Current Project: RPG Toolkit, codename "M3"

[Mayabird]

The "if" method is more familiar to me. I did that in my intro CS classes (I wasn't in CS myself, but we're all required to take it here, and that means some programming).

It's not really magic to me. It's just hard.

[SirNitram]

Non-linear storylines are so easy it's fairly clear the reason it's not done is to save time writing/creating FMV's/recording voiceovers. It's always just an if/then, however the language reads that.

The question is only 'How deep do you want the branches to go?'.

[Destructionator XV]

Non-linear storylines are so easy it's fairly clear the reason it's not done is to save time writing/creating FMV's/recording voiceovers.

True. The programming team is one of the cheaper parts in development relative to the actors and CGI artists, so that is an important business reason to keep those relativily simple.

It's always just an if/then, however the language reads that.

One of the problems though is it is not just one if/then, it is a lot of them. You need to pay attention on many different events.

Its not really difficult to program, just more time consuming.

The question is only 'How deep do you want the branches to go?'.

Which is a very important question since if you really do start branching, it can become exponentially more complex and time consuming as you branch more. Many professional games mitigate this by making many isolated episodes branch, and not interact much until a common ending. Look at KoToR and how each planet was mostly self contained. It saves a lot of development time.

[Destructionator XV]

First little optional download ready

Well, I have a first revision of my element wheel ready, and have whipped up a quick test utility that does the math for you.

To run any GUI programs I write, you will be needing the Qt library. I've zipped up the needed dlls and you can get them here:

Qt Library for Windows

The license says I need to offer you the source to distribute it, so if you want the complete source code to the library, just ask me.

It is a 3.5 megabyte download. Once you download it, unzip it and you will see a folder inside called qt. Inside that folder are 4 .dll files and an install.bat file. If you run install.bat, it will install the dll files to your windows/system folder. If you would rather not do that, simply copy any exes you download from me into this qt folder and run them from there. Either way will work.

Once you have the library ready, you can start to play with my programs. The first one I will offer you all is the element tool.

Get it here for Windows

The license is the GPL, meaning you are free to do almost anything to it. If you want the complete source code, just ask me and I'll send it to you.

This is a 123 kilobyte download. If you installed qt to the system folder, you can just run it anywhere. If you did not install qt to system, you need to move the exe to the qt folder and run it from there.

This program will pop up a window that looks like this:



You use the mouse to click or drag the locations on each colour wheel, top is attacker, bottom is defender. This represents their element and strength of the element, as I described on the last page.

The two spin boxes next to each color wheel show numerically where you are on the circle. The top one is the radius, between 0 and 1, and the lower one is the angle, between 0 and 6.28. These numbers are tied to the picture, so if you change one, the other will automatically change too.

You can also change the total raw damage in the text box to the right if you want.

Then click the calculate button on the right and the total, nonelemental, and elemental damages will be displayed. Play around with it to get a feel for how my proposed system would work.

Crunching the numbers in a pretty way is all this program does.

I still want to do a few little changes to the formula, but this is mostly what I have in mind. If anyone wants to try it, tell me your thoughts on the system.

[Destructionator XV]

Monster graphic sizes: I intend to support at least 3:

1. Small: 64x64 pixels. 16 of these would fit on the screen at the same time in battle. I'd imagine these as things like slimes, imps, enemy people.
2. Medium: 128x128 pixels. 4 of these would fit at once. I imagine these as being beasts, lesser dragons, giants, etc.
3. Large: 256x256 pixels. Only one of these would fit on the screen at once. This I would imagine only being used for very special fights like great dragons or bosses.

The main battle screen I am envisioning like Final Fantasy 4: about 1 / 3 of the screen, probably at the bottom, being used to display stats and menus and the top 2/3 being used to show monsters and player characters.

