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Dragonite March 9, 2014 03:29:21 PM

Don't feed the Dragonite!
 
* Yawns massively *

Hello, all you inhabitants of Victory Road! I finally got around to thinking about writing this. For a bit of backstory on me, long Primal Dialga hunt spanning several months somehow or another led me here. After that, I was pleasantly surprised that (most) people here judge posts by their content instead of the user's post count, so I plan to stick around! (Plus, I swear Cat is the only forum admin of all time who also happens to be an active user on their forum.)

One more thing, I'm fairly actively working on a Pokémon fan game, Pokémon Dawn and Dusk. Since I can't think of a better place to probably post updates (there was another thread, but it kind of feels disjointed from the rest of its subforum) I'll be posting those things here about once a week, too.

Have fun diving into the madness of Dragonite's mind!

[3/9/2014 17:00:07]

It's been an strange weekend. For the first time since elementary school I didn't put all of my homework off until the last minute, so I've mostly been able to enjoy the weekend without it hanging over my head. It's been a slow few days, but it's 5 PM already so it's mostly over . . . oh well. That went fast. I got a fair amount of programming done for Dawn/Dusk today and recorded some YouTube crap (okay, a LOT of YouTube crap . . . I'm surprised I still have my voice today) so it didn't feel like a completely wasted weekend.

(Speaking of which, I'll probably update this on Friday instead of the weekends after this so there's actually moderately interesting stuff fresh in my mind instead of just homework and code.)

Oh, and a little while ago I got asked to record a few old Pokémon Black/White battle videos with a capture card. If anyone else needs a few of those recorded for whatever reason, put it on the GTS and send me the battle video number and I'll get it done as soon as I can!

Also, I said I'd post updates on Dawn and Dusk here. Welcome to Round 1 of Dragonite's Guide of How To Not Write Revision Comments! (They date back a few weeks and my backup system doesn't approve of the "é" character, for some reason.) And screenshots.

Spoiler Alert:    
http://victoryroad.net/attachment.ph...1&d=1394926270

http://victoryroad.net/attachment.ph...1&d=1394926272

[2/22/2014 17:26:11] 3.19.99 - Reverted to last verion; not broken yet.
[2/22/2014 17:37:5] 3.19.100 - It works for no apparent reason again.
[2/22/2014 18:31:19] 3.19.101 - Saving/Loading following NPCs works.
[2/23/2014 20:37:16] 3.19.102 - Couple more graphical bugs
[2/24/2014 00:42:52] 3.19.103 - In-battle Poké Menu UI.
[2/24/2014 00:52:27] 3.19.104 - I did something, forget what though.
[2/28/2014 00:06:31] 3.19.105 - Switching isn't broken again.
[2/28/2014 00:16:37] 3.19.106 - Fixed a bug where Pokémon progressively creep away from their positions on switching
[2/28/2014 00:57:36] 3.19.107 - The correct Pokémon takes damage when you switch into an attack now.
[2/28/2014 08:10:38] 3.19.108 - You go to a Pokémon Center after losing a battle, but the game dies after that for some reason
[2/28/2014 08:31:17] 3.19.109 - fixed a bug in the timestamps
[2/28/2014 13:21:03] 3.19.110 - When you faint and haven't registered a Pokémon Center yet you go back to Hawthorne's office.
[3/4/2014 16:53:04] 3.19.111 - Major update, gutted a lot of obsolete code.
[3/4/2014 19:29:03] 3.19.112 - Draw depth sucks.
[3/6/2014 01:00:52] 3.19.113 - You attack the right Pokémon upon switching in battle now.
[3/6/2014 02:50:43] 3.19.114 - Skeleton code for EOT actions.
[3/6/2014 15:50:23] 3.19.115 - modStat works now
[3/7/2014 01:39:45] 3.19.116 - More work on PokéMenuRunner. I like making GUIs.
[3/8/2014 17:53:52] 3.19.117 - More work on the PokéMenu panels.
[3/8/2014 19:21:07] 3.19.118 - You can swap Pokémon now.


Suggestions are welcome, too!

Dragonite March 15, 2014 08:49:49 AM

[3/15/2014 12:31:16]

It's been a weird week. The weather is a pretty good metaphor for it. Monday and Tuesday were gorgeous. (Most of) the snow had finally melted and the temperature finally jumped above freezing. Then a blizzard hit Wednesday. Fifteen inches of snow (half a meter), and the temperature was well below freezing again. My school called a snow day for the first time in several years. Then Friday and today are, once again, gorgeous. Shorts weather. And tomorrow and Monday are apparently supposed to be frigid again?

I told you, weird.

Anyway, what else has happened recently . . . I finished a five-hour live stream of old Harry Potter yesterday with a few friends. Turnout wasn't anything earth shattering, but it was a lot of fun. And I still have my voice, which I didn't expect after nearly five hours straight of talking. Might do it again, some day.

Speaking of Harry Potter, loosely, anyway, I'm on my school's IQA Quidditch team. Haven't been able to make any practices so far this semester because night classes and similar, boring crap, but I'll hopefully be able to start doing that again soon. I like Muggle Quidditch. It's good exercise, too.

Before I forget about this thread's existence again for another week, have some more of Dragonite's Guide of How Not To Write Revision Comments! Didn't break any records writing code this week, but progress is progress.

Spoiler Alert:    
[3/13/2014 02:11:43] 3.20.119 - Rewrote inventory code (for like the ninth time)
[3/13/2014 02:13:51] 3.20.120 - Added support for multiple generations (but no way to change it during runtime)
[3/13/2014 15:53:35] 3.20.121 - Saving and loading items is a pain in the butt.

http://victoryroad.net/attachment.ph...1&d=1394902132


Also, does anyone know what happened to the pictures in my last post? I swear they didn't look like that last week. Is VR glitching on me?

Dragonite March 19, 2014 09:14:39 PM

[3/20/2014 0:56:35]

It's been a weird day. I almost walked into the wrong classroom for one of my classes. I learned that one of the meal halls on campus is exceptionally bad at making pasta (and I'm pretty sure tomato sauce isn't normally that acidic, either). I tripped going down a flight of stairs and almost knocked a few people over. And then I get back to my dorm and realize I've been given a review code for a specific Steam game because I volunteered to do some of that "Let's Play" stuff surrounding it a few days ago, so I'm feeling compelled to play video games. Imagine that.

Speaking of being compelled to do video-game related stuff, a few days ago I worked myself into a situation where I have to write a research paper on them for my writing class. So that should be an adventure. I might post it here at the end of the semester if it comes out semi-not-horrible.

Witnessed a PC vs. console war on Facebook that somehow ended with people speaking Ubuntu to each other. Meanwhile I'm sitting here waiting for a few GameCube/GBA games I ordered to arrive in the mail.

It's been a really weird day.

And then, of course, there's this age-old dilemma:

What I should be doing
Ruby on Rails
What I want to be doing
Pokémon code
What I am actually doing
Absolutely nothing

So, that's fun. I'm probably going to hate myself for wasting tonight tomorrow.

Oh, speaking of Pokémon code. This recent section of code has probably been rewritten from scratch at least four times since I started this project :P

Nobody still has any idea why my attachments are dying, least of all me. I really hope that gets straightened out sooner or later. I'll re-upload them properly after it does . . .

Spoiler Alert:    
[3/15/2014 13:05:38] 3.20.122 - Nothing.
[3/18/2014 01:46:45] 3.20.123 - Added:
[3/18/2014 01:48:11] 3.20.124 - Fixed item entries. Did not save changes to backup system. Probably something else.
[3/18/2014 02:17:53] 3.20.125 - How many nerds does it take to get an inventory working properly :P
[3/18/2014 02:22:03] 3.20.126 - Inventory complete //for like the ninteenth time
[3/18/2014 18:34:28] 3.20.127 - How many nerd-hours does it take to build an inventory? :P

(Game Maker really loves FileIO with special characters.) There was also some of this name/flavor text stuff I did. I'm fairly sure I will never get hired by any professionals now, at least not as a designer. You're welcome.

https://i.imgur.com/sHQrK2MN.png
https://i.imgur.com/9dVA2f1n.png

Reuniclus March 19, 2014 09:16:59 PM

I think it's interesting that you're using Game Maker. It just seems similar, but different to RPG Maker; what I'm using.

TurtwigX March 19, 2014 09:23:29 PM

"I have no idea what this item could possibly do."

Maybe it can give you wings! :D I'm definitely loving this flavor text, adding spice to the Pokémon Company's limitations.

Dragonite March 19, 2014 09:30:38 PM

I've heard a lot of people draw that comparison. I haven't used RPG Maker before, but from what I've seen on the Internet GM is of more universal purpose (it's not even strictly limited to making games), RPG Maker is more specifically aimed at RPGs.

RPG Maker also uses Ruby, which is my official least favorite programming/scripting language.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TurtwigX (Post 292280)
"I have no idea what this item could possibly do."

Maybe it can give you wings! :D I'm definitely loving this flavor text, adding spice to the Pokémon Company's limitations.

Best part of making your own stuff. You're not limited to what will and won't get smacked down by the play testers and Nintendo of America : >

Dragonite March 25, 2014 09:38:31 PM

1 Attachment(s)
[3/26/2014 0:39:49]

For the past, say, three weeks I've had vague plans for using my spring break basically for nonstop Pokémon programming and/or YouTube stuff.

Long story short? NOT how it's played out for the first half of it.

I've designed exactly one area and half of a building set and written no code whatsoever. When I started this a few years ago, I had a vague ETA of sometime this summer, but I'm doubting that more and more. Probably doesn't help that I've rewritten almost every line of code in the game so far at least once, either.

And as for YouTube? Well, I learned a few hours ago that I somehow managed to lose two and a half hours of recording. Go, me.

So, to focus on what I have been doing . . . if you couldn't already guess, I've been playing more way more video games than is healthy for me. Some time about Saturday, I got a free Steam review code, and I've been doing practice runs of the game so that I hopefully won't fall victim to the Let's Play Curse when I sit down for that. As you might imagine that has led me to start to actually using Steam, downloading a couple "Free to Play" games that I haven't actually played yet (I get the feeling that they may not actually be 100% free . . . does anyone have experience with this?). And then today one of my friends got me to try Team Fortress 2 for the first time. Today I learned that TF2 is one of the highest rated games on the Internet for a reason, and I don't even like shooter games.

And it doesn't end with Steam. I finally got off my lazy butt and downloaded Pokémon Trozei from the E-Shop. It's more basic than the edu-tainment stuff I used to play on Windows 95 when I was like 4 years old, but that thing is more addicting than orange juice. I'm probably going to write myself a full review of it when I finish it. In the mean time, it was SO hard to put that thing down and . . . er, go play other video games.

Which includes, funnily enough, a homebrew DS game. Knytt Stories is about as basic a platform game as you can get, complete with what I think are pen-and-notebook sprites, and it's surprisingly good. It's sort of hard, though. I've sank quite a bit of time into it, and still only beaten I think one world. I should have a look at the source and learn C. It would be awesome if I could program DS stuff someday. (They have a PC version of the game, too.)

Not done yet. I finally got my $20 capture card working (I swear, the drivers are allergic to being used or something. If I have to see a bubble that say ##ids_difx_x86## one more time . . .). At any rate, my brother and I recorded a few last Mario Kart Wii WiFi races today. Haven't actually looked at the video yet, but I hope it came out all right, especially after I succeeded in losing 2+ hours of Golden Sun. We got disconnected almost every race, though. I hope it isn't due to the Wii having something wrong with it, though. Speaking of which, are we going to have any of those Farewell to WiFi tournaments starting soon?

Last thing, I've had the sudden urge to restart my records in the Pokémon Dream Radar so I can get another Regenerator Ho-oh (forget what happened to the original, I think I traded it to my cousin). So I've spent considerable time in the last three days spinning in circles in my room with my 3DS, shooting virtual sphere things with lasers. I realize that if someone from the 1950s were to see someone using that program, they'd be checked into a mental ward faster than you can say "Tornadus."

* exhales loudly *

So, that's that. Hopefully I didn't forget anything. Hopefully the rest of my spring break will be a little more "productive." Hopefully my list of games to play doesn't get even longer than it already is (though I doubt it: while I was downloading Trozei, I also noticed One Piece: Romance Dawn has been published on the 3DS). Hopefully I won't delete any more really important files. Writing some actual code would be sort of nice, too. Anyway, I have no revision history comments stuff or anything this week since I haven't actually tested anything in like a week, but I'll leave a screenshot of the area I sort of designed.

I'll leave the attachment thing attached this time. vBulletin, can we please not delete it this time?

There's a lake or pond or something in the empty upper-left corner, but I made them invisible for screenshot accidentally because I'm stupid and it's 1:30 AM.

Dragonite April 3, 2014 09:14:32 PM

2 Attachment(s)
[4/4/2014 12:31:41]

So I'm back at school, and the annoying homework stuff and tests and all that lovely, boring stuff.

Okay, okay, it's not THAT bad. At least I like most of my classes this year.

So other than that, what to talk about . . . Might have told a few people already, but I did a farewell sort of thing to Mario Kart Wii WiFi last Friday by live streaming some online races for about three hours. Dropped a few hundred VR in the process, but it was fun anyway.

Weather finally turned less-than abysmal up here, so I've been walking around in shorts and a tee shirt for most of this week. Looking ahead, the temperature seems like it should be pretty stably above freezing so hopefully the infamous Rochester winter is over. Which is nice. I like my school over here, but the roundabout 110 inches of snow we've gotten this year and everything . . . you get the idea.

Oh, I recently discovered this great thing called "OCRemix." Which I've been listening to basically nonstop since the middle of last week. It was interesting to see someone encourage people to torrent their stuff to save them bandwidth costs, too. Regardless, Chrono Symphoniac ftw.

Moving on to Pokémon Dawn/Dusk, I finally started doing serious work on it again. Only have one commit milestone comment thing this time, but it's a mildly important one. And, fortunately for me, these lines dozens of code were actually quite fun to write.

Spoiler Alert:    

[4/4/2014 00:27:32] 3.20.129 - Hold items.

Got a screenshot (bottom of the post). There's quite a bit of dead space in that part of the UI, though, so if anyone has any suggestions as to what to put there let me know. Suppose I could switch the list and info panels, but I feel like that might conflict with the rest of the design so idk. Most likely I'll doodle something silly or something quickly and stick it at the bottom there.

The game purposefully does not discriminate what types of items you can hold. That is purely because I find the concept of something holding a Bicycle far more hilarious than it really is.

(Edit: I'm really tempted to let people release their Pokémon regardless of whether or not they're holding a Key Item or HM, but I don't want people breaking their save files and making a stink. So, there's that.)

If you look carefully the sprites for key items are sort of screwy, though (there's a Prism Scale where the bicycle should be in the second picture). When I'm not feeling so lazy I'll put them in the proper order and everything.

Fun fact: when I started this project, GUI stuff was what I was least looking forward to because I had no idea how to draw stuff on the screen properly. Nowadays I consider it the easiest part of the entire game. Models, views and controllers, people. Your CS teachers stress it for a reason.

Also managed to make the program somewhat more efficient, in terms of graphics. If anyone else has done extensive work with the Game Maker family of programs before you know how touchy it can be about program efficiency.



So, that's that. Hopefully the next few weeks won't suck. Hopefully I passed Tuesday's physics test. Hopefully I'll have some battle-related news for D&D next time, though I'm liable to get sidetracked by smaller details and back-end stuff so we'll see. Arreviderci!

Dragonite April 6, 2014 09:16:12 PM

Hasn't been that long since I posted here but I'll do it again anyway.

I didn't really mention it in the last post, but I had a LOT of work that ended up being due last week. Couple of projects, a political science test, a physics test that I really hope I did decently well on, some writing research paper related stuff, etc. I'm expecting pretty much ever week until summer to be like about that crazy now, this being the tail end of the semester and everything. Before I know it it'll be time for the biannual DDoS of institute servers (also known as course selection), final exams and packing up to go home. Crazy. I'm almost 20% through with this college thing already.

But in terms of the weekend, I got my homework done early and then ten+ hours of sleep on Saturday. Don't think that's happened since middle school. Think I caught up on rest pretty well, and yet I still feel like I need another day (or twenty) to let my brain decompress . . .

And then there's the thing whose source code I'm starting to see in my dreams now. The timestamps look sort of wrong somehow, since I probably would have been in the middle of class during them . . .

Spoiler Alert:    

[4/4/2014 01:46:31] 3.20.130 - Fixed Key Item sprites ordering.
[4/4/2014 10:49:11] 3.20.131 - Held item thing, complete. Officially. I hope.
[4/4/2014 10:50:08] 3.20.132 - Okay, NOW hold item thing complete.
[4/4/2014 13:34:59] 3.20.133 - Added a few options and made it less code.

