, and aside from the battle engine / major cutscenes, we should be done for the alpha release. Geekboy should have more info on the whole release thing.
30
« on: October 15, 2015, 06:03:19 pm »
geekboy thought it would be a cool idea to show some statistics regarding the the code in E:ToR.  The menu system contains the most lines of source code and is also the largest file. No surprise there. What is sorta surprising is that the support routines in _common.z80 for most of the menus comes up in 2nd place. The cutscene system comes in third and is still growing. It must be said that none of the .inc files and none of the binary data are considered in this count, along with all the other non-text assets such as sprites, tilemaps, tilesets, and utilities (some of which I did not write). Speaking of utilities, might as well show our statistics with regards to Python: 
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