[Destructionator XV]

Enemy AI overview

I want to support 4 types of enemy AIs:

1. Random. You select a probability for each of the enemy's moves, and when he gets his turn, he will randomly select one of these moves and execute it on a random target (friendly or enemy is up to you). If you set, for example, attack player as 100%, every turn, he will attack a player character at random.
2. Random, under conditions. Like normal random, but you can put in alternate lists to execute based on conditions like HP < 25% try casting cure or MP = 0 stop using spells.
3. Automatic. This will let a program I will write select the move for the enemy when he gets his turn. It will calculate the best reasonable move (whatever brings the characters closer to game over) each turn and carry it out. This should make for difficult fights if I do it right!
4. Script. You can write a script that is executed each turn. In this script, you can examine HP, MP, and some other status effects (like if you are poisoned) then choose the command to execute, and on which target.

You select which AI the enemy will use in the monster editor.

[Destructionator XV]

Since my last post here, I have not been working on the engine nor the editors, instead taking some time to write a documentation creation program.

This program will probably never be seen by you all (though if you want it, I will put it up for download) but nevertheless fills a very important task. The easier it is for me to maintain the documentation, the more likely it will be to be up to date and complete, which means it will be easier to use.

Using this new program, I hope to have the official website up within about another week, which will have all the full documentation on everything.

So still moving right along. My release estimate might be pushed back though, it is taking longer than I expected. Still, I hope to have it out in August for public testing.

[Something Awesome]

Is that the program with the Commie Twidgets? If so, I'll want it, just on general priniciple of awesomitude.

(For everyone who doesn't have the ability to look over Adam's shoulder while he programs, I saw the phrases "commitwidget" and "editwidget" and found them to be quite funny.)

[The Jackal]

I've been working on some character designs and plotting for this. when I'm done I'll post them for everyone's viewing pleasure. sorry I've been so quiet but I've been hard at work.

[Destructionator XV]

Well, I've taken the first few steps in setting up the M3 official website, and I have put up the official forums, found here:

http://rpgtoolkit.arsdnet.net/forum/index.php

I'm having a hard time deciding what forum categories I should have. I don't want too many, since that would make it harder to use, but I want to cover everything.

Thus far, I have announcements, support, game creation, engine development, and user games (just follow my link and read the descriptions there for more information).

Think I should have any more? Or consolidate what I do have?

[Scottish Ninja]

I'm thinking that should be good for now. I don't see a need for any more at this point.

I love the official website, though.

[Destructionator XV]

Update: not a lot of code progress this week; I allowed myself to be otherwise occupied (Chrono Trigger the last couple days...), but did think up some more little details.

Vehicles need to know if they will follow the player when he teleports. To tackle this, I've decided on two things: one is when you teleport the character, you can decide where the vehicles go too (you being the content creator), the vehicles can stay put, or you can let them follow you automatically. If you do this, they will be teleported to the nearest square they are allowed to occupy (a boat goes to the closest water, etc)

By teleport, I mean plot based movement or magical teleportation spells (like Return in Dragon Warrior). This will have to be a different function in the script than moving up and down stairs, etc.

Also adding a dungeon stack: instead of just moving to a dungeon, you can push current location on the stack and move. This allows you to return to where you were before simply by poping the old location. Using this, for example, moving to the cockpit of the Highwind and back to the map is easy.

Also been podering the in game menu system: I am envisioning it as a layer of boxes with a user selectable color (in fact, four colors to form a gradient like Final Fantasy 7 with added transparancy like Lunar). I'll probably be going for a FF4 style look to it: character overview on the left, options on the right. Don't want to copy it outright, but it is a good system, so I will be basing on that system to at least some extent.


Well, that's all that's on the pondering list for today. Time to get back to work on the code part: I want to get the vehicle editor up and running and get started on a game overview editor and the tile editor by the end of this week. I'll keep you posted on progress.

Also, any of you guys working on art, music, or potential storylines making any progress? The program is a long ways from being ready to use it all, so no rush, I'm just curious to see it if you have anything yet.

[Mayabird]

Also, any of you guys working on art, music, or potential storylines making any progress? The program is a long ways from being ready to use it all, so no rush, I'm just curious to see it if you have anything yet.

Eh, I'm making progress, but not much luck. I've been having some trouble translating the music in my head to the program, and also with forgetting the tune itself while I try to pick at it and find the right note.