I've also been fiddling around the idea of giving options for forced Nuzlocke mode and Smogon clauses, or at least giving you the option to use specific components of them - perhaps you want Sleep Clause active but evasion deactivated, a randomized Wedlocke for the masochists, etc. Probably wouldn't be too hard to implement, but I'd probably better make sure other things are working properly first. Like, oh, the battles.

Speaking of battles, don't you love it when there are bugs that are rooted in so many different parts of your projects that it's impossible to track them?

Anyway, another idea I've thought about is considering tracking stats like total Pokémon encountered, total damage taken, average damage inflicted per turn, tally of all the moves you've used, luck hax induced, all that fun stuff. It would probably take about a half hour to add and might be interesting to see if one really gets the short of the stick with luck hax so consistantly cough rubberbanded AI cough.


So, that's my stream-of-consciousness for today. Goodnight!

Dragonite April 13, 2014 08:09:11 PM

1 Attachment(s)
[4/13/2014 23:10:26]

So someone told me to go play this game called "Vanish" a few weeks ago.
So I went and played this game called "Vanish" a few nights ago. At 12:30 AM in a dimly lit room.
I don't know if my heart rate will ever return to normal.

. . .

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway. Last two weeks haven't been too bad. Passed my physics test. We're doing C now in my computer science-ish class, which is better than Ruby by several large orders of two, so for a morning class I look forward to it quite a bit. And most importantly the weather's been good so I might be able to get away with shorts and a tee shirt for the rest of the year.

That being said, I still don't have much of a life at school or anything. In fact, I've started taking my laptop to class with me and writing code between classes. Oh well.

Random story, Friday I had to go mail a package places. Post office closes at 4:30. I got there at 4:31. That was fun, especially considering I would have probably been there in time if I hadn't forgotten my school ID card and gotten locked out of a building.

What else . . . I started a Wedlocke of Platinum on Friday, as another Twitch project. So far I've had four deaths and am standing in front of Gardenia. But I also learned exactly how painful it is to train a Zubat (off screen) with no Exp. Share. Those are two hours of my life I will never get back.

I also came up with the idea in the semi-distant future to do an, um, "afterlocke." Involving me sending all my dead Pokémon to a different game and running through it with that. I worry that might be a little too easy with the experience multiplier and everything, but guess I'll find out.

So I played chess for the first time in about two years yesterday and lost in flying colors. I like chess. I used to be actually sort of somewhat good back in middle school (and by that I mean I could win against my little brother. Sometimes.) I feel like I should get back into it. Anyone here play it, by any chance?

So, what exactly have I been working before my professors walk in the room?

Spoiler Alert:    

So weird to be figuring out how to make a game where you battle stuff, and then going to class and learning how to do file IO in C >.<

[4/7/2014 10:55:55]3.20.134 - I think I fixed the bug where you faint twice in one turn. // Only took me like a month.
[4/8/2014 17:57:05] 3.20.135 - Game doesn't sometimes crash when you speak to NPCs now. Code to fix it was pretty bad, though.
[4/8/2014 21:12:33] 3.20.136 - Recoil moves, they work. yay.
[4/9/2014 00:13:01] 3.20.137 - You can win battles and return to the overworld. The defeated NPC will no longer fight you. If you restart the game, the NPC will no longer fight you IFF you save. Yay.
[4/9/2014 13:46:09] 3.20.138 - Database OS boots but doesn't do anything else. Yippee.
[4/9/2014 21:34:19] 3.20.139 - Database has some text in it, but no actual data yet.

Fixed a few bugs in the battles, including a really annoying one with the order of events when a Pokémon would faint and many crazy things would happen at once and the game would sort of die. So battles code is mostly finished, since most of everything else that can happen only requires a few relatively simple lines of code (i.e., if flinch == true do not attack, if poison == true take some damage after each turn, if move == thunder wave and opponent is not already majorly statused, protected by Safeguard and a few other conditions . . . you get the idea).

More importantly, battles can end if you either win or lose now. Guess that's sort of big. Still hope I'll be able to pull this off without too much game lag, like I've said before Game Maker is sort of a slow engine and there is going to be a LOT of code to check/process all of that stuff. Maybe I should consider hash tables and/or using external modules written in other languages to do some of the more repetitive computations.

So I feel like I should be finishing up the battle engine once and for all, but something else has caught my attention. I have decided to go ahead with the statistics database thing, and started to do work on the statistics tracking thing. If I ever finish this game, it might be worth a few laughs for a few people. Plus a way for me to roughly check if all of the probability effects and stuff are working properly. And it'll force me to be a little more sneaky about possibly rubberbanding the AI, since people would take notice if measured hax ratio is something skewed ridiculously in favor of the AI.

That aside, with the basic battle now working properly the potential end of initial development of this thing is considerably closer than last time I wrote in this thread. I have a feeling most of the rest of this is going to be split between cutscenes and grinding out the 150-ish potential battle effects, 150-ish abilities, many hundreds of items, designing a few dozen maps . . . okay, maybe not so close. But still!


The attachment file is a short demo-ish thing of the stats list. Thank you, and good night!

Dragonite April 20, 2014 09:23:57 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Has it really been a week since I wrote here last?

[4/21/2014 0:57:53]

I really should be getting some sleep right about now, but . . . meh.

So, it's been an "interesting" week. Classes are meh, except for my computer science class (and even that's kind of weird because we're learning C and I already know Hello Worlds and pointers and stuff so it's . . . uh, weird). Had a few tests and papers and stuff, got some pretty decent marks on of my tests and papers and stuff - well, I don't exactly have a 4.0 or anything but still pretty good considering that I'm bored stiff by most of it (thank God).

Was really happy when the weekend finally showed up, last week was kind of rough, but it's already over and I'll be back in American Politics in eight hours. Fiddlesticks.

Aside from school . . . idk. This weekend, or what little of it there was, went pretty quickly. Finally sat myself down and finished the Harry Potter Goblet of Fire game, DS version, and I have to say it was better than I was expecting it to be. It was more focused on plot than on grinding out pointless and unexplained Triwizard Shields, like the PC/console versions were. Might not have made that much sense to someone who isn't a total fanatic about the books, but hey. It's a game based on a movie based on a novel. Nobody would play it if they aren't a total fanatic already. (Controls were a bit weird at times, though.)

There was also a few live streams I was trolling actively viewing. Including one where I got my friends who were on at the same time to stream themselves viewing each others' live streams . . . eh, it would have made more sense if you were there. Was tremendously funny, though.

That Platinum Wedlocke I mentioned earlier. So I did about three hours of level grinding . . . and then had most of my party wrecked by a Staravia. Bloody hell, AI. Evasion Clause was implemented for a reason. So now I'm stuck trying to do something with a Level 15 Shellos so that it can stand up to a Cycling Road of Level mid-20s. Fun stuff.

And, of course, there's this.

Spoiler Alert:    

[4/16/2014 17:05:53] 3.20.140 - Some Battle Recorder options and file writing and stuff.
[4/21/2014 01:16:56] 3.20.141 - VS Recorder OS. Battle files are saved, though the program doesn't exactly know how to play them back yet.

I've started bringing my laptop with me during the day so I can write stuff during my lunch and stuff, but that hasn't exactly been happening. I've done a lot of staring a a half-filled in code window and thinking of game options and stuff.

The VS. Recorder can record NPC battles, mainly because I want to make use of it but don't feel like implementing multiplayer (networking is not my thing). The interface looks a lot like Database. Will probably fill in the white space with random math functions and stuff. See the attachment.


So, that's that. Happy late Easter, to those who celebrate it. Good night!

Dragonite May 11, 2014 02:11:07 AM

[5/11/2014 5:42:12]

Was going to update this thing about two weeks ago. That didn't happen.
Then I was going to update this thing about one week ago. That didn't happen either.
Then I sort of figured I'd get around to updating this thing more or less at least twice a day over the last five or six days, and . . . the timestamps would kind of indicate that that didn't happen, either.

So now it's almost 6 in the morning on a Sunday, I'm not the slightest tired, waiting for a video to render and listening to Gospel music with nothing better to do, listening to the incessant clicking of someone playing League of Legends behind me (maybe today just isn't friends with sleep, in general) and I'm finally updating this thread. It's been a weird last few weeks.

Where to start . . . I don't even know. It's just been weird. Had this one fourteen-year-old try and stalk me on the Internet (we can safely assume he's 14 by the way he behaved, at any rate), and then then blow up when he learned I didn't really want to be stalked, which was weird and decently entertaining but also probably a cue that I should take my Internet safety a little more seriously. Saw a couple others decide to make mountains out of molehills, take offense at nothing, etc., the standard Internet fare which would also been pretty weird if I wasn't already used to this sort of thing. Some of my friends started running a Minecraft server off one of their computers, and I think the several hours we wasted there can be summed up by a toilet made out of a hopper, trapdoor and some stone bricks. We're a bunch of teenagers, don't ask.

What else . . . there had to be something else over the last three-ish weeks. Oh yeah, the drama with school which I brain dumped here some time ago. Was quite interesting reading all the different responses and everything. Probably wouldn't happen like that on many other web sites. You Victory Road people are awesome.

I think there may have been some drama over Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire recently, too. Some television-ish thing they did yesterday. As I wrote elsewhere,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dragonite
To editorialize a wee bit:

One hour of bad television and commercials.

Twenty bloody seconds of gameplay.

http://i.imgur.com/bfMXcPA.jpg

At least we now know that the top screen of the 3DS will be utilized. Don't believe there was any word on the bottom screen yet, though.

Even on my low standards, and I know they technically did what they said they were going to, but that was pretty underhanded. I sat through an hour of terrible acting and commercials for that? Thanks, guys.

Still want to build a time machine so I can rip straight to November, though.

Oh and I unfortunately haven't gotten as much useful programming done as I'd have liked to recently. Few semi-interesting things happened, spread out over the course of a little while.

Spoiler Alert:    
[4/21/2014 10:51:26] 3.20.142 - "View" view code scrolling stuff works.
[4/21/2014 21:31:47] 3.20.143 - Lists the battle videos and whatnot properly, though it still doesn't know what to do with them.
[5/2/2014 10:36:00] 3.20.144 - Random AI. I like Random AI. Random AI is easy.
[5/6/2014 12:23:45] 3.20.145 - SGA audio, does what it should be doing.
[5/7/2014 00:20:59] 3.20.146 - Cleans Pokémon storage archive when loading/saving. (prevents saves from getting bloated)
[5/7/2014 01:07:09] 3.20.147 - Partial implementation of save import/export. Will do testing tomorrow.

For those curious, the Battle Recorder thing is currently able to save files containing all the data needed to replay a battle, I just have been too lazy to implement yet.


It's been a few tomorrows, but I still haven't tested that thing I said I would. Oh well. There will be other tomorrows. Might have screenshots next time, too. I technically could take some now anyway, but I'm not sure how exciting pictures of code would be to most people.

Anyway, it's now 6:06 AM and sunny out. Think I'll go eat breakfast, try to remember what I was going to be doing today and then go into a coma around 1 or 2 PM. Have a nice day!

Dragonite June 10, 2014 07:47:54 PM

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[6/10/2014 23:26:50]

Been a while since I wrote here, partially because I'm forgetful, partially because I'm lazy, and partially because I'm forgetful.

So, school ended. That was nice. I had about a week and a half of doing nothing (probably mostly sleeping, I honestly don't remember much) besides trying to finish X, which couldn't possibly have taken me an entire week and a half. Then I started my summer job once June hit. I won't say too much, but that basically means I get to spend seven and a half hours a day standing and putting stuff in boxes. Which gets boring really quickly, but at least it's not physics class and at least I can let my mind think about computer programming other completely random and stupid stuff. Did you know that hash tables are my favorite type of data structure and that I do mental addition big-endian? Neither did I!

Oh yeah, computer programming. Been working on that Pokémon game on and off over the last month that I haven't spent writing in here. I suppose I was also kind of trying to finish something interesting before updating this thing, but that probably won't happen for a little while so here we go anyway.

Still bad at the backup comments thing.    
[5/13/2014 02:42:46] 3.20.148 - Fixed a slight issue where Pokémon save files would get erased on load, and the game would get stuck if you didn't save and re-create them. Dang, this is a long message.
[5/13/2014 16:53:18] 3.20.149 - Started wild Pokémon battles.
[5/13/2014 18:12:56] 3.20.150 - More on wild battles.
[5/19/2014 01:33:42] 3.20.151 - Storage saving and loading, storage OS
[5/19/2014 02:26:18] 3.20.152 - Scrolling the pointer through box N works (but scrollling through boxes doesn't)
[5/20/2014 18:22:40] 3.20.153 - Display on stuff in PC; scrolling through boxes
[5/20/2014 18:57:43] 3.20.154 - pokemon_menu freezes the rest of the PC and does the scrolling thing
[5/20/2014 20:14:58] 3.20.155 - You can release Pokémon now.
[5/20/2014 21:23:07] 3.20.156 - Summary screen on Pokémon storage

The PC storage is about half finished (screenshot below). I'll probably throw a Unix command line parody in it because Unix is awesome, but that'll probably lead to me wanting to add a bunch of other command lines to various things in the game and might end up taking a while. Plus fixing the one I use for debugging, that's kind of a mess.

Aside from that, there's actually a lot of stuff that didn't end up getting mention in here. Wrote a helper thing that lets me edit base stats and whatnot without manually opening files and boring stuff like that. Automation is the best thing ever. I updated the Abilities list to include the Kalos ones, and am in the process of adding all the extra Pokémon - another screenshot below.

I recorded myself writing code this time, but the Wild Battle Programming wasn't too exciting so I don't think I'll waste an attachment on it and, naturally, the PC isn't finished yet. I might not put that one up at all, or maybe just embed a YouTube, because it's so far taken six hours of real time and even if I speed it up a lot that'll be a massive file to attach.

Also had someone ask if I need any help with this project. I've been on a few "teams" before but those typically didn't end well because the people I was "working with" had no idea what code was and only wanted to contribute a story, but this guy actually knows C++ and Java so I'll see how that works out. After his school year is over. At the very least I'll be able have someone who won't stare at me like I have five heads when I start talking about hash tables and runtime analysis, right?


Edit: the Ă© that it does is really weird. Really need to do something about that :P

Another edit: So they keep revealing new Megas for ORAS. Looks like I might have to keep going back to edit these things in the next few months . . .

Dragonite June 17, 2014 03:09:48 PM

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[6/17/2014 18:42:37]

So, this week has been fun. I have redefined the word "fun" to mean the following:

- Learned that I officially got "academic suspension" from school for having a GPA below 1. Can't say I'm surprised, and I learned that when I was going to officially withdraw anyway. Mental breakdowns and spring semesters do not mix well, people.

- Learned that one of the old CD-ROM games that I used to play the crap out of as a kid has been scratched badly enough that my computer no longer knows how to install it properly.

- Learned that I "have" to buy a car, per my dad. Which will cost me at least 50% more than what I'm probably going to make this summer, before taxes. So, I'll be putting off getting a Wii U. By, like, a year.

- Learned that I officially lost most/all of my friends from high school. One of them wants me to pick up alcohol (I'm 18), one of them is already "behind" on summer classes and one of them seems to hate me ever since I told her I have a crush on her, and the rest won't even return a PM on Facebook.

- Learned that most Redditors get mad when I talk about copyright. To be fair I should have noticed this long ago.

- Used to play baseball in middle school, and used to have better aim than most people at that age. Went out to throw with my brother on Sunday and couldn't even hit him from 20 feet away.

- I don't have the capability to fix my 3DS buttons currently, and learned that the post office closes fairly soon after I get home, so I'll have to wait a while before I can mail it off.

- There is something important that I'm supposed to be doing, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is. Whatever it is, probably going to make July even more "fun."

So, that's "exciting." Unfortunately, I haven't even written all that much enjoyable code this week, either. Been trying to put data for Kalos Pokémon together, but there's kind of a lot of it and some things (catch rates and EXP yields) are still largely unknown. I guess there are benefits to be had from people hacking the game ROM as soon as it's released.

(Talonflame is #665 because there are two fakemon in there somewhere.)

Dragonite June 26, 2014 06:46:16 PM

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[6/26/2014 22:01:04]

Well, this last wee's been interesting. "Interesting" meaning something slightly different than "fun" did last week.

- Found out how to rip my own GBA ROMs/save files (finally). Not terribly useful because I still prefer my physical consoles, but I suppose I can use the speed up part of emulators to skip the boring parts of RPGs and whatever. Plus I get to tell people I know that my ROMs are actually legal.

- After two weeks of not doing so, I finally had the time on Saturday to send my 3DS places to get fixed. It should get back well before the NU tournament is set to start, but that probably depends mostly on the guy's current workload. Fingers crossed.

