Poke Island (SE)

Well I'm still kind of waiting in the wings, as I haven't received anything yet. I don't mind the wait, but I just want to make sure it's indeed a wait and not you waiting for me to reply before you send them...

Sorry about that. I've been pretty busy last week, as well as attending a funeral and a weekend vacation, so I couldn't find the time. Anyway, when I'm off of work, I may be able to send them to you.

No prob. Life seems to be giving us both the shaft at the moment, though I'm sure things will calm down soon enough.

Continuing from the email...

Well, I did the map thing anyway. Plus, I think you can fill a whole area. I mean, I know I did once. It should be the paint bucket at the top right.

Unless you're using a different version?

Back to the map, it seems to scale it up to a large but still appropriate size, in that it doesn't over pixelate everything like the tutorial the program comes with did. However, I'd still want it to be windowed by default. Also, I gotta do something about the frame rate or... whatever. It doesn't seem to move in the same sense that a console game would. It's almost WAY too smooth, and I'm going for SNES scrolling, here. Not obvious fan game scrolling.

On the plus side, I can use the obstruction tool for collision detection. Not bad! The only thing, though, is that I better choose a good tile size to start with. The default is 16 by 16, which is fine, but I may need to change that when it comes to entering doors, which I'm sure is a coded event.

So far, the only problem with importing maps is that I don't think there's a way to make certain tiles a higher priority, so that you appear behind them. However, there probably IS a way, I just saw some option with "insert code" and left it alone. Plus, when you import maps, it breaks everything up into a 16 by 16 tile, so I could probably just create a new layer and reinsert higher priority tiles in the exact same spot.

Seriously, this import map feature will definately save us time. All I have to do is make all the maps like I'm doing now. =) Glad I figured this out, and glad Sphere has the feature.

I attached a screenshot of what it looks like. I know ya'll like my bad Kirby sprite. You want it on a graphic tee-shirt.

Um... wth? It looks like the forum is eating my posts. Maybe I'm just hallucinating...

EDIT: Nope, not hallucinating. It ate my post -_-

Here's what I had:
Well that's good. I don't know what you did that made it work, but so long as it works, who cares? Here are those screenshots I promised, with the really shoddy map I threw together in 2 minutes. Note how the ice reflects your character (also as a note, you can't see this but the frame rate drops a bit when you run over the ice. I think it's a bit CPU intensive...). Also, in the shadow one, you can see how the shadow covers Pikachu. The problem is that when he leaves the shadow it uncovers the wrong way, so instead of his head breaking into the light first, his feet do. You'd have to use those shadows for things floating directly overhead methinks....

Still no movement on the uh... movement. Mainly, this is because I had other work to do and didn't get around to working on it, but we'll see how I go.

EDIT AGAIN: Oh, and that's what the current menu looks like. It's the sample they gave me, so I'm working with it. Once I know what I'm doing I can experiment...

Ugh. That menu just won't work. I better get that interface going. Not that it'll be hard. I just wonder more if I'm going to do the battle interface EarthBound or Mother 3 style (the only difference is that in the former, when it's a character's turn, their small window is raised up above the others a bit, while the later, a sprite of the character pokes his/her head out of their window).

I won't reflect ice, and if it's graphics intensive, that'd be a really bad idea for one of the area's that's pretty much solely ice. The only thing I'd use it for is a possible mirror in someone's house, and even then that's absolutely not necessary.

As for shadows, I wouldn't use it in the traditional sense, but maybe to shade characters in caves. If not a pallet switch. Or I won't do anything at all, it really doesn't matter.

Sorry for slow replies. I've been having a lot of car troubles and stuff, and since uni's started up again I've had less and less time to work on my projects. Nevertheless, I'll be getting back to working on SE as soon as I have the chance.

It's no big, I've been rather busy myself, preparing for internships and whatnot.

It's so hard to determine a good time to try to find more help. You'd think it'd be the summer, but people get lazy. During school, people are busy.

I'm not talking about you, I'm just saying in general. I'm sure statiticians know what times of the year people are most productive, I need to find out when that is, so when I make some posts about this elsewhere, it's not at a bad time.

I know one things for sure, when I finally get my next big showing out, I'm changing my rules about work. I'm tiring of the really slow help I get at times. If you can't get things done in a week (and I mean spriters), don't waste my time. And stuff like that. I'm the most busiest person I know after my own mother and I can STILL get a full set done in an hour or two if the character's more difficult, so everyone else has no real legitimate excuse AFAIK. So I'm thinking of announcing something like that.

Musicians and coders are given a lot more leniency, though, as I'm more dependant on that. But it should not take MONTHS, and I'm talking several, here, for sprites.

Typical quarterly update. Top of first page explains changes/additions.

Perp, I haven't heard from you in a while. Could you let me know what's going on?

Also, the new work rule is in effect, not that you have to code in a week, but now I'd like to stay posted on things, even if much hasn't been done.

Erm yeah, sorry about that.