For example: Sad music box

You can probably tell where the problem spots are.

I do have storyline ideas, as you might have guessed from all my questions about vehicles and space travel, but I haven't been working on that much.

[Ra]

Update: Due to my lack of time recently, my sprite-making has, sadly, crashed and burned. I'll get back to it eventually, but I can make no promises. :sad:

On a more optimistic note, I do have some plot ideas (What the fuck was I posting in the Fiction forum for long ago? I'm an author! ), so I can say I'm at least making *some* progress in that area.

[Destructionator XV]

Quick notes to self: some form of auto battle would be nice (like PS2), fast forward (like CC) to double movement speeds, optional delayed scrolling (characters move off center before scrolling occurs, like Lunar and PS2) and character order in party should be relevant in deciding whom is attacked.

[Mayabird]

Any progress updates?

Okay, in all honesty, because of some procrastination of mine, I started making a few simple little sprites in the same format as that knight sprite. Here's a woman, a chef, a pirate, and a longshoreman.



What do you think?

[Destructionator XV]

I have been a lazy ass for the last couple weeks, not getting much done. I finished a battle system test program, and after that been slacking for a while. (Yeah, lazy procranstinator here)

GUI programming is a rather boring job (the editors are basically a file format (easy and quick) and a user interface (easy, but tedious and time consuming to get right)), but it won't be too much longer before I can move on to the fun fun engine coding if I get back into it. Though with class I now waste a chunk of each day, and potentially adding job too, which will burn more time.

But, I am going to get back to work soon, be certain of that. And if I don't, nag me.


I like your big sprites (the small size is no longer necessary as I have decided to go with larger 32x32 pixel images (or 64x32 if you want tall characters similar to FF6 and Chrono Trigger)).

It also looks like they can be easily animated to move, which is awesome. Do you have any side or back views of them yet, or are you currently just focusing on front view art?

[Destructionator XV]

A few good things though. While I am slacking, I am learning new things - most important to this is how sound will work.

Sadly, I won't be able to play midis directly in the game, but I will be able to play .ogg and .wav files for music and sound effects, respectively.

I can convert midi files to ogg files using tools I have on my computer, which should sound pretty good.

The down side is the file downloads will be bigger (midis are generally 10 kilobytes or so, ogg are 2-3 megabytes). This is significant, so I might consider using bittorrent when distribution time comes around to conserve our bandwidth.



Anyway, the sound system was going to be hard before, but now since I know how to do it with a library (SDL), I should have sound ready in the first release.


I also spent the last 24 hours reading manuals of design tools to help automate the creation of the user interfaces. I drag and drop elements into the window, and much of the boring code is autogenerated. I was using this before to a limited extent, but now I actually understand the manual, so I'll use it more properly. The benefits: the boring stuff gets done faster so I can focus on the fun stuff.

Additionally, in my slacking time, I created a new website auto generator tool, read some more theory on programming methods which I intend to apply, and learned how to write *nix man pages, so I will have complete documentation in three forms (website accessible, manual pages, and a special tool to give context sensitive help) rolling along shortly.


Yeah, I have been slacking, but it is not all for naught. I am getting back to work using the new techniques, and it is moving faster than with my old technique already, which is obviously good.



BTW if any artists here have something you would like to see as the M3 logo (and if you can think up a better name, feel free), post it and if I like one of them, you will be forever immortalized in the CONTRIBUTORS.txt file in the source! (...actually, you already are for posting ideas in this thread, but I'll mention you twice or thrice even!)

[Destructionator XV]

Here is my current skeleton of the map editor main window. The white box on the left would list all the available tiles that you can use, then you would click one and on the right, between the scroll bars, you could place them on the map.

The tabs would let you place monsters and events (stairs, townspeople, etc) in much the same way.

And of course, the window is resizable, and you can grow and shrink the white tile box on the left too. I am also thinking about making that a detachable window, but not sure on that right now.



If you click map->properties (or the toolbar button), you are greeted with this dialog box:



You can right click on anything or use the question mark button anywhere for context-sensitive help.