- Threw a baseball for the first time in almost a year on Sunday. Surprised that I can still throw decently hard (and a curveball), not surprised that my aim is complete crap now. Limbs were so sore the next day, it was not even funny.

- Finally made myself a command line for D&D. Unix parodies ftw.

- Had this ridiculous idea to do a radio station thing via Twitch, where I stream random OC Remixes for a few hours every day. Even wrote a program to play the songs/show the relevant information on the screen, sort of like a specialized version of iTunes or WM Player (screenshot below). So that's more or less what I spent my free time doing the last few days.

- TOMORROW'S FRIDAY!!!!!!

Also, there's been a bit of this stuff . . . I tend to change the data structures a lot, don't I?

Spoiler Alert:    
[6/22/2014 22:56:20] 3.20.157 - Changed the filesystem data format stuff.
[6/22/2014 23:14:01] 3.20.158 - Item/Move data fixed.
[6/24/2014 21:28:46] 3.20.159 - Pokenix :3


That's about it here. Good day! Night! Whatever!

Dragonite June 29, 2014 09:41:32 PM

[6/30/2014 0:40:22]

It's nearing 1 AM and I have to be up at 6:30, but I can't sleep and I have a lot on my mind so I guess I'll take it out on this forum anyway.

. . . that sounded a lot more negative than it was supposed to.

Okay, since when did I write so much? Here, have a spoiler tag.

Spoiler Alert:    
Anyway, time is a weird thing. Almost everything I did a decade ago, it's the complete opposite now. I like lists.

- It was the summer before 4th grade. I was 8. I was in the top of my class in the small Catholic school I went to. A grade of a 92 (considered a B) was unusual for me.

- I read books. Like, a lot of books.Third and fourth grade, I burned through Harry Potter and other fictional stories, most of which I can't remember the name of, at an absurd rate. The only limiting factor was how often my mom would take me to the library.

- I had a social life. I had friends at school. We did stuff after school, if possible. I played baseball. Considering I was less than four feet tall at the time, I could hit. I could pitch. I could throw a curve ball, even though I wasn't supposed to because I was eight years old.

- I didn't spend time on the Internet. In fact, I didn't like the Internet. You got viruses there, which took Dad three days to scrub off the computer, which made Dad mad. YouTube was only a few months old at the time, and - at least, the way people made it seem - it was a site where people posted p000rn and other inappropriate things.

- I didn't have a Game Boy. Or a 'Cube, PS2, N64, or anything else. I didn't like video games. Video games were for people in middle school who got into fights and were in detention every week. Video games were bad.

Fast forward a decade again, to today.

- I'm going to be nineteen in September. I finished freshmen year of college. I only had one grade higher than a C the entire year. As of now, I'm officially not in school anymore.

- I haven't read a fictional book in eleven months, and even that was because it was the end of a series I'd been following since ninth grade. The library's a fourteen minute walk away without any busy roads, but the only reason I go is . . . uh, I don't.

- I have no social life, and don't especially want one. I have one categorical friend from my local area, and he's from my sister's grade, not mine. Everyone else, I know from the Internet. I can sort of still play baseball, but not nearly as well as a majority of my peers.

- The Internet. Yeah, that place. If I'm not at work, sleeping, eating or mowing the lawn, I'm probably there. YouTube is my most-used web site, and I have several weeks' worth of footage uploaded to there.

- Video games? Forget playing them. I have a soft-modded Wii sitting next to my printer and a row of 3/DS games lined up like books on my desk. Forget that, I'm freaking making a Pokémon game.

Yeah, time is so weird. What were you all up to ten years ago?

Otherwise, it's been a crazy four days since I posted anything last.

- Every weekend, I go in with a list of A, B and C that I'm going to get done - or at least, find out how I'm going to get done. Five minutes later it's Sunday night and I'm lucky to have half of A done. And this is when I don't lose a day because we go out to see Mom's cousin's . . . some relative's high school graduation.

- To make things more complicated, my Dad and I have officially decided that I have no idea what I'm doing with my life, which is the best feeling ever. I could get a job at a grocery store for the next forty nine years, but that's . . . yeah, nobody wants to work at a grocery store for half a century. Basically everything else I could find, from being a plumber to a secretary to whatever, required a college degree or experience in the same field . . . which, ultimately, requires a college degree. Which has already been established to be unlikely to happen. Like I said, best feeling ever. Maybe the job market will improve before I die. Maybe.

- I half wish I had a girlfriend or something. It would be nice if I had someone to talk to who wasn't (1) my mom, (2) within twenty miles of me and (3) not constantly buggered down by things like SATs and college applications (see above). But then that would require me going and having a social life, which has constantly and adamantly not happened successfully since about eighth grade. And not being good at having a social life really doesn't make it easier to have a social life in the future. Positive feedback loops are so much fun, except when you're involved.

- One of the other YouTubers I follow has been having a pretty rough last 2 weeks himself. I wish I could do something to help, because the influence he's had on me in various ways is incredible, but I know I won't be able. That's not a happy feeling, either.

Although, this week there have been some nice(r) things going on.

- Remember the radio/jukebox that I was talking about last time? The program that runs it is officially finished and can operate itself while I'm not home without crashing, provided my computer doesn't go to sleep. It's probably the most useful thing I've ever made that doesn't break the second you start it up. Most stuff on OCR that it plays is pretty upbeat, which is good for my mental health, too.

- 3DS is supposed to get back to me on Monday, buttons fixed. The first time I'll be able to powerslide in MK7 since before Magfest, when they started to act broken. Of course, whether or not I'll have time to actually play anything remains to be seen. Speaking of which, that tournament . . . better start thinking about a team . . .

- Skyrim was five dollars on one of the Steam sales. Again, the amount of time I'll have to play it remains to be seen, but come on. Skyrim. Five dollars.

- In a perfect world, I'd teach programming for a living and make Let's Play videos in my free time. Of course, that'll never happen, at least not without an extreme stroke of luck, but it's nice when I can help someone via the Internet with something they're stuck on in Game Maker or a video game or their math homework and finally seem them exclaim "Oh! I get it now!"


*Shakes head*

I'm all over the place in this thread, aren't I? I really don't know if I'm getting too personal or not or anything. Even if I am, though I don't feel too bad about it. This forum's somewhat unique in that I've never come across anyone who I don't get along with. On that note, thanks for reading!

(will put up the fan game stuff when I have more screenshots more interesting than blocks of text)

Dragonite July 14, 2014 08:23:18 PM

[7/14/2014 11:39:24]

What? You mean it's been two weeks since I wrote anything here? What?

Anyway, I finally asked my aunt for the WiFi password to the beach house we're renting with some extended family, meaning that I'm on the Internet today for the first time in one . . . two . . . almost three whole days.

Call the press, people, this is the first time I've gone almost three days without being on the Internet since about 2010.

Whatever. List time, because writing real paragraphs takes an attention span longer than I can realistically be expected to have.

- While we're talking about attention, apparently I have ADD. Apparently the fact that I was able to vote before anyone noticed is kind of unusual. I'll read through some of my older posts and see if I can tell that my mind goes everywhere when it's not supposed to.

- Officially back into Mario Kart 7, will my fixed R button and everything. I've finally gotten used to the controller being attached to the screen. Awesome.

- Someone pasted the "WATCH MY VIDEOS/SUB4SUB" crap all over my YouTube channel, and then got offended when I said I don't do that stuff. Quietly banning a couple more users now.

- New York Mets have started to pretend to play good baseball again. I might consider starting to watch them on TV again.

- Finally saw Frozen. It basically took all of the usual, stupid Disney stereotypes and slapped them in the face with an eighteen-wheeler. It was awesome.

- Found out someone bought an $80 3DS flashcart to play pirated 3DS games on. I've known the things existed for a while, but I didn't know anyone was actually - I'll throw words around here - that sick in the head to buy one. The lengths people go to in order to steal things is amazing.

- Got Paper Mario: Sticker Star, which more or less completes my collection of non-ORAS 3DS games that I want to play. I've been hearing from people that it's the worst the Paper Mario series has ever done, but I actually like it. It has its problems, but there's enough behind it to make it worth playing. Will write a full review when I finish it.

- Oh yeah, vacation. Seventeen family members on my mom's side jammed into a beach house for eight days. This should be an adventure.

- Was outside for a grand total of twenty minutes without sunscreen today and my arms are on fire. I used to be able to go out for a week and just turn brown as a potato. Who needs an ozone layer.

- Played Whiffle ball with cousins today. In the middle of a wide open beach. I managed to lose the ball in a dune anyway. In any case, it was nice to swing a bat for the first time in forever. (Tee hee.)

- Rode a bike a decent 17 miles. Not the longest thing I've ever done, but still decent exercise. There's not exactly a lot of space to go around here, but I'll probably do it again by the end of the week.

- SALT. WATER. TAFFY.

So, that's that. Oh yeah, the one other thing I've been doing, what is it. Uh. The. Uh. Well, the thing in the spoiler.

./procrastination    
[6/30/2014 22:35:07] 3.20.160 - PCCL Summary.
[6/30/2014 22:37:50] 3.20.161 - Swap works.
[7/14/2014 23:36:32] 3.20.162 - Up and Down on pc_cl work; fixed bug in pc_cl_summary
[7/14/2014 23:38:17] 3.20.163 - PC IS PROBABLY FINISHED.

No screenshots because it's all text and still looks an awful lot like the last one, just with fewer bugs and more commands:

http://victoryroad.net/attachment.ph...1&d=1403836745

Not quite sure what I should work on next. I could start doing things like area design and cutscenes, which would be a lot of fun and provide pictures to show, or I could go back and try and make the program more efficient and streamlined and things like that - which would probably be the better option, considering how foggy some of the code still is. We'll see. This isn't exactly on a deadline.


Good night!

Dragonite July 16, 2014 09:02:49 PM

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[7/17/2014 12:32:16]

Has anyone else noticed that every time I update this thing it's something ridiculous like the middle of the night? Also, I remember posting this a few days ago . . .

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dragonite (Post 294640)
Going on vacation from today until the 19th. I'll probably still be online because going on vacation != me having a life, but there's that.

Turns out that people don't seem to have a problem with me writing code in the middle of the living room, as long as I can still be social when people talk to me. So far.

So, to make a long story short I did the official stupidest thing in my life a few days ago: I started messing around with programming in 3D in Game Maker. And made it work. And now my head is so full of ideas of things to try I get distracted even more easily than I probably did before.

So, I'll be slowly migrating all of my old Pokémon stuff into 3D. Shouldn't be too bad, since most of the important computer science is already done. The main draw is that I get an entire new dimension to fool around and make mazes and level design and stuff in. On the downside more content -> even longer for me to make and more data on a map potentially -> lag issues that I really don't want to deal with. No screenshots, but that's only because I went and zipped a demo executable thing and attached it. You have my word it's not a virus :P More information in the readme file. Runs on Windows. I'll probably have most of the bugs in this version fixed fairly soon, but if you find one feel free to spam my VM wall about it or something.

Other than that, the weather's been kind of meh for the last two days so there haven't been any really crazy adventures. Although I currently have sand in my hair because, well, diving after footballs on the beach is a lot less graceful than it sounds.

For all of the people who are even bigger nerds than I am (which is a good thing)    
[7/16/2014 00:31:58] 4.0.164 - Set the controls, started work on collisions, saving/loading, a few other 3D things. 
[7/16/2014 00:54:55] 4.0.165 - Stop in front of solid objects but can jump over them (but can't go under them)
[7/16/2014 01:06:52] 4.0.166 - Walls.
[7/16/2014 02:20:43] 4.0.167 - Fixed saving. I think I did something else, too, but I forget what.
[7/16/2014 02:28:16] 4.0.168 - Debug mode, fixed saving (again), you can climb short ledges.
[7/16/2014 02:34:35] 4.0.169 - Everything suddenly does not look drunk when you try to draw a HUD over the screen. Yay.
[7/16/2014 02:42:37] 4.0.170 - Updated the Tab HUD, made an option for Windowed Mode.
[7/16/2014 02:54:03] 4.0.171 - More stuff on the debug screen.
[7/16/2014 02:56:56] 4.0.172 - Testing stuff.
[7/16/2014 11:05:29] 4.0.173 - NPCs (don't interact with you, though)
[7/16/2014 11:24:08] 4.0.174 - NPCs with front and back faces (still don't talk to you); added "restart" command
[7/16/2014 11:32:42] 4.0.175 - Trying 60 fps, may not keep; grid
[7/16/2014 17:11:59] 4.0.176 - NPCs face you when you talk to them (don't say anything); command lines tells you when you enter an invalid command
[7/16/2014 17:38:17] 4.0.177 - You can now talk to NPCs.
[7/16/2014 19:01:10] 4.0.178 - Added a primitive pause menu (unrelated to the debug screen)
[7/16/2014 19:13:23] 4.0.179 - Gravity option.
[7/16/2014 19:46:43] 4.0.180 - Escape menu thing.
[7/16/2014 21:32:41] 4.0.181 - Added sign posts.
[7/16/2014 22:05:04] 4.0.182 - Stupid quotes.
[7/16/2014 22:17:41] 4.0.183 - Stairs.
[7/16/2014 23:27:32] 4.0.184 - Fixed problems with the platforms in the air and the camera position in first person POV.

Dragonite July 21, 2014 08:29:31 PM

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[7/21/2014 23:31:47]

I had to go back to work today. That wasn't fun.

In other news, its been a weird last few days. My mind's literally been all over the place. Whatever attention problems I may have had before, the discovery of 3D game design has made it fifteen times worse. The disappointing thing is that if I ever get an idea that sounds interesting at work or during dinner or something, I'll probably have forgotten about it by the time I get home. Going to start bringing a sheet of paper and a pencil around with me at all times, I think.

That being said, if this thread turns from partial nerd stream of consciousness to completely nerd stream of consciousness, I apologize in advance.

- Friend told me to get Game Dev Tycoon like a year ago, and I finally remembered to do that on Saturday. And then discovered that six hours of my Saturday had magically disappeared. Perhaps I should stick to making my own games . . .

- YouTube's Auto Playlist thing is the best thing ever. Not that adding things to playlists on time was ever really a difficult task to begin with, but I get back about five seconds every day. Fun stuff. Now if they can only make an Auto Annotation thing, they will have the perfect web site.

- Except for like two of them, all of the posts in this thread have been written between 10:30 PM and 1:30 AM. Don't tell my mom.

- Learned CAD/Blender. It's awesome. I could have taken a class on it in high school, but didn't. Maybe I should have. Oh well. You'll see why I brought this up farther down the post, probably.

- Noticed Adobe AfterEffects is twenty dollars a month on Creative Cloud. I have a few things I'd like to do in AE for YouTube, the game, etc. so I might give it a go for a month or two. Too bad they don't make AE Elements or something . . .

- Game's design has been pulled and stretched and stepped on and thrown at the wall several times in the last week. Think I'm going to settle on a third/first person perspective, something like Skyrim. A bit far removed from traditional Pokémon, but I think it also can open up a few design choices that Game Freak seems scared to death of trying.

I was originally going to try a Paper Mario-diorama sort of look, because I didn't really know much about modeling or anything, but I like

not as bad as usual    
[7/17/2014 01:15:38] 4.0.185 - Jumping while under solid objects works. 
[7/17/2014 01:51:58] 4.0.186 - Added fog. Started messing around with Terrestria geography. [your home town, as well as my test map]
[7/17/2014 02:35:36] 4.0.187 - Added Map Managers and running shoes.
[7/17/2014 16:41:49] 4.0.188 - Auto Tile.
[7/17/2014 23:18:09] 4.0.189 - Fences, sort-of-updated-house-design, maybe a few other things
[7/17/2014 23:43:08] 4.0.190 - Fixed the thing where you can't jump while standing on platforms.
[7/18/2014 01:07:15] 4.0.191 - Fixed problems with colliding with fences that do not originate on the same height as you (i have no idea why it works)
[7/18/2014 11:46:32] 4.0.192 - In-game clock.
[7/18/2014 11:57:24] 4.0.193 - In-game clock complete.
[7/18/2014 12:54:30] 4.0.194 - Randomized trees.
[7/21/2014 23:29:43] 4.0.195 - Added support for 3D models. (They still need work, though.)


Going to have fun with this. One of the pictures is of a miscolored Poké Mart that's about eight inches high that I thought was rather funny and took a screenshot.

Dragonite July 27, 2014 05:28:57 PM

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[7/27/2014 20:49:02]

My brother had a bunch of friends over yesterday. We ate watermelon out of the rind and played lousy Ping Pong for five hours. It was awesome. I like my brother's friends.

Other than that, this week has been taken up by patching bugs in my engine and playing Super Mario 3D Land for the first time since I got my 3DS in 2011. Going to try to actually 100% the game this time, S world included. Come to think of it, the only Super Mario game I've actually 100%'d so far is Galaxy 1. I am so good at those games.