I really ought to be more vocal about my decisions when you're counting on me like you are, so I apologize for giving you the run-around. I don't want to make excuses if possible, so I'll merely say that I ended up giving myself too much to work with and haven't been keeping up with it properly. Unfortunately, I am the kind who tends to be really badly organized when it comes to these things. I'll try my best to get back on board now and make up for lost ground now though.

Basically I haven't really done anything since I last showed you my progress. Me getting sidetracked aside, this project is going to require a lot of time and patience as far as the coding goes. The language is pretty low-level, all things considered, so there will be a lot of extra work for any poor programmers who get stuck with the jobs. Admittedly, I've been hoping others would step up to help out with it so I didn't have to do all the hard stuff alone. I guess that hasn't happened or you'd have told me about it, so darn. An additional block is the fact that I have to LEARN the language as I go, which slows things down a lot.

To give you an idea of what you are facing, I'd say that the programming will take an estimate of 2-3 times the amount of time everything else will take (aside from say composing music if someone gets into that). That may sound a bit too high of an estimate, but believe me, even simple programming tasks can spiral into huge odysseys that take a long time to complete, and god forbid you only have one poor programmer stuck with the tasks.

Of course, I'm not complaining (since I knew what I was getting into when I offered to help out), though you can probably see why I've been procrastinating about it a bit. Anyway, this all has nothing to do with me not getting stuff done for ages, but I'm trying to give you a clear idea of what to expect in the future. I do have my own rl stuff to deal with too, including a big AI project this semester, so you can expect that I will get tied up with my own work from time to time. I promise to keep you updated in the future though, unless something drastic happens to me and I don't have the chance.

Again, sorry about the lack of updates. I'm still here and everything, just moving slowly. I'll give you another update once I get some more of this programming language deciphered enough to program something for you. If you need anything, just email me if it's personal, or put it up here if you need others to read it too. I'm online a lot, so I should get back to you within a few days if possible.

Again, sorry about making you wait; I'll try and keep you on the level with regards to my situation from now on.

You might use the MD sprites?

Nah, that would defeat the purpose of the Mother style. Plus, PMD sprites are far too small and poorly scaled.

I'm quite a proficient scripter in sphere, need any help?

Sure, we could definately use it, although I think Perpetr8r might have more of an idea with what he needs help with. We're trying to create a test bed, getting all the little silly things to work, so to speak, so that when it comes time to actually get this game going, it's smooth sailing (figuratively speaking). It'd be like a debug room.

On my end, I'm going to try to work with menus, using a new menu format. I'm going to give it a go myself before throwing arms up.

I mean, if you want to jump in somewhere different, that'll be alright too, but I know you've already got a project going. Actually, you both do. Come to think of it, maybe I haven't been appreciative enough...

The moment I saw Earthbound I fell in love. Will play when it comes out.

Ok so I've been doing some sphere tutorials to gain a better understanding of how this things works, however I haven't heard any news on what Waudby is going to be doing. If he gets on board, he'll be a lot more efficient at this than I will, so I'm kind of waiting for some confirmation of who is doing what. It's best if we don't all work on the same thing separately, after all.

Makes sense to me. Well, sense time is precious, it's hard to say whether he's busy or forgot the topic, but I'll cut to the chase and send a PM.

In the meantime, in case you haven't been there yet, the Spheredev.org website has a lot of interesting tutorials that even I might try on some spare-spare time. In a way where it doesn't interfere with production, that is.

I had some free time today, so I tried to recreate the text system from Mother 3.

I don't however have the correct font so placement may look strange with Sphere's system font.

What do you think? It includes, letter by letter text and the option for the name box to appear or not for use with signs and what not.

Enjoy.

What's funny is that the font looks close enough as it is. I'm thinking about using the probably now overdone Orange Kid font, which is basically the EB font.

Maybe using this would be "different" (except for sphere users, oh well... can't win them all, right?).

That looks pretty darn close, moreso than I'd've gotten so far. I was going to go with EB's text system, but to be honest that really looks neat. I'd use it. As long as it flows nicely, I have no problems with it, the only thing I'm really particular about is the battles. Do you use videos for reference or did you just try out a *ahem* ROM?

I'll check the menus of both games and see which one is more accessable (M3s is a lot more user friendly but I think it's a bit more crowded, too).




Now, speaking of character stats I mentioned in the PM, there's about 213+ unique enemies, 30 some bosses and then another sub group of optionals, and not all of them have 100% completed information yet. It doesn't take me long to fill this out, I can just transfer information and fill the rest out in a word document, but that said, you may have to wait a couple of days on the stats of all enemies, mainly because they aren't all Pokemon. Not that makes it too much harder, but I mean, when one of the game's enemies is a China Plate of all things...

Oh, I should also type up the completed list of Pokemon attacks used in game, and which of them have animated effects. I'm eventually going to database this all anyway, so it's really no big deal to me.

Since there's now an experienced coder on board, perhaps I should take a back seat and help out with the little things he doesn't have time for. It would save me a lot of time if I could work off of his code instead of trying to write my own from scratch. Of course, I'll still put in a good amount of work on it, it'll just be more focussed on what we need and less on trying to decipher javascript.

How does that sound to you two?