If anyone thinks I am going entirely in the wrong direction with the user interface, now is the time to talk before I go beyond preview models.

Also, if you have icons you would prefer I use in the program for open, save, etc, I'll happily take suggestions there too.

And this is the result of playing with the interface design tool: hours of playing with it, but now since I know it, that should speed up. It beats the crap out of manually coding all the locations and menus and all.

[Mayabird]

The new and improved test sprites!



Since it's 32X32, I could add more and finer detail, so now the pirate has a skull and crossbones hat, the baker has a loaf of bread, and the woman can wear a flowery headscarf. The sprites look pretty Earthbound-esque to me, and I don't know exactly what style of sprite we should make in the end. If we're going for more serious-looking sprites, I can make some more test ones.


To answer your earlier question, no, I haven't made side or back views because I don't know if we're going to go with these or not.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot. That right angle there marks 32X32 pixels for a size comparison.

[Ra]

I'm going to start on drawing up sprites again, probably focusing on the 64 x 32 Adam said we could go for. Storyline-wise, I could adopt one of my old original-fiction ideas for a game plot, in fact I have one on my mind as I type. So, I've got a good idea as to what I'll be drawing up.

[Mayabird]

Hey Ra, what's your story idea? I can't remember if you've said it in this thread or not. I also can't remember if I've told my RPG idea either. Although to be honest, 64X32 sprites would be better for mine as well, since it would be a more serious sci-fi adventure.

[Ra]

Indeed, I actually haven't told my idea yet, so here goes.

My idea is a fantasy game, with a more gothic twist, rather than Tolkienesque stuff. It's heavily inspired by the stories in the Apocrypha, with other elements taken from older Mesopotamian myth.

Essentially, the main character is a knight that must stop the demon queen Lilith from setting free a host of the first fallen angels, the Grigori, who are bound up in a santuaried prison (think like a DnD pocket plane). So it'd involve lots of fighting against witches, warlocks, demon-posessed humans, actual demons like succubi, incubi, and imps, even some of the half-man, half-angel Nephilim. Lilith herself would be the end-boss, taking full advantage of the 256 x 256 Boss Sprite.

The game's premise, obviously, is why I'm trying to work on serious-looking artwork. The story would also be heavily story-driven, not some "hack 'em slash 'em" affair like Diablo.

[Ra]

Alrighty, some artwork. It's not much, but it might come in handy for some of the battles:



Essentially, it's a beam of "holy light", which can be used for high-level healing spells, resurrection, and holy smiting spells. I made it large enough to encompass a 32x64 sprite character.

Implementation of it might be difficult (I wouldn't have a clue how to do it), but it's a proposal.

[Mayabird]

Ooh, something I just thought of: ammo slots.

Would it be possible to implement a way of keeping up with the amount of ammunition characters have and use? It'd be like the arrows in FF4. Whenever Rydia or someone else attacked with a bow, the number of arrows went down one. I was thinking of this in terms of my story, where there wouldn't be much usage of ray guns or even regular guns much because of the limited amount of ammo or battery packs available.

My story takes place in a solar system where colonization of space had gotten (barely) to a self-sustaining level when world war broke out on the homeworld. Thousands of nukes, engineered diseases, mutagenic gases, the works. A lot of orbital colonies get destroyed as well. Space and land are cut off from each other, and both now have their own struggle to survive.

The game starts a few hundred years after. The space colonies were able to hold on by the skin of their teeth, and civilization is just starting to rebuild on the homeworld (sometimes in weird ways, so you'll have a Bronze Age-level area with waterwheels, or fisher-gatherers who craft hooks and harpoon points out of aluminum cans they find). Anyway, a spacecraft gets destroyed under mysterious circumstances, but several people were able to get to escape pods and land on the homeworld. They're marooned and want to get back home, and there starts all sorts of quests and RPG adventures.

Anyway, as relating to the story, I was thinking they'd have ray guns or at least some sort of gun as part of a survival kit in the escape pod, but they'd only have a limited number of charges and batteries, forcing them to have to rely on other means of defence.