So, why not talk about that game thing I'm working on? Eh, why not, this thread is basically a brain dump that I write between normal-person-posts on the rest of the forum, right?

Yeah, the game. I've cleaned up a few bugs, added a few silly things, and saw the frame rate drop by about 30%. (Still working on that part.) The trade-off for being more or less open world is the thing where your computer tries to process all of the information at the same time and slow to the speed of a dead turtle. But people have it, so you can bet your Internet service that I'll try.

hi    
[7/22/2014 21:26:08] 4.0.196 - You can rotate the camera indepenant of the player now. Would be cooler if the player still wasn't a blue square. 
[7/22/2014 21:38:21] 4.0.197 - Scrolling through debug console history with the arrow keys is now a thing. Testing is a tiny bit easier.
[7/24/2014 00:25:13] 4.0.198 - Added some game options like Text Speed and Sleep Clause to the save data.
[7/25/2014 23:31:54] 4.0.199 - Sign posts. Took me an entire day >.<
[7/26/2014 01:49:46] 4.0.200 - Uses an actual sprite for the character now. Not a good sprite, but still better than a blue square.
[7/26/2014 15:26:24] 4.0.201 - Character angle changes properly.
[7/27/2014 02:08:41] 4.0.202 - The orientation code works for NPCs now, too.
[7/27/2014 03:29:08] 4.0.203 - Fixed the backup (it logged messages, but didn't actually back up the file . . . scary) and changed the selective draw.
[7/27/2014 03:34:39] 4.0.204 - Changed the Selective Draw again because there was an issue with solid objects that were located behind you but stretched out in front of you.
[7/27/2014 15:43:06] 4.0.205 - Ladders work. Just need a climbing animation now :P
[7/27/2014 15:46:07] 4.0.206 - Reversed the controls for zooming the camera in and out because that makes sense.


I guess the most interesting thing, at least for most people, is that things like NPCs are now displayed properly. Before, if you'd look at them from certain angles they'd appear paper thin (or not there at all); now they'll "rotate" (sort of) as your camera moves around them so they look sort of like normal beings. So much for a Paper Mario look. This applies to the main character in third-person view and things like trees and rocks, as well.

Speaking of which, the 3rd person POV actually works like I originally intended it to now. You can even zoom in and out and rotate around the player's head. This is already better than Super Mario 64. Yay.

Sign posts look like actual signs now. With text drawn on them and stuff, instead of you having to talk to them as if they were people, like you would in a 2D game.

Ladders. They usually only appeared in dungeons and stuff in regular Pokémon games and the occasional Fortree City, but I think they can be used a little more widely in 3D. In any case, they work. I totally, totally did not steal that texture from Minecraft. No. Stop asking me.

And, that's about all for now. Originally planned to have a video trailer made of this by the end of this weekend, but fixing bugs was more interesting (said nobody, ever) and two empty patches of land is not much to make a trailer out of. Probably by next time I write in here, since I'm almost done with the game's engine and stuff.

Dragonite August 17, 2014 08:29:59 PM

[8/17/2014 23:03:33]

Hey look, I have a blog thr-okay, that joke was stupid the first twenty times I wrote it.

So, what have I been up to the last three weeks? Uh, excuse me for a few minutes while I try and come up with the least boring way of phrasing things.

. . . Okay, I came up dry on that. Uh, I had a near-death experience on the way to the dentist a few weeks ago, also known as trying to merge onto a highway in New Jersey at rush hour?

Actually, I've gone back to spending a decent amount of time playing video games. Steam is growing on me, because it's easy to only spend a few dollars and get a number of rather good games. Currently trying to finish off all the achievements in another Indie game, Epic Battle Fantasy 4 (probably not going to happen), make some more headway on Skyrim and find enough time to sink a couple hours into an RPG Maker game known as Last Dream. Also, did anyone else read the Bone comics as a kid? Telltale made games of the first two (and then stopped), and I discovered they'd put them up on Steam, too. Neither the best nor the longest games I've ever played (they're point-and-click with a couple annoying bugs), but I like to pretend I'm in sixth grade again once in a while.

And, as usual, the code has been a thing. Today Mom told me that it's like medicine for me. No comment on that from me.

Why was so much of this done after about 10 PM.    
[7/27/2014 22:16:41] 4.0.207 - Changed the color of the day sky (blue-ish), added teleporters. 
[7/27/2014 22:39:24] 4.0.208 - The banners that pop up at the top of the screen when you enter a new area work, whatever they're called.
[7/29/2014 18:11:34] 4.0.209 - Added stairs and fixed the simple dialogue system thing.
[7/29/2014 20:13:00] 4.0.210 - Fixed a bug in the stairs generation object thing. I need to improve my vocabulary . . .
[7/29/2014 22:20:03] 4.0.211 - NPCs now land on surfaces/solid objects. Only took forever.
[7/30/2014 23:29:55] 4.0.212 - Changed the gravity system, game officially back to where it was in the last update. Will commit again if I test this and find nothing wrong, even if nothing was changed. (Edit: Five seconds to midnight. Nice.)
[7/30/2014 23:42:48] 4.0.213 - You can stand on platforms that have multiple layers. You seem to pass through some of them, though . . .
[7/30/2014 23:46:29] 4.0.214 - NPCs have circular collision masks instead of NPC-shaped ones now. Because that would have been weird.
[7/31/2014 22:03:47] 4.0.215 - Added commands for credits and editing player values.
[8/3/2014 23:22:56] 4.0.216 - View bobbing. Silly, but it's an option now.
[8/3/2014 23:35:53] 4.0.217 - Command to change the camera point of view added.
[8/3/2014 23:44:59] 4.0.218 - Wait command added.
[8/3/2014 23:51:11] 4.0.219 - Commands to move the camera around added.
[8/10/2014 18:11:19] 4.0.220 - Updated how the console works to make it easier to use and harder to break. (Again.)
[8/10/2014 21:47:04] 4.0.221 - Multiple choice responses added!
[8/10/2014 22:38:34] 4.0.222 - Added branching respones to multiple choices, and goto statements. Awesome.
[8/10/2014 23:23:00] 4.0.223 - get command for getting input from the user (without the dumb Windows operating system message boxes) works now.
[8/11/2014 23:50:35] 4.0.224 - SGAudio. Pretty sure I haven't backed up this change yet. If so, oops.
[8/12/2014 00:11:06] 4.0.225 - Added script execution in the middle of cutscenes, fixed the problem where the game would crash upon ending
[8/12/2014 00:15:24] 4.0.226 - Cleaned up the script a little more.
[8/14/2014 00:06:31] 4.0.227 - Scripted motion - turning
[8/14/2014 00:28:54] 4.0.228 - Scripting - command to make stuff walk.
[8/14/2014 01:16:43] 4.0.229 - Scripting - turn a character to an exact degree in addition to a relative one.

Decided to put off the trailer I had in mind a bit in favor of more general things like making complicated cutscene scripts and stuff. Been a lot of fun, actually. Also, on the side, I've crunched a bunch of Pokémon base stat data. Before, I had everything (base stats, types, egg groups, etc.) stored in INI files, which takes up more space than I'd like it to on a hard drive and is kind of slow to read - the upside being that it was random access and easy to manipulate. So now there's one file that looks like a bunch of these:

Spoiler Alert:    
Quote:

Dragonite[†_ddP-@ ÜĎ &&‡)˙ ˙ •


instead of over seven hundred files that look like this:

Spoiler Alert:    
Quote:

[Normal]
0=Dragonite
1=13
2=5
3=2
4=91
5=134
6=95
7=100
8=100
9=80
10=45
11=64
12=7' 03
13=463
14=Derpy-looking, sarcastic programmer.
15=3
16=12
17=38
18=38
19=135
20=41
21=6
22=-1
23=-1
24=149
25=030000


Oh, and it means the game'll probably break if a mischievous fool like me tries to go and edit the values themselves. Same principle applies to the save data.

Also added a bunch of screenshots of various things, so I'll risk a hotlink today because attaching ten things could get messy: http://imgur.com/a/qhFD4#24



Good night!

Dragonite September 29, 2014 02:57:18 PM

[9/29/2014 17:12:21]

I realize how ridiculous putting the timestamp in that thing up there ^ is because it always takes me about a half hour to write this thing anyway. But taking it out would require common sense and common sense is for boring people. And people who like to be sensible but bear with me plz.

ANYWAY! STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS, GO!

- I finally started battling Pokémon again. Did you know that they don't restrict what you bring to Battle Spot free battles, so you get to fight some really hilarious teams filled with Ubers like un-EV'd Flamethrower Ho-oh? : ) I haven't seen any Power Herb Geomancy Xerneas that I get to dismantle yet but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Also live streamed some of those battles without my Internet dropping dead (albeit in standard definition) which was quite nice.

- By the way I remembered to save a few of the battle video numbers. My favorite was 9Q9G-WWWW-WWW9-QFNV but there were a bunch more.

- POKéMON SYMPHONIC EVOLUTIONS! I got lost coming home so I spent an hour driving around Philadelphia lost and then another two driving around Pennsylvania and New Jersey lost, but it was worth it. Even though my 3DS died while I was in the middle of a battle with someone and before I ran into Reun and Matty and Pianomaster on the way out. Oh yeah, that. I've met a few people from the Internet at places like this before but it's still really bizarre. Also before the next big event or convention or whatever that forum people go to we should all post pictures of the back of our heads in that one thread because it might have helped a lot.

Also, the concert. They had music there. It was amazing. It made Skotien sound like a bloody piano midi. If they ever have one within about three hundred miles of where you live, GO.

- Got a 360 controller, for use of playing games with and programming into games. Now I keep hitting B when I want A and A when I want B on my 3DS. Oops?

- Went to a Mets game for the first time since about 2010. They beat the Nationals in their home field, for something like the first time since June or something. Also got a free tee shirt. It's weird, there are only a few players from the 2010 lineup who are still there. And it's only been four seasons.

- Skyrim has gone from something nice that I've been playing to one of, if not my favorite game of all time, competing even with the likes of Galaxy and EBF4. And I don't normally even like swords-and-killing-stuff games so that's saying something. It looks beautiful, for one, even the level up menu and the insides of furniture and stuff. It has a good story with player choices that are more like "would you like the red pill or the blue pill" than "would you like an apple or an orange." And then there's a LOT to do. There's a lot of ways you can shape your character but it's not all thrown at you at once, plus like seven thousand sidequests. Usually when HLTB says a game's Main + Extras is 100 hours, that usually means 30 hours of game and 70 hours of completing the Dex or something. Not here. I can easily see 100 hours of actual gameplay in this game, probably more (I take my time). Almost hard to believe they packed all this into less than 9 gigabytes of my hard drive.

- Steam added a music player. Honestly not what I was hoping for, I was hoping for a legitimate replacement to iTunes or Windows Media Player, but it turns out it only wants to play the music that came as "soundtracks" with games. Which I have, let's see, exactly two of. Oh well.

- YouTube added Realtime analytics. Not bad, except I haven't actually figured out how to get them for a channel as a whole yet.

- I started messing with RPG Maker a little bit recently. It tends to get compared to Game Maker a lot. I'll write a full-on comparison when I've had more time and know it inside and out but so far it looks like it's easier to make games that look good in it, but in the long run there's less you can do with it than GM. You may notice that most things that get published from it looks pretty similar. I've been told you can change a lot of the look and feel to it but most people just don't, so we'll see.

- Taken an interest in the stock market recently. There are so many easy ways to lose all your money in it and not that many ways to get it back. I may have finally found a place where the average payout is less than that of YouTube! Also the S&P hit 2,000 a few weeks ago and promptly did a nose dive. Weird, right? Almost as if it didn't want to be that high or something.

- Speaking of making games. Dang, I've been slacking. Is this really all I've done in 6 weeks?

Spoiler Alert:    
[8/18/2014 19:57:21] 4.0.230 - Added Pokémon object with space for data and stuff (but no implementation of it yet) 
[8/18/2014 22:07:31] 4.0.231 - Saving through the menu instead of this command line.
[8/18/2014 23:15:28] 4.0.232 - Generation variable added. Added command to give a Pokémon, plus all the math with the Personality Value and stuff.
[8/18/2014 23:39:05] 4.0.233 - More Personality Value math. Probably didn't get it right.
[8/18/2014 23:57:43] 4.0.234 - Command to give a Pokémon (to team or storage) works now.
[8/20/2014 22:39:00] 4.0.235 - One source of memory leak fixed. Probably about seven more, though. Getting on that now.
[8/20/2014 22:41:20] 4.0.236 - Got rid of another memory leak.
[8/20/2014 22:46:27] 4.0.237 - Got rid of a couple more potential sources of memory leak. Hopefully didn't break the game in the process because those errors are a pain to fix.
[9/9/2014 12:43:03] 4.0.238 - 360 controller, possibly others - L and R buttons
[9/9/2014 12:58:04] 4.0.239 - Controller - other buttons
[9/9/2014 13:04:12] 4.0.240 - Controller circle things.
[9/10/2014 13:35:33] 4.0.241 - Finished controller support. I think.
[9/18/2014 22:12:57] 4.0.242 - Removed controller support because it was slowing down the game. Removed multi-generation support because it's too much to keep track of. This message is already way longer than any revision comment message should be.
[9/22/2014 00:36:34] 4.0.243 - Loaded item data. Fixed a bug in loading move data/
[9/22/2014 23:22:59] 4.0.244 - Set up inventory and money system.
[9/23/2014 14:23:10] 4.0.245 - You can save the game without the command line now!
[9/28/2014 16:14:02] 4.0.246 - Inventory GUI; items and list displays properly. Also unrelated but warning text now gets highlighted in red.

I want to put the controller back in if I can find a way to use it without taking off fifteen frames per second. Controllers just feel more natural than keyboards somehow.

Maybe it's not fair to say I haven't been doing ANYTHING, with regards to this project. Re-compiled a lot of data like items and moves and stuff, like I mentioned last time, added a lot of Kalos Pokémon and Mega Evolutions, that sort of thing. So that took quite a bit of time, with nothing to show for it unless you're interested in tables of text and numbers or maybe the binary jibberish that I posted last time.

Attempted to update the project to Game Maker: Studio, the newer version that did not exist way back when I started working on this, but that brings along its own . . . issues, and it would have seemed faster to rewrite everything from scratch there, so I didn't do it.

Developed my favorite line of code, too. Method call, specifically. Its signature looks something like:

Pokemon newPokemon(int species, int level, boolean hidden)

Simple line of code that generates a Pokémon object, with all of the ugly IV/PV math done automatically. I think my computer science teacher called it the "Factory model" or something. It's nothing amazingly amazing or cutting-edge technology but considering how many points in the game Pokémon have to be generated it makes a lot of things soooooooooooo much easier.


Was there anything else? There might have been something else. If I remember it I'll post it in another month and a half or something.

Dragonite October 23, 2014 01:47:47 PM

3 Attachment(s)
Should I . . . shouldn't I . . . should I . . . shouldn't I . . . eh, who cares.

[10/23/2014 17:17:44]

I'm supposed to be spending time with relatives but I've been writing code in my room instead for the last hour and I don't think anyone's noticed I'm gone so woo hoo for being sneaky. I am a horrible person. What has my October looked like so far? Let's see what I remember . . .

- Skyrim has officially claimed my life. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, i'm not on it every day (close to it, though), but that game is amazing. I have a hundred twenty hours strong and still feel like I've just scratched the surface. I could be here for days writing about the graphics, the creativity, the atmosphere, the vibrance of Whiterun and Riften, the enchanting mechanics, but I think there's a limit on how long these post can be so no. My favorite thing about the game has to be the amount of player choice you get to make. Ya want to join the Imperials, or ya want to join the Stormcloaks? I spent more time thinking about that than I spent on anything else in a game since . . . um, ever. And that's just one example, you see choices like that all over the place. Really wish they'd do that in more video games, especially, oh, Pokémon, and I'm quite looking forwards to TES6 now. anddidimentionthatLydia'sofficiallythefirstfiction alcharacteri'veeverfalleninlovewith?

ALSO THE DOVAHKIIN SONG IS NOW MY FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME.

- Sending job applications out all over the place. Almost two months now and I still don't have one. That's fun. Real fun. Like, I'd trade my bedroom ceiling for a job right now kind of fun. Well, I suppose YouTube is sort of a job. One could probably find more money on a beach without a metal detector but whatever, at least making videos keeps me sane, right?

- ADD has been lovely. The current status is "yes we know your attention span is shorter than (some fluctuating big number)% of the population, no we won't let you start medication yet." Being productive is getting harder by the day, while dropping hours into Skyrim is getting easier. This does not bode well.

- Did a bit of writing. Code, of course. Still haven't gotten around to programming any battle mechanics, but getting closer.

Spoiler Alert:    
Extra nerdy today.    
[10/15/2014 20:05:29] 4.0.247 - Read and set variables via command line. Also re-formatted the error messages and stuff. 
[10/16/2014 05:25:37] 4.0.248 - Streamlined ifs and gotos and stuff.
[10/16/2014 05:41:10] 4.0.249 - Fixed a problem saving color settings.
[10/16/2014 07:27:41] 4.0.250 - You can execute external script files now. Makes testing easier, among other things.
[10/16/2014 22:13:22] 4.0.251 - Some Pokémon Team UI added.
[10/18/2014 18:00:18] 4.0.252 - Added command to show a base stat, Pokémon menu almost finished.
[10/18/2014 19:51:24] 4.0.253 - Fixed a problem with the move data structure. Also added moves to the Pokémon summary screen.
[10/18/2014 20:35:14] 4.0.254 - Generated move sets and fixed personality values.
[10/18/2014 20:56:08] 4.0.255 - Fixed getvar command.
[10/18/2014 20:59:43] 4.0.256 - Hold items on Summary screen.
[10/19/2014 12:03:07] 4.0.257 - Took out the PP counter for null moves.
[10/23/2014 17:09:21] 4.0.258 - Graphics of options menu.


I guess the most major thing is that you can see Pokémon in one of those fancy graphical windows now, not just print them on a command line. Kind of wish I had a bottom screen to work with now, because organization, but unless I feel really ambitious and compile to NDS somehow that won't work.

Also did a lot of stuff with the command line. That's more to make my job easier than visually impress anyone, though. Well, maybe. Anyone want to change the text color through command line? Anybody? Nobody? Nah, din't think so.

Lastly, I haven't actually implemented any of this yet, but game options. There's the normal stuff, like text speed and whatever, but I'm considering making options for Nuzlockes and stuff a thing. Pictures below. Feedback?


So that's that, once again. Hopefully by the next time I post here I'll either have a job or the apocalypse will have happened so I don't have to. In which case, Cat, will this site be accessible from the afterlife?

Dragonite November 9, 2014 07:51:44 PM

7 Attachment(s)
I had this all written out.

And then I reloaded the page.

And it was gone.

/cries

[11/9/2014 23:14:25]

So my brain has been dead for the last week and I somehow did stuff with code anyway. In fact, that's the only thing I really remember about it.

Spoiler Alert:    
[10/24/2014 00:47:00] 4.0.259 - Can change colors with mouse and stuff instead of command line now. Takes like fifty LOC less than the first time I tried to do this . . . 
[10/24/2014 19:22:36] 4.0.260 - Fixed gotos (again).
[10/24/2014 21:21:53] 4.0.261 - Fixed saving (I think), 360 controller option doesn't suck anymore
[10/24/2014 23:25:08] 4.0.262 - Fixed if scripts and wrote the full Cynthia introduction.
[10/25/2014 00:44:56] 4.0.263 - Compass.
[10/26/2014 12:57:46] 4.0.264 - Crappy fly animation.
[10/26/2014 17:08:35] 4.0.265 - Generate NPC Pokemon (levels scale with yours, basically)
[10/26/2014 17:40:30] 4.0.266 - Opponent pokemon who evolve by level scale properly with your team (plus evolution).
[10/27/2014 15:55:09] 4.0.267 - Added difficulty modifier. Also fixed a thing with saving.
[10/27/2014 16:19:13] 4.0.268 - Battles know who's participating in them now.
[10/28/2014 14:59:40] 4.0.269 - People disappear during start of battle.
[10/28/2014 15:13:08] 4.0.270 - Battles send camera to third person and make you/NPCs invisible. Also added startup script things.
[10/28/2014 15:43:15] 4.0.271 - Added running shoes.
[10/28/2014 16:29:33] 4.0.272 - Sending out the proper things into battle.
[11/9/2014 13:58:02] 4.0.273 - Command to list all external script files. Corrected the pokémon sprite center issue thing.
[11/9/2014 14:07:06] 4.0.274 - Print a script file on the console. Basically Unix's "cat."

Tee hee. "Cat."

[11/9/2014 15:41:47] 4.0.275 - Sprites are now centered in the right place. Don't know what the problem was, but it's fixed now.
[11/9/2014 20:44:30] 4.0.276 - Sprites appear in battle =.=
[11/9/2014 21:53:51] 4.0.277 - Pokémon face the right way during battle.
[11/9/2014 22:05:57] 4.0.278 - Camera centers around battle barycenter in battles. That was redundant.

Pictures below, as usual. It's actually less progress than it looks like. In English,

- Expanded cutscenes once more. You now get a starter Pokémon based on what option you choose, for example. The options for which, for those curious, is randomly selected from a list of grass, fire and water starters.

- Did stuff to the options menu. Half of them don't do anything yet, half of them do. Also, am I the only one who thinks like neon text on a black background could look really cool?

- Game can use external cutscene scripts and stuff. I think that was there last time, but it's easier to do now. If you really really really want to mess with the game you can probably make up whole shiny new NPC cutscenes with it, otherwise it just makes my testing a lot easier.

- Added a Skyrim-like ribbon compass. Not necessary by any stretch of the imagination but I'm a Skyrim nut so who cares. You can switch it off, anyway.

- Some reason or another, the save system is perpetually breaking. Fixed it. Again. A couple times.

- Started on battles!

- In the spirit of open world, opponent Pokémon levels scale with yours, plus the difficulty setting. Hopefully will nullify most too easy/too hard complaints that you get in ROM hacks, and X and Y. They also have the proper state of evolution and appropriate movesets and stuff.

- Battles can have up to 4 people/NPCs participate in them, either in teams or free-for-all. I can barely maintain 30 frames as it is, though, so I don't know how many 4-person battles there will be in the finished game, if any.

- Pokémon display properly during battles, i.e. you see their backs if the camera is behind them, the front if it's in front of them. You can also rotate the camera around the center of the battle, but the controls on that are a little iffy. They also look kind of 2-dimensional, but I'm not sure how to change that without making it look even worse from other angles . . .

- Battles take place in the overworld instead of separate arenas, the way they do in the Game Freak Pokémon games. Which looks cooler imo, but once again, I don't know how this will affect the frame rate later on. Also, I don't think this'll be an issue, but there's a chance battles could spawn in midair or in trees or in other weird places.

Stuff I want to do and am writing down here so you all can yell at me when I don't:

- Finish with battles. Damage, HUDs, switching, all that stuff. Obviously.

- Do some story. Late last year, I filled an entire marble notebook with plot notes, but I decided I don't like a lot of it and don't know how much will be kept.

- Do something with the ribbon compass besides letting it sit there and look pretty. Location icons that show up in actual Skyrim, and stuff. Not sure if I want to let this game fall into the typical boring sidequest system that other RPGs do, but we'll see. Come to think of it, that could open up some fun routes for after I finish working on the main game . . .

- Have a look at PokéScript. Which, for those of you who don't know, is the actual script used in Pokémon games that ROM hackers mess with. I don't like ROM hacks because I don't like being restricted to existing engines but there's probably a lot to be learned from the way it's set up.

- Learn to fry eggs.

- Save Pokémon with the rest of your game settings. Should have done this before starting on battles tbh, but whatever.

- Better system for random encounters. The one I used in the last, 2D version of this game had a horrible runtime and isn't going to work in this new engine anyway.

- Get better sprites. Don't have to be 3D models but the 32x32 things don't really look so good when blown up this large.



Explanation of the pictures, in order    
1. Picking your starter. At this point, the game actually gives you the one you choose. Yay.
2. Battles (no HUD). The sprites are animated.
3. Neon colors. I accidentally did this a while ago while testing something else, but it ended up looking kind of cool. Especially for Zoroark.
4. The compass, with nothing on it.
5. Pokémon menu, with default colors. As far as I can tell, all the math is right. Don't ask how I got a level 1 Mewtwo.
6. List of settings. Might add a couple more. No, not all of the flavor text is that sarcastic.
7. Battles, from another angle.


Thank you, and good night!

Dragonite December 8, 2014 06:51:12 PM

2 Attachment(s)
[12/8/2014 22:24:08]

See, here I go forgetting to write in this thing again. Awesome.

This month?

- Cut back on the amount of Skyrim I play. Mainly attributing that to having near 100%'d it, but nontheless.

- Still trying to get into classes at the county college for the spring. It's like herding cats. Nobody there ever wants to answer a phone call so I'm stuck driving a half hour there if I ever want to hear which bits of my information is sitting under a mountain of papers in a closet this time=.=

- Pokémon AlphaSapphire and OmegaRuby came out. Games are magnificent. Also did a Let's Play of it the instant it came out, and it's easily been the most fun I've had making YouTube videos since . . . uh . . . ever.

- Actually wrote code! For once in my life, I can say I probably got more done than the following messages would lead you to believe. More on that below.

Spoiler Alert:    
[11/11/2014 16:19:55] 4.0.279 - Added some battle HUD. Frame rate dropped in half for some reason. 
[11/11/2014 16:52:54] 4.0.280 - HP and EXP bars put onto the battle HUDs.
[11/11/2014 18:42:50] 4.0.281 - EXP displays properly.
[11/18/2014 00:17:53] 4.0.282 - Switched to a lookup table for experience, the way the actual pokémon games do. Experience displays on battle HUD properly.
[11/29/2014 17:31:03] 4.0.283 - Switched the sides of the screen battle HUDs show up on, so that it now matches normal pokémon games.
[11/30/2014 00:28:34] 4.0.284 - Added a difficutly setting for rubberbanding. Something I'm going to use to test AI that I might as well leave in.
[11/30/2014 13:21:46] 4.0.285 - Battle status text at the bottom of the screen. Repositioned HUDs again.
[12/1/2014 21:59:53] 4.0.286 - Started work on the different menus that you go between in battles.
[12/2/2014 00:13:50] 4.1.287 - Transitioning battles to a separate room, to save the frame rate.
[12/2/2014 00:27:54] 4.1.288 - Added command to backup your save file.
[12/2/2014 12:18:11] 4.1.289 - Work on saving Pokémon to a file.

Added the battle HUD. Not much to look at, I'll post a screenshot when the rest of the battle scene is finished. That's the less lame way of saying "I don't have one on hand and I'm too lazy to go and make one."

Rubberbanding, meaning the AI can look at what move you selected and counter it directly. Most people will probably turn it off but you never know. Probably make testing some things easier, at the very least, because I can force it to do certain things they probably wouldn't otherwise.

Messages like "____ sent out ____" appear at the bottom of the screen in battle, as they should.

Battles no longer take place in the overworld. That was something I really wanted to do, but Game Maker just isn't efficient enough to show all that on the screen and give me more than about ten fps at the same time. Maybe someday I'll come up with some godly efficient algorithm that'll let that work, but that day is not today.

Started looking at story again. Taking what I write up for it a year ago, expanding it, removing dull characters, sharpening the remaining ones, retrofitting for open world, that sort of thing.

Saving Pokémon. Finally. Originally I wanted to use the exact same format that the actual Pokémon games, but there really isn't any reason to so I just dumped it all in a binary file and called it a day. 80 bytes a 'mon. Beautiful.

On that note, I also made an editor for Pokémon files. Again, testing things, making sure all the data's there, letting me make NPC trainer Pokémon more than just "Rattata, some level, generic moveset." And allowing malicious users to meddle with things they shouldn't be meddling with.

Lastly, made an editor for the NPCs themselves. Not as glamorous as the Pokémon editor but just as useful.


So, there's that. Time to forget about this thread for another month!

Dragonite December 12, 2014 10:16:21 AM

4 Attachment(s)
Less than a month between posts? Where is the real Dragonite and what have I done with him?

[12/12/2014 12:50:50]

So the last week or so has been pretty decent, especially on my standards. Why? Couple nice things happened.

- ADD medicine has (finally) started to kick in. I'm celebrating by sitting down and writing code for like seven hours straight, as opposed to . . . what was it before . . . like seven minutes straight.

- Got a job! Grocery store, cashier, basic drill. Starts Saturday. Tomorrow. Whatever. I have part-time rotating hours, so that should keep things interesting for a while.

- Discovered the Skyrim modding tools. Which I would totally be neck-deep in right now except I've already got some other really nice projects.

- Speaking of projects, this stuff happened. I think there's more progress in here than there is in all of my updates since about August:

Spoiler Alert:    
[12/9/2014 21:25:02] 4.1.290 - Loading NPCs from files. 
[12/10/2014 08:41:52] 4.1.291 - Read pokémon from a file.
[12/10/2014 10:42:59] 4.1.292 - Load NPC teams from a file. Can start programming battles now.
[12/10/2014 13:53:36] 4.1.293 - Battle camera works better now.
[12/10/2014 13:55:20] 4.1.294 - Battle camera works even better now (fixed the zoom in/zoom out issues)
[12/10/2014 18:15:38] 4.1.295 - Fixed the issue with pokémon HUDs. Probably broke something else in the process but I'll deal with that later. Still not sure what the original issue was.
[12/11/2014 08:42:59] 4.1.296 - Attack choosing battle loop works.
[12/11/2014 09:29:59] 4.1.297 - Priority works properly.
[12/11/2014 18:28:41] 4.1.298 - Structure for entry hazards and field moves like Reflect and Light Screen.
[12/12/2014 01:12:22] 4.1.299 - Fixed a bug with loading item data. Unfortunately, this version is unstable and battles crash the program.
[12/12/2014 01:16:24] 4.1.300 - Battles run without crashing, though they don't run properly.
[12/12/2014 09:44:51] 4.1.301 - Damage calculations and type matchups working, critical hits still wonky.
[12/12/2014 10:23:11] 4.1.302 - Scrolling HP in battles.
[12/12/2014 10:38:04] 4.1.303 - Scrolling HP v 1.1
[12/12/2014 11:14:30] 4.1.304 - Pokémon who evolve through level up are at their appropriate stage in leveled trainer battles. Pokémon who don't evolve through level up evolve after level 0.07*BST. That's a mouthful.
[12/12/2014 11:39:25] 4.1.305 - Faint messages appear when something faints, though nothing happens aside from that.
[12/12/2014 11:43:39] 4.1.306 - If a Pokémon faints before they get to use their move in battle, their move is canceled.
[12/12/2014 11:56:10] 4.1.307 - Evasion/Accuracy.

Four days, almost 900 lines of code 8)

Not accounting for move animations, battles are probably like 30% done. Re-wired some old things so that they work better/are easier to use. (Most) NPC behavior scripts now inhabit text files instead of obscure corners of the project files.

Camera can rotate around a battle, and zoom in and out. And look around. The last part isn't terribly useful, unless you want to look at the skybox or something for some reason, and I might decide to remove it later.

Power points are there, though I haven't tested any yet. Mainly because I don't have the patience to sit through fifty rounds of battle and wait for someone to go down to Struggle :/

Random AI. Pretty simple, the opponent picks a random move, regardless of whether or not it actually affects you. To be used mainly in early-game wild battles, probably level 20 random encounters and below.

I also have a simple AI that I wrote a long time ago where the computer scrolls through its 4 moves and decides which one will probably do the most damage, all factors considered. Doesn't attempt to switch out, even if it can't hit you with anything, so I like to call it "shallow max damage."

This part I especially had fun with: Leveled opponent Pokémon use their correct evolutionary stage. For example, if the a trainer in the game generates a level 10 Axew for you to fight, it'll be a level 10 Axew. If it generates at level 60 instead - say your team's average level is 48 and I don't want the trainers you didn't fight earlier to waste your time - it'll be a level 60 Haxorus. Pokémon who evolve through methods other than leveling - trades, stones, etc. - "evolve" after a certain point dependant on their base stat total, so more powerful Pokémon won't be fully evolved until later in the game. This doesn't consider Mega Evolution, obviously, although there was a rather funny bug I had a while ago where they did. Movesets are also correctly generated, though that can be overridden for certain NPCs (the Champion, etc.)

The important part: choose attacks, deal damage according to the correct equations, HP bars scroll, display messages when you faint. Type and ability effectiveness/immunities, critical hits and some hold item/abilities are factored in, though not all. Accuracy checks are accounted for.

Explanation of pictures, left to right    

1. Typical battle interface. Your Pokémon HUD will be highlighted, in the case that you've rotated the camera around and it looks like you're on the opponent side of the field. Gender symbols are a bit off, though, I'll fix those at some point in the future.

2. Using a move. HP bars are partially depleted. The opponent HP numbers will be hidden after I'm convinced the system is airtight.

3. Random AI, and stupid battling by me. This was before I programmed any damage to actually be dealt. Also notice me "using safeguard" on Garchomp.

4. A thing demonstrating the "leveled opponents" mechanic.


So, that's that. I have pictures this time. Really looking forward to working on the rest of the battles. After that I'll probably be spending a lot of time on world design and story, which'll be even more fun.

Oh, before I forget: I also wrote a couple cheers that show up when you send out a Pokémon into battle. I think they're fine, but any other thoughts? https://pastebin.com/eE5MLYAL


Yay!

Dragonite December 19, 2014 04:08:48 PM

This has pretty much been my entire last week :D



Most of the important information's in there. If you're running a potato modem or something and can't watch here are some bullet point things:

Spoiler Alert:    
 - Windows executable. Maybe some day I'll get it to work on other OS's, but for now I'd rather make it passable on one OS than awful on all of them.
- Hopefully it works on your computer. I legitimately don't know this because so far it's only been tested on mine. I would think it should, at least Win 7 or 8, but operating systems are finicky things.
- It looks like a diorama a third grader made on the bus before class. I know.
- You can walk around. You can probably walk anywhere on the map without breaking the game but who knows, I might have misplaced a tree somewhere, or something.
- You can battle people. Battles are fairly linear and the only real trainer there has a bunch of test Blissey, which you can attack or use autokill. I haven't seen battles or experience break down in several hours, but I'm sure someone can do it somehow.
- Status moves have not been implemented and will always "miss" or fail to work.
- Pokémon don't get saved when you save (yet) and if you resume the game you'll have a level 5 Flaafy. If you want to start over, go into ./filesystem/ and delete the file called "yruhere."
- Let me know how it looks/feels overall. Some things obviously need work, like the ladder that leads nowhere, but some things might be less obvious.


Update history for nerds:

Spoiler Alert:    
[12/12/2014 17:37:49] 4.1.308 - Battle cheers actually show up now. Pokémon HUDs don't show up before the Pokémon has actually been sent out. 
[12/12/2014 21:53:30] 4.1.309 - NPC switching works. Random AI switching works.
[12/13/2014 16:17:46] 4.1.310 - Basic switch menu implemented.
[12/13/2014 17:34:55] 4.1.311 - Game forces you to choose a Pokémon to send out when you go down (though you can't actually do that yet).
[12/14/2014 01:39:42] 4.1.312 - Shallow battle AI works, as far as I can tell (would like more test cases(
[12/14/2014 21:37:16] 4.1.313 - Switching in opponents flies like a kite; player switch ins still have a few weird places.
[12/14/2014 22:15:44] 4.1.314 - Your switching in upon fainting works. Unrelated, but gender pronouns now also work.
[12/15/2014 02:38:46] 4.1.315 - Battle HUDs show up again after you switch Pokémon.
[12/15/2014 10:09:52] 4.1.316 - Battles finish after someone's last Pokémon goes down, and the appropriate message is displayed. Changed the "printqueue" command to use a while instead of do-until.
[12/15/2014 10:27:13] 4.1.317 - Can't send an unconscious Pokémon into battle; changed colors on scouting UI.
[12/15/2014 11:32:33] 4.1.318 - After conclusion, battles return to the overworld properly.
[12/15/2014 11:53:22] 4.1.319 - battle debug is properly formatted.
[12/15/2014 13:22:20] 4.1.320 - Auto-win and Auto-lose works. That took way longer than I should ever have spent on a debug tool.
[12/15/2014 15:30:25] 4.1.321 - Forfeiting/running from battles works. Prize money is dished out appropriately.
[12/15/2014 22:08:55] 4.1.322 - You gain experience in battle. It's not pretty but it works.
[12/16/2014 14:19:27] 4.1.323 - Fixed experience, yet again. (Using 16-bit values to hold 32-bit values is a baaaaaaaad idea.)
[12/16/2014 15:37:39] 4.1.324 - Added autokill option to debug battle menu. Doesn't give experience, though :/
[12/16/2014 15:45:44] 4.1.325 - Autokill works and gives experience.
[12/16/2014 16:16:29] 4.1.326 - You stop gaining random levels upon getting experience, but the progress bar still scrolls backwards D:
[12/16/2014 16:38:22] 4.1.327 - Experience scrolls the right way now, though I suspect the forumula is wrong.
[12/16/2014 16:52:09] 4.1.328 - Stats update upon level up. HP updates properly.
[12/16/2014 17:27:50] 4.1.329 - Changed EXP Yield from an 8-bit number to a 16-bit one. Blissey now gives you so much experience in battle that it breaks the game :/
[12/16/2014 17:44:17] 4.1.330 - Experience, scrolling and leveling up works, as it should.
[12/16/2014 20:22:49] 4.1.331 - Updated the way trees and rocks are drawn so they look less stupid. Also added a bunch of random sign posts around Terrestria.
[12/17/2014 02:58:23] 4.1.332 - Pokémon look . . . well, better than they did before in battle now. Cutscene doesn't lock up after conclusion of battles.
[12/17/2014 03:00:23] 4.1.333 - Got rid of the loading bar. Changed the launch picture to a keyboard because why not.
[12/17/2014 10:35:05] 4.1.334 - Audio doesn't crash.
[12/17/2014 11:18:55] 4.1.335 - Added quit option to the escape menu, a couple other bug fixes.
[12/17/2014 11:27:31] 4.1.336 - More bug fixes, regarding the introduction to the game. Also, test release 1! :D

I think most of these speak for themself.


Also finished a Sapphire-ish game yesterday, and can happily say I've never had more fun making video game videos.

Dragonite January 23, 2015 08:07:03 PM

How Not To Plan For Trips, Presented By Dragonite


(I'll make a real post when I get back home on Monday-ish. There's a TON of stuff I've been working on the last few weeks I'd like to post here when I finish polishing them up.)

So I hit the road at about 11 AM this morning to drive down to Magfest . . .
. . . twenty miles down I-95, I realize I forgot my camera . . .
. . . by the time I get home, the hardware and leave again it's almost 1 PM . . .
. . . get caught in traffic, finally enter the building at 5:30, and miss the AI panel I really wanted to see . . .
. . . brought 2 camera batteries with me, just to be safe . . . and it turns out they're both dry as a bone . . .
. . . and then remember that this time, I forgot the camera charger!

I even remembered to lug my tripod around with me all day, and as of right now I don't have any use for it.

There's a bunch of TRG and game dev related panels I'd really like to record with something better than my phone, too. Time to drive all over Maryland trying to find a replacement!

I'm really good at this "travel" and "packing" stuff. Last year I forgot my laptop charger and had to access the Internet through my 3DS for the whole weekend. And this is after I go through my things two or three times to make sure I have everything I need.

On the bright side, I ran into Eyan/Super Skarmory/Junsezeal/whatever you want to call him and his girlfriend about ten minutes after walking through the door. Apparently they recognized the back of my head from last year or something, which is pretty impressive considering how many people were in the place and that I wasn't wearing the yellow Dragonite shirt. That was a nice surprise.

Dragonite January 26, 2015 07:34:43 AM

Walking with legends, or something cheesy like that

Yeah, I think I'll start replacing the redundant time stamps with lame titles in these posts or something.

So I got home from Magfest a little while ago. Holy flying draugr with ketchup, what a weekend:

- There was the debacle that involved leaving and traffic and stuff in the post above this one, which was fun.
- Next morning I spent two hours driving around looking for a portable battery charger. Finally found one. That thing is amazing. Meaning I could actually use my camera all day instead of just for about 3.5 hours' worth.
- Sat in on a bunch of panels about various things - mostly on game design - and met a bunch of really interesting people:
* Level99 of OCReMix. Worked on a few of the songs I was listening to on the ride to and from, most notably the vocals in "Radience." Showed him the Dragonite I used in the latest VR tournament, who just so happens to be named after said song. He got a kick out of that. And traded me a Phione for a HA Snivy.
* LuIzA, also of OCReMix. One word: vocals of "Ska Buffet." (Level99 also worked on that one.)
* Mklachu, violinist who plays a lot of video game music and is part of the Tetrimino VGM band. Not the biggest name out there but I've been following a bunch of those guys for years so it was still pretty neat to get to meet Michaela in person.
* One of the founding fathers of Let's Plays as we know them, Chuggaaconroy. Got an autograph, which is awesome. Also did a quick, silly, awkward, informal "interview" with him, which completely blew my mind, but there was just too much background noise and you couldn't hear either of us in the video D:
* ProtonJon, NintendoCapriSun and MasaeAnela. Didn't get to actually talk to any of them, which is unfortunate, but I did see them on stage with Chuggaa which was pretty cool. Also spoke briefly with Lucahjin, but I didn't know what she looked like or who she was until after the fact, though \:
* James Portnow and Daniel Floyd from Extra Credits, a video game analysis/development/a bunch of other things series on YouTube. They're pretty interesting people who know a lot about what they do. I'd say their Q&A panel Sunday night which totally didn't cause me to get home way later than I wanted to was the best one of the weekend but that's a hard call.
* Probably a bunch more people who I'm just forgetting because there were so many of them!
- Added a bunch of things to my collection of handheld games. I now have all 4 main Gen 5 games, a foot in the door of the PMD series, all of the 3D Mario games (counting 63DS as 64 itself) save Sunshine and all of the Mario Kart games save MK64 and Double Dash. Whee!
- Participated in a Pokémon tournament, but only had one battle because time and didn't win. Dang. Back to Battle Spot.
- Distributed a few HA Snivy and Froakie to random people via the random passerby trade thing. Didn't get anything awfully interesting in return but I hope I made a few peoples' days with those things.
- Watched Eyan fail at arcade Donkey Kong for about ten minutes (clearly the highlight of the weekend).
- Might post some of the video next time, too, if I can get it together in a reasonable amount of time.

tl;dr Magfest is awesome, y'all really should go next year.

Dragonite February 2, 2015 10:34:43 PM

7 Attachment(s)
The illusion of doing stuff

It's been a weird week or so. Then again, when isn't it?

- Translated Let It Go into Dovahzul. You're welcome.
- Said something about MAGfest video last time, instead of linking five hundred different things (my camera did a lot of work that weekend) I made a little hub video for the whole little thing. Warning, if you click on anything that says "Extra Credits" on it, don't read the comments, one of them basically became a complete hate fest and it sort of spilled over into everything else. Including my non-MAGfest videos.
- Semi-related, the Thrown Controllers video actually got shared on NintendoCapriSun's Facebook page, which was kind of awesome. Most of the comments on that one are pretty fun to read, and like half of them are from people who I saw there, too, which is also kind of awesome.
- Day after I got home, the northeast got hammered by a snowstorm. Well, parts of it did, anyway, I got like three inches while a few miles away got like eight. Really glad I got home right before it got bad. Also the grocery store the next day was all but vacant, which was pretty bizarre considering that it feeds about three towns almost singlehandedly.
- Also speaking of YouTube, I finally started a run of Skyrim today. Yesterday. Whichever. I had so many scrapped recordings of that game it's kind of ridiculous, and I'm sure there will be many more to come, I'm being kind of a perfectionist when it comes to covering my favorite video game of all time.
- Games! I've kind of went in a couple different directions and don't have quit as much to show as I'd like, but I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that'll probably have gone somewhere by next year so I guess I'll throw them out here. Actually wait, there's more here than I remember. Did I forget to hit "post" last time or something? o-o

stuff    
[12/22/2014 15:18:04] 4.1.337 - Fading in and out when you step on teleporters works properly. Started work on R301..TTTHNN map. 
[12/23/2014 01:45:23] 4.1.338 - I. HATE. 3D. GRAVITY. PHYSICS. (Also I think it's complete.)
[12/23/2014 01:48:44] 4.1.339 - Player gravity works: jumping on ground, jumping on platforms, stopping at walls, walking under overpasses, and climbing stairs within range. NPC gravity does not.
[12/23/2014 02:09:21] 4.1.340 - NPC ID crosshairs added, a la Elder Scrolls
[12/23/2014 02:16:53] 4.1.341 - Really tall grass added. Having too many (of either type of grass) in the room really slows it down, though :/
[12/23/2014 02:20:22] 4.1.342 - Reducing the angles drawn in grass improves frame rate a bit, though there still is a lot to be desired ._.
[12/23/2014 17:14:08] 4.1.343 - Separated 'e' from 'action' key during text input. Player doesn't walk right up to walls now, getting rid of the "seeing through the wall" thing.
[12/23/2014 17:22:45] 4.1.344 - Improved on the collision thing from last time.
[12/23/2014 18:27:47] 4.1.345 - Using signs doesn't make the world turn black.
[12/23/2014 21:41:48] 4.1.346 - Some specified objects get elevated to sit on top of raised surfaces. Tiles don't appear transparent when drawn at depth > 0, for some reason, so they're not . . tiled.
[12/23/2014 23:42:43] 4.1.347 - Raised objects now work in all cases. This took forever.
[12/23/2014 23:56:12] 4.1.348 - Changed the font size of the text on sign posts. Significant, I know.
[12/24/2014 03:54:50] 4.1.349 - Randomly generated graphics - trees, flowers, rocks
[12/24/2014 12:48:45] 4.1.350 - Bushes.
[12/26/2014 14:39:10] 4.1.351 - Gravity physics are officially the antichrist. (You no longer pass through trees while jumping.)
[12/27/2014 14:05:37] 4.1.352 - Changed the elevated object code so it works better now with lots of solids stacked on top of each other.
[12/30/2014 02:47:10] 4.1.353 - Fixed ladders. (Solution: treat contact with ladders as continuous jumping.)
[1/1/2015 13:30:18] 4.1.354 - 3D collisions officially the second antichrist. (They now work in all situations, as far as I can tell.)
[1/1/2015 14:21:40] 4.1.355 - More precision in 3D collisions.
[1/2/2015 13:05:36] 4.1.356 - Made a bigger buffer between player and solid walls, so collisions with those sorts of things are a little smoother. Again.
[1/4/2015 13:36:19] 4.1.357 - Work on Rainbow Field. Looks rather colorful.
[1/4/2015 13:56:24] 4.1.358 - Tightened up the order of oprations at game load. Added something for a city.
[1/4/2015 14:18:15] 4.1.359 - Designed a good part of Route 307.
[1/5/2015 06:39:34] 4.1.360 - Added more to 3D model support.
[1/6/2015 00:22:17] 4.1.361 - Rotated 3D models (not solid yet)
[1/18/2015 15:47:46] 4.1.362 - 3D collisions with models work.
[1/20/2015 18:20:42] 4.1.363 - Multi-component models. That sounds cooler than it actually is, btw.
[1/21/2015 16:53:37] 4.1.364 - Flower pots. Was feeling ambitios today, wasn't I?
[1/22/2015 02:55:20] 4.1.365 - Circular models and Pokémart added.

Looks like I screwed around with gravity and stuff quite a bit. Gravity is evil. Gravity is the one single thing I've ran into so far where I can really asy I haven't had fun doing this and wish I used Unity or something instead.

3D models, on the other hand, now I really wish I took that CAD class in high school. Those are fun. I might take this game a little farther than "Paper Mario 64" grapically, models aren't too, too expensive to draw but they add a lot to how the game looks. They can also be compounded and colored to give the same object different "skins," and maybe - if I have time, I really want to do this - let you actually customize your character. Also non-sprite NPCs would be awesome, though properly animating them could take a while. Same for Pokémon, except there's no way I'm modeling and animating over 800 Pokémon and alternate forms on my own.

Code hit 7000 lines today, btw. Not really sure how many it'll finish with but I know animation and move status effects and probably more scripting I want to do will take a lot, too.

stuff I have half-finished that I plan on adding    
By the way, if anyone's wondering, this "leave everything half finished" thing I do is more or less the last way you ever want to go about software design. Don't follow my example.

- Game achievements. I think I was working on this the night before I left for Maryland, and then got distracted by other things when I got back. They sound fun and shouldn't be hard to finish up, I'll get back to that one of these days.
- Languages. I haven't actually started this yet but I was thinking recently about a decently efficient way to translate the text into other languages. This'll take a while and I'm not very good at many other spoken languages so idk what'll happen to that.
- Another class of items in the form of books, with their own category in inventory like Berries and TMs. Not sure how important I want them to be, they'll probably be random things like ridiculous limericks and rants on Double Team and stuff like that. Maybe plot related, who knows.
- This one, I have started work on, and I think it's almost done: NPCs have randomized teams. Not to be different every time you face the same trainer, but as with the "randomized flower" screenshot (see below) each character'll have a specific set of Pokémon that I don't explicitly give it. At least, not for route and maybe Gym trainers, the Leaders and other important people will have teams which I specifically give them, like Bird Keeper Bob might have any non-legendary Flying type and Poké Fan Bob might have anything in the Fairy egg group, that sort of thing. Obviously things like legendary Pokémon and possibly starters ought to be combed out, and it would be nice if I could approximately match your team's base stat total so you're not fighting a Garchomp and a Slaking in your first battle.
- On that note, there's now another base stat value telling the game if a species of Pokémon has any special value, like being legendary or being a starter or being Mega or something. Which is useful in a couple places, since there's no way to mathematically decide if something's legendary or not.
- There might be something else. Was there something else? I don't remember.


Explanation of pictures    
Oh, also, there's a bunch of screenshots of a few of the models I've been working on which I'm not going to try to attach because that'll get real messy, real fast: http://imgur.com/a/dvO1O#12

1. Tall grass, plus sarcastic sign posts. Get used to them, they're a dime a dozen, and Dragonite's sense of humor is getting weirder by the day.
2. Flowers, trees and more tall grass. The faces of the flowers and trees are procedurally randomized, the "seed" being the position in the map, meaning I have no idea beforehand if a flower'll be pink, yellow or purple but they will all be the same color every time you run the game unless the position gets changed.
3. Trainer class editor, with a bunch of rules defining what type of Pokémon a trainer can have on their team.
4. Used a game screenshot as a texture for a Pokéball to see what happened. I kind of like it, I might keep it.
5. Crosshairs on people. This might be useful for identifying important people, or it might not, it only took like three minutes to add so it doesn't really matter.
6. Surfaces of hills and stuff have different looks than the side of hills and stuff so it looks a little bit less like you're living in a world of boring polygons.
7. Yet another reason why reading 8-bit values where you need 16-bit values is a bad idea. (Thank God I had backup.)


Let me know what you think about the random NPC team thing, especially, I want to do it because it could save a lot of time for me but there's probably at least a few holes in it I haven't looked at yet.

Dragonite February 14, 2015 10:04:22 PM

I might need to get a life. Nah.


Let's see, these last two weeks have been utterly boring because I did almost nothing besides writing code.

It was awesome. All said, added about 1200 lines in 13 days, plus a few things that actually resemble making the game look like a game.

Oh, also played a bit more of Assassin's Creed. I'm slowly getting used to the controls so it's actually becoming playable (sorry, Ubisoft, telling me to press Button 5 is not helpful in any way, shape or form). It ain't Keizaal but it looks really good, the concept's pretty interesting and climbing up vertical walls. Yeah, that just stands for itself.

Spoiler Alert:    
[2/3/2015 14:37:28] 4.1.366 - List of Pokémon eligible for NPC teams works. 
[2/3/2015 17:30:30] 4.1.367 - Fixed the landscape procedural generation thing (again).
[2/3/2015 18:10:51] 4.1.368 - NPC Pokémon teams are properly randomized.
[2/4/2015 17:30:35] 4.1.369 - Changed the way learnsets are stored. Loading time cut down to about 50% of what it used to be.
[2/5/2015 02:28:19] 4.1.370 - Streamlined the loading process even more, now only about 40% of the original time
[2/7/2015 16:48:27] 4.1.371 - Tier, Price and Location data for items.
[2/8/2015 02:01:02] 4.1.372 - Added some (font) character handling functions. The specifics of which are . . . a secret :^)
[2/8/2015 02:40:22] 4.1.373 - [redacted]
[2/8/2015 03:32:27] 4.1.374 - Model usage has been automated.
[2/8/2015 11:52:12] 4.1.375 - You can 'talk' to ground items and add them to your inventory. Pluralization on "th/ch/sh" words work.
[2/8/2015 12:10:37] 4.1.376 - Plural-ization words on most words. There's probalby a bunch of exceptions because English is dumb but I'll look those up some other time.
[2/9/2015 10:04:25] 4.1.377 - Mouse unlocks when you alt-tab out of the game. This probably should have been implemented back in something like July, leave me alone.
[2/9/2015 11:08:51] 4.1.378 - Cleaned up Inventory UI.
[2/9/2015 11:25:59] 4.1.379 - Scroll through inventory types, plus better formatting on the item description panel.
[2/9/2015 11:52:59] 4.1.380 - Scrolling through items works, plus a few more text formatting details.
[2/10/2015 03:30:48] 4.1.381 - Added sprites for key items; removed Quantity counter on Key Items and TMs (maybe books, later).
[2/10/2015 04:17:56] 4.1.382 - Use/Give/Chuck/Back menu in inventory works now. (None of them besides Back works yet.)
[2/10/2015 17:04:47] 4.1.383 - You can use a few different types of items. The game tells you if you can't.
[2/10/2015 17:22:47] 4.1.384 - Re-enabled NPC battles; enabled tilting battle camera up and down, without moving side to side.
[2/11/2015 10:36:42] 4.1.385 - Auto-repel works.
[2/11/2015 11:35:35] 4.1.386 - Repel information is saved.
[2/11/2015 11:58:36] 4.1.387 - Save data and options menu options for key items on HUD/
[2/11/2015 16:04:29] 4.1.388 - Fixed a few things about unpausing the pause menu, like the game window zooming off to the side when you try to exit it.
[2/11/2015 18:23:05] 4.1.389 - Chucking items works properly.
[2/14/2015 11:49:35] 4.1.390 - Views and scrolling through the bag works properly now.
[2/14/2015 12:28:34] 4.1.391 - Turned variables into constants where I could get away with it.
[2/14/2015 13:20:31] 4.1.392 - Assigning items to L and R
[2/14/2015 13:27:54] 4.1.393 - No longer draw "quantity" for the Key, TM and Book inventory pockets.
[2/14/2015 16:54:33] 4.1.394 - Inventory sorting - alphabetical, by quantity and by in-game index
[2/14/2015 17:53:08] 4.1.395 - Bag pocket search works
[2/14/2015 18:12:18] 4.1.396 - Searching full bag for an item works.

In English . . .

- Made the game load a lot faster. If you're interested in the specifics, down at the bottom of the post.

- Mouse unlocks if you alt-tab out of the game. Completely random thing to add now, but it was getting really annoying trying to jump to a window and having the mouse still freeze.

- NPCs have procedurally randomized teams. I nerded out about that enough last time. So, I am very happy about this for very many reasons.

- The same applies to items. The way NPC trainer classes have a set of rules for the type of Pokémon they can have, items have a number telling what type of environments they can appear in - fields, caves, the ocean, etc. Also there's four tiers they're sorted into, putting them into groups based on value.

- "talk" to items in the overworld and have them added to your inventory.

- Pluralization on words; mainly so that the game doesn't have to tell you "Obtained 2 Repel!" Covered most of the rules, but the English language is stupid so there's probably a few hundred more I didn't remember. And honestly can't be bothered to, but don't tell my Language Arts teacher that.

- Inventory UI. Could write words but pictures are easier so they'll be down at the bottom of this post somewhere.

- Few inventory functions like searching, sorting and actually using some of them.

Faster load times    
Back when I was young and stupid (and by that I mean, like, last summer) I decided to be lazy about storing Pokémon learnset data in a grid of every level, etc. regardless of whether or not they actually learn anything at said level. Considering that most Pokémon only learn twenty or thirty level up moves and a handful of TMs/HMs/tutors, that's a lot of extra processing. The faster way, as I figured out, was to only store the information on levels and their respective moves, and specific TMs, instead of everything. All said and done, this reduced the load time from about 7.1 seconds to about 3.5.

Yay.


I have way too many screenshots this time so: http://imgur.com/a/bhzOl#6 Most of them have to do with the inventory UI, all of them have to do with items. Imo the UI is kind of bland so if you have any ideas about how to liven it up a bit I just might read them.

Dragonite February 23, 2015 08:07:41 AM

6 Attachment(s)
Real life is dumb. That's why we invented computer science!


So the only really interesting thing that happened in the last week-ish is that I now have arguably the grossest job in the grocery store now: cleaning the machines and floor in the butcher room. It's great. Also it means I get to be away from the people who like to loudly discuss usage strategies of the human reproductive system. Loudly.

So, computer science. It doesn't look like I've done a whole lot this time, but that sort of has an asterisk on it . . .

Spoiler Alert:    
[2/15/2015 17:00:29] 4.1.397 - Choose a Pokémon menu works for the inventory now (hold items, medicine, etc.) 
[2/15/2015 18:05:30] 4.1.398 - Books are listed as unique items; upon use, they freeze the inventory but don't actually do anything yet
[2/16/2015 13:52:26] 4.1.399 - Books read text from their files, organize it properly and fade in/fade out when you open/close them.
[2/16/2015 16:31:24] 4.1.400 - Books do everything they have to except be animated.
[2/16/2015 16:35:23] 4.1.401 - Error handling on the pages in books.
[2/16/2015 17:23:36] 4.1.402 - Embellished the books a little (still minus animations)
[2/17/2015 04:54:03] 4.1.403 - Changed the way sign posts are rendered
[2/17/2015 13:00:23] 4.1.404 - Primitive HUD filled in.
[2/17/2015 16:16:32] 4.1.405 - Cleaned up the overworld HUD now. Once it's completely filled in, it's something I can live with now/
[2/17/2015 16:20:34] 4.1.406 - F3 and F4 clear the items bound to L and R.
[2/17/2015 16:31:09] 4.1.407 - You can give items to a Pokémon if they're not holding one yet. Hold items are reflected in the little window menu thing.
[2/17/2015 16:56:12] 4.1.408 - Fixed bag_contains (it previously would skip over the first element in the bag because I forogt arrays started at 0, not 1)
[2/17/2015 17:12:04] 4.1.409 - Giving hold items from Inventory screen all works as it's supposed to.
[2/18/2015 02:32:07] 4.1.410 - item_pokemon_can_use works properly for general items and TMs.
[2/18/2015 02:41:34] 4.1.411 - Fixed the problem where you could scroll around in the bag with the debug screen up, since that was a little weird.
[2/18/2015 14:14:55] 4.1.412 - You can "use" items on a Pokémon, but nothing happens and the item just disappears from your inventory.
[2/18/2015 15:22:56] 4.1.413 - Pokémon sprites are blended with their major status afflictions.
[2/21/2015 01:07:06] 4.1.414 - Load texture graphics from files automatically. Saves time for me, and will be working with the map editor later.
[2/21/2015 01:16:23] 4.1.415 - Fixed a few issues with textures turning Pokémon Centers and tall grass into sand. Also fixed the location hash function. Did you know that using too many big numbers causes GM to break? I didn't, either!


In English . . .

- Mostly everything in the inventory works now, except for the actual effects of items, except for
- Books. Took quite a bit of string manipulation to make it work properly. I ended up not animating them because time and effort and general lack of interest in animating books. (That does not bode well for when I have to animate a few hundred families of battle moves.)
- Overworld HUD, filled in with information like your team and Pokédex and some stuff that would go in the Dex Nav in ORAS. Probably. Not sure about the final version but the skeleton is all there.
- Binding items to L and R (the Q and E keys on the keyboard; this is where I hope I'll be getting around with controller input because using Q and E is really dumb).
- Giving/taking hold items to/from people
- Textures for stuff are loaded from files on your computer instead of built into the game project file. That caused a few weird problems where the ground was textured like an NPC (yeah) and gave me problems trying to figure out why for a while, but it also opens the door for . . .

- Map editor. Got tired enough of trying to use Game Maker's 2D Room Editor to make a 3D map, so I decided it's time to go and make my own. Currently it has the three cameras (that was fun to do), a couple tabs with a bunch of settings like size, ground texture, models, their textures, their size scaling, rotation, etc. Bunch of things I still need to do like tiles, terrain/height maps (yeah, I'm mad enough to try that), so on. This should be fun. Now that I'm actually doing this I might go back on my word and let people design maps for me . . . meh, idk, don't want to get peoples' hopes up.

And, this is what happens when I get bored:




About pictures and stuff.

Spoiler Alert:    
1. Choosing a Pokémon to do stuff with. Might change the indentation to a rectangular bounding box or something to make it more obvious where your cursor is, but that can wait.
2. The inside of a book.
3. Overworld HUD, more or less.
4. Interface for using items with Pokémon.
5. How not to use textures.
6. I can't believe I'm dumb enough to try this.

Dragonite March 15, 2015 11:30:43 PM

6 Attachment(s)
Stuff happened?


It's been an odd three weeks. Spent almost all of it working on the map editor I alluded to in the last post, a little bit of it playing video games and working on another project of mine.

The other project, I'll probably write more about when it gets filled in a little more. It's not game design related for once, though.

Uh, as for real life . . . school sucks. I spend six hours a week learning about nested for loops and then go home and work on rotated 3D hitboxes. I'm barely getting a B in the class. It's just weird.

Work is nice. Cleaning the meat room is fun. Don't let anyone else ever tell you otherwise. I still don't quite understand how they manage to get bits of chicken and beef so close to the ceiling, though.

So, on to the fun stuff . . . once again, I haven't done a whole lot to the code of the actual game, but the map editor has quickly grown to a 2.5K-line behemoth that almost actually works. There's only a few things I can think of that are left to add to it, like warp tiles and triggers for cutscenes and HMs and stuff. And then it's just building the actual levels and loading them into the main project and then spending a month trying to figure out why it's all blown to pieces.

Attached some of the more interesting pictures. Here is an album with a few more of them.

1. Flowery meadow area. Got to do something about that frame rate. The main game does a few things to address that, like not drawing trees that are far away and behind other trees or outside your field of view, a shorter render distance in general, but I don't think it's going to do much for a frame rate of ten. Have a few more ideas as to what that might involve, though I haven't tested any yet.

2. Island. It's actually most probably going to be the protagonist's home town eventually. The area outside the grid is outside of the actual map, ideally the player won't be walking there, the ground just extends a bit farther in all directions so the world doesn't appear to abruptly end in front of you.

3. Imprecise, rotated 3D hitbox. Currently the game would treat that table as a solid brick outlined by the red lines, i.e. the player wouldn't be able to get too close to the corners. Getting around that involves some annoying math that could slow down the game even more if I'm not careful, but it's something I really should do. Will probably use either an invisible 2D sprite or rotated height map. If I can't get that to work within like two months I'll just refrain from rotating solid objects. Meh.

4. Incomplete Pokémon center design; the thing that's selected is a bookshelf that's been automatically filled in with individual book objects, rotated appropriately. Not sure if they'll each be actual book items that can be interacted with and read or not. That's another thing I need to be careful with, though, there's an absolute ton of them and rendering each one of them individually will make things get very awful very quickly.

5. Stairs. Draw an angled plane in the editor and it'll automatically fill it in to form a staircase that can be walked up. The bricks can be moved around individually, though admittedly I can't think of any situations where that would be very useful.

6. Levitating trees and flowers, an army of Wiis and the reason you should probably never actually hire me to design maps. I know I wouldn't.

There's plenty more glitches and examples of bad map design in the album I linked above!

Dragonite March 22, 2015 02:32:30 PM

1 Attachment(s)
TIL what a GPU is.


^ Before anyone gets mad at me for that, I'm joking. I guess a more appropriate title would be "til how to force Game Maker to actually use the GPU" but that just sounds weird.

Anyway, I finally figured out a way to make the game render madness like that at more than about three frames per second, by packing about five hundred flowers into each actual model file, since that shifts the responsibility of putting things on your screen over to the GPU, which is a lot happier about rendering loads of crap than the CPU would be. Plus it means each individual flower doesn't have to be processed every frame of the game, which also saves time. There's a total of about eighty thousand flowers and trees in there, and it can still handle >30 fps. Yay.

(Most maps probably won't have nearly as many little graphics like that in it, but it's good to know I can push it way farther than I need to.)

Other than that, started working on HM/field tiles, like Cut trees and Surf and Ice tiles. They still need to actually be programmed, but I figured it would be easiest to set up a structure for them now instead of later.

No comment on real life because real life would be boring even if we didn't have computer science.

So, that's that.

Dragonite March 30, 2015 11:57:06 AM

5 Attachment(s)
Map editor and game collide.


- So apparently the manager at the grocery store thinks the maintenance staff is doing a good job. Idk if that applies to me or not. At least I haven't broken any machines yet, right?

- Got a Wii U, capture device (I have no television) and started playing Wii U things. Finally! Surprisingly not as awful at MK8 as I am at MK7, I suspect it has to do with the fact that the controller is bigger and my hands have more space.

Moving on to more interesting things, after almost a month of just working on map editor, I finally started working on importing the .map files into the actual game. Was easier than I expected.

The nerdy-looking changelog is back    
[3/1/2015 16:16:43] 4.1.416 - Load NPC images from files. 
[3/25/2015 02:36:40] 4.1.417 - HUD now a surface; some radial graphics are drawn as models instead of quads
[3/25/2015 02:38:52] 4.1.418 - HUD surfaces refreshes whenever pause menu is closed (to reflect changes in team order, bound key items, etc.)
[3/25/2015 19:40:57] 4.1.419 - Maps technicall [spelling is hard, okay?] load from files, though no models are actually drawn or anything. Ground and skybox are a lot bigger now, so the world doesn't appear to abruptly end when you get to the edge of the map.
[3/25/2015 21:34:17] 4.1.420 - sky colors at times of day work properly (no more orange sky and fog)
[3/26/2015 08:53:52] 4.1.421 - Rainbow Field test passes - map loads and renders properly (but trees are not solid)
[3/26/2015 10:43:28] 4.1.422 - Tightened up collision with solid objects; model bounding boxes still not working properly.
[3/27/2015 17:33:14] 4.1.423 - Game optimized for third-person camera, rather than first-person camera.
[3/28/2015 03:35:46] 4.1.424 - Player walking animation works again.
[3/28/2015 03:37:45] 4.1.425 - Player walking animation pauses when you jump or fall off something.
[3/28/2015 12:47:26] 4.1.426 - Third person camera behaves like it should; invert Y added and saved to save file; player sprite no longer appears to levitate ten pixels off the ground.
[3/28/2015 14:31:46] 4.1.427 - Re-enabled first-person camera
[3/28/2015 17:27:41] 4.1.428 - added some file i/o which i really should have done a long time ago, to read/write a string (file_bin_*_string(...))
[3/28/2015 18:28:54] 4.1.429 - More loading stuff, but the code is pretty bad. Plz fix later.
[3/29/2015 01:43:20] 4.1.430 - Cleaned up loading, read ground texture from map file (idk why I wasn't doing that before).
[3/29/2015 02:30:01] 4.1.431 - Player stats - saving, implementation
[3/29/2015 12:54:54] 4.1.432 - Added Shadow Pokémon data values (they don't do anything yet).
[3/29/2015 14:31:04] 4.1.433 - Added a new type - Shadow (neutral damage taken/dealt on all targets)
[3/29/2015 15:43:58] 4.1.434 - Geometry objects display properly, but you can still walk through them.
[3/29/2015 16:54:41] 4.1.435 - Geometry shapes don't disappear at distances anymore, but you still don't collide with them properly
[3/29/2015 17:37:55] 4.1.436 - Eliminated the "skybox tear" effect that happens for whatever reason when it's too big (more than 32000 pixels away from camera) gg Game Maker.
[3/29/2015 18:05:45] 4.1.437 - Geometric shapes act solid now (finally). Jump height now feels a bit short D:
[3/29/2015 18:13:54] 4.1.438 - No more maximum falling speed, now you can hit the ground however fast you want (but don't die . . . yet).
[3/30/2015 03:44:13] 4.1.439 - Camera no longer passes through walls. Still looks pretty weird and it'll probably break soon, but at least the camera no longer passes through solid walls.
[3/30/2015 11:17:33] 4.1.440 - Got rid of the things where the skybox would flicker through the floor.

In English:

- HUD is now displayed on the screen with one draw call instead of . . . like forty. Hopefully that'll speed the game up a little, too.

- The sky color changes with the color of day. Before, for whatever reason, it had weird colors like orange at certain times of day, which just looked dumb. Removed that. Now it's just normal shades of blue, dark blue and black, like a normal sky.

- Decided the third-person camera looks better than first person (I'll probably change my mind at least eight more times before finishing this game), so went and cleaned that bit back up. Zooming in and out looks better (trigonometry is a tiny bit better for these things than arithmetic for these sorts of things), and movement with the camera works more like it does in other third-person games than it does in . . . uh . . . Unreal Engine 2. Can switch between first and third with the middle mouse button, which makes more sense than . . . whatever weird combination I had before.

- Player sprite had some graphical glitches that were kind of annoying to fix (and interestingly enough both of them were caused by the same problem), but it now animates properly and doesn't levitate off the ground. Animation also pauses when you jump/fall, because I'm pretty sure most people don't keep flailing their legs when they jump/fall. Well, not sure about that last one . . .

- Player has their own set of stats now, like a nerfed version of the Pokémons'. Will go into more details on that later.

- Added Shadow Pokémon stats. And by that I mean one stat, the variable that tracks how much experience they should have gain in battle, which should be good enough for the whole thing (Shadow moves are obviously stored in the slots with regular moves, and the "heart gauge" thing can be temporarily stored in the Happiness variable). Also added Shadow moves and type for it. Haven't actually made it a battle mechanic yet, though.

- Maps load from files, which is kind of the main point of most of the last week or so. And display properly. And are solid when they're supposed to be solid, etc. Also got most of the finer details, like large objects don't vanish when you get too far away from them, because it's kind of weird when you can see hills and mountains disappear into thin air.

- Skybox was having some issues, especially on larger maps. For whatever reason Game Maker doesn't like to render things more than 32,000 pixels away, meaning that there were large gaping holes appearing in the sky/fog in some places. It looked really weird. Also the part where it started clipping through the ground and flashing really annoyingly.

- Maximum fall speed removed. This was done earlier because the player was having an annoying habit of falling through solid objects if they were moving too fast, but now that I sort of know how gravity works that isn't much of a problem anymore.

- Oh yeah, fixed gravity again. I'm not exactly sure where it broke this time but apparently it's okay to walk through walls if you approach them from certain angles or something. There's probably about fifty more issues but I'll fix them when I find them.

- Third person camera doesn't pass through solid walls if you rotate the camera into a solid wall. Thank God. That looked really weird.

some more things I'll probably try to do in the near future    
 - Game achievements. I know I said I'd try to do this "soon" like two months ago, but I wouldn't be a true procrastinator if I actually did that. Eh, whatever, think I'll make it the first thing I do next because it's already half done and it sounds fun.

- Languages. I know how I'm going to do this now, it's just going to take a long time to find every text string in the game, let alone translate them.

- Shadow Pokémon in battle. It shouldn't take me more than a few hours to do, since they're really similar to normal Pokémon from the computer's point of view.

- Cutscene scripting. Not that it doesn't work as it is, but now that everything in the game is loaded from a file and I can't just stick code in a text file and execute it (well, I can . . . but it's a bad idea) there's a few dozen things I need to add to it.

- Make Player stats actually useful. Again, will go into more detail when I actually do that, probably.


Pictures    
1 and 2. Map loaded into game (first a third person)

3. "Here we see a wild Pokémon Trainer, in his natural habitat." Actually that was just me having fun with the camera.

4. Generated an almost infinite forest. 65536*65536 is probably more space than I'll ever come close to putting in a single map file.

5. What happens when you try to move the camera through a solid wall. It would look pretty normal in any normal computer game that uses actual 3D models for things, but sprites don't fare quite as well.

Dragonite April 18, 2015 11:40:01 PM

5 Attachment(s)
I did stuff.


The Mets have the second best record in baseball and a seven game winning streak. What is this madness.

So apparently Ludum Dare, the semi-annual 48 hour game, is this weekend. Would actually have joined this year if I didn't have a job taking up a whole quarter of my time (I work on weekends). Or a mom who's like "go outside" mostly every waking hour.

This one's theme is "unconventional weapons," too, and I can think of like fifteen different ways to look at that off the top of my head . . . dang.

Also started working on a tower defense engine recently. This'll be the first formal game I make that's actually my IP, for the little of it that can fit into a tower defense. I won't spend a whole lot of time on that until Pokémon is finished, but I like tower defense and working in another genre should be fun.

So, Pokémon.

Proof that i have no life    
[3/30/2015 16:21:30] 4.1.441 - Got rid of the crosshairs in third person and when !Player.free 
[3/30/2015 18:17:28] 4.1.442 - Achievements GUI set up (doesn't do anything).
[3/30/2015 18:26:05] 4.1.443 - Achievements GUI controls.
[3/31/2015 14:28:40] 4.1.444 - Give/clear achievements, save achievements to a file independant of the save file.
[3/31/2015 16:10:56] 4.1.445 - Achievement graphics.
[3/31/2015 16:59:52] 4.1.446 - Player takes HP damage when you fall from high places but doesn't die yet. Might increase fall damage later.
[3/31/2015 17:49:32] 4.1.447 - Changed goto statement so it makes more sense.
[4/2/2015 17:53:10] 4.1.448 - Fog looks better now; non RadialGraphic models get drawn now
[4/2/2015 18:17:41] 4.1.449 - Save file hands both positive and negative player coordinates now.
[4/3/2015 01:55:14] 4.1.450 - okay, NOW the game can save negative player coordinates. D:
[4/7/2015 15:02:53] 4.1.451 - Increased player hitbox so you don't appear to clip through walls quite as much.
[4/7/2015 15:58:49] 4.2.452 - Testing new gravity system.
[4/7/2015 17:32:06] 4.2.453 - Fixed gravity again. Physics now don't get wonky when there are lots of solid objects in the same place; no automatic climbing over short ledges, though.
[4/7/2015 17:51:20] 4.2.454 - Automatic climbing ledges works.
[4/12/2015 13:48:01] 4.2.455 - Signs load in new map format
[4/12/2015 13:52:38] 4.2.456 - Made some changes to the camera
[4/12/2015 13:56:17] 4.2.457 - Sign hitboxes
[4/12/2015 18:00:32] 4.2.458 - NPCs load from maps (but don't properly work yet)
[4/17/2015 17:13:50] 4.2.459 - better playerIsFacing
[4/17/2015 17:17:32] 4.2.460 - Camera pitch resets when you switch points of view
[4/17/2015 17:42:15] 4.2.461 - 3D distance applied to playerIsFacing
[4/17/2015 22:32:10] 4.2.462 - Mobile battle camera
[4/17/2015 23:18:32] 4.2.463 - Added a "user" field to game script commands so I can figure out which NPC is issuing them after they've been executed. Yeah, yeah, should Have been added from the beginning, I know.
[4/17/2015 23:47:30] 4.3.464 - Begin battles v3
[4/18/2015 01:16:15] 4.3.465 - Battle code has been gutted; commandUser is properly set
[4/18/2015 03:19:52] 4.3.466 - Direction the player is facing properly loads with save files (that's all, not very noteworthy)
[4/18/2015 14:34:04] 4.3.467 - Completely removed almost all of the battle code.
[4/18/2015 15:11:06] 4.3.468 - bg_main interface complete
[4/18/2015 15:24:20] 4.3.469 - bg_run (yes/no) interface complete
[4/18/2015 16:30:57] 4.3.470 - bg_fight interface complete
[4/18/2015 16:42:28] 4.3.471 - filled in the inventory interface things with placeholder text because i don't feel like torturing myself with that now
[4/18/2015 16:49:20] 4.3.472 - Got rid of the NPC ID crosshairs during battle
[4/18/2015 17:08:31] 4.3.473 - NPC Pokémon will load from text files now; fixed console text color/formatting
[4/18/2015 17:32:34] 4.3.474 - Pokémon sprites show up on the battle field properly (but not facing the right way)
[4/19/2015 01:53:01] 4.3.475 - Pokémon sprites face the right way during battle. yay.

- Added space for game achievements. They're persistent between save files but can be cleared. I don't know if anyone's actually going to play this long enough for that to be important, but it sounds good in theory.

- Player can take fall damage and die. Not the main focus of a Pokémon game but I guess it eliminates taking shortcuts off the top of cliffs?

- Made cutscene scripting somewhat less painful.

- Hopefully the last encounter I will ever have with my arch nemesis (more commonly known as gravity).

- Things like signs and non playable characters load from the map files properly. Interestingly, getting signs to work properly was more irritating than getting NPCs to work properly.

- Rewired the way talking to NPCs work. For whatever reason (and apparently I didn't notice until last week) you didn't actually have to be facing them to talk to them as long as you're close enough. Also the game now knows which object is issuing its internal commands; in the case of NPCs, they used to more or less just tell the game "start a trainer battle, kthxbai" and then the game would be like "okay, i have no idea who the player is battling against but I'll start one anyway." That explanation made about as much sense as the system did.

- Battle camera is treated like the third person overworld camera, meaning you can rotate 360 degrees around the scene and about 170 over it. And can zoom in and out. This allows for some very strange camera angles. Much more interesting than just looking up and down.

Here's a video demonstration:



- Deleted a lot of old battle code because it was getting almost as unweildy as it was in the old, 2D version from back on like page 1 of this thread. Only made some minor changes to the GUI code, though, so I don't have to spend two or three days doing nothing like that. Hooray for MVC.

- Battles take place on the overworld, this time with no noticeable impact on the game's frame rate. Had to change the way Pokémon sprites are displayed on the screen thanks to the change to the camera, but was able to get them to display properly again without too much trouble.

- Messed around with lighting a little in the map editor. It makes some parts look better, but also some parts look worse. I'm not sure if I'll keep it.

- In the NPC editor I made ages ago, it now checks the script you type into it and tells you when there's errors in it. Probably put more time into that than I should have, but it looks sort of neat. And let's face it, my typing accuracy is awful and I probably need to be notified when I screw something up.

- NPC editor can also generate a random name for the given trainer class, which is good because I suck at coming up with names. Fortunately that took slightly less time than the script checking thing.

Picture stuff    
1. Enhanced NPC editor.

2. Lighting applied to a map. Notice how the buildings look kind of okay but the trees do not.

3. Never let me decide the field of view in a video game (a normal FOV is like 45 degrees; I think this picture is 170).

4. Battles on the overworld.

5. More informative battle UI. Enhanced a couple other ones but imo this one looks the fanciest.


Future plans    
 - Get battles working again, obviously. Left appropriate space for double/tag battles, and I hope I don't decide to ditch them this time around. Would be fun to add a little variety.

- HMs/field interaction. Walls are now solid but you can still walk on water, which is a little weird. Plus the allure of 3D strength puzzles, the chance to torture people with ice puzzles, fun with dark caves, and a few other things.

- Do a LOT of map making. At this point I have physics working, cutscenes working and soon to have battles working, which are the main important things for this particular game. But that doesn't go very far if you only have a couple areas to walk around in; I'm expecting to spend at least a month, probably two on map making alone.

- Speaking of maps, the world map. You know, the Fly menu. After all the time I spent making 3D graphics work I don't want to just draw a picture of the region (now officially named "Solaris") and stick some names and labels on it, the way normal Pokémon games do. I have a rough idea of how it should look, but it's really not a priority now.


Let's see, was there anything else? As soon as I hit Post I'm probably going to think of a bunch of other things but I'll deal with that later. Kogaan fah etaak!

Dragonite May 2, 2015 01:35:01 PM

2 Attachment(s)
Graphics weekend


Few interesting things happened recently, I guess.

- Finally installed a C++ compiler, and started using it. Maybe I'll be a real computer scientist one day!

- Got a message from someone on YouTube who said they used one of my GM programming videos for a class of theirs. If you heard a loud noise on the 30th of April, that was probably my mind being blown.

- Somehow I started off rewriting battles two weeks ago and somehow got distracted and started working on, of all things, lighting and atmospheric effects. And somehow that ended up being far easier to work on than battles. I'm not sure how that works, but it does. Weird, right?

edit: POLYMORPHISM! That's the word that was on the tip of my tongue for a good part of the following. Of course I'm not able to remember it until like three days later, even if I use it every day D:

Spoiler Alert:    
[4/20/2015 02:28:35] 4.3.476 - Got rid of old and obsolete code/objects, and moved most of the long code strings to actual script files 
[4/20/2015 03:36:40] 4.3.477 - Priority processes correctly; Pokémon status HUDs don't show up on the battle screen until they, themselves are on the battle field
[4/21/2015 18:22:36] 4.3.478 - Enemy Pokémon AI improved
[4/21/2015 18:23:40] 4.3.479 - NPC Pokémon don't spawn with improper totals of HP (like current=120, max=100)
[4/22/2015 03:12:49] 4.3.480 - Targets of attacks correctly identified
[4/22/2015 03:20:55] 4.3.481 - Repositioned Pokémon battle HUDs.
[4/22/2015 03:24:32] 4.3.482 - NPCs are solid now
[4/22/2015 14:29:48] 4.3.483 - Battle loop
[4/22/2015 14:31:24] 4.3.484 - Battle move text
[4/22/2015 15:08:19] 4.3.485 - Battle TurnSet targets a position on the field rather than a specific Pokémon (in case of switches, etc.)
[4/22/2015 15:09:27] 4.3.486 - NPC Pokémon with empty name strings get reset to their species name
[4/22/2015 15:48:09] 4.3.487 - Type effectiveness counted.
[4/22/2015 18:08:54] 4.3.488 - Critical hits, fainting in battle detected by the game (but fainting is not accounted for)
[4/22/2015 18:23:20] 4.3.489 - Animated HP scroll bars
[4/23/2015 18:27:03] 4.3.490 - PP on damaging moves
[4/24/2015 17:50:39] 4.3.491 - PP deducted from status moves; mid-range HP color changed to orange instead of yellow; Move/PP/Pow/Acc text collor fixed
[4/25/2015 01:44:38] 4.3.492 - Game forces you to choose a replacement Pokémon when you faint (but doesn't do anything when you do)
[4/25/2015 03:02:39] 4.3.493 - Priority revised; replacing a dead pokémon counts as a "turn" on its own now
[4/25/2015 03:57:46] 4.3.494 - Switch/scouting menu linked together properly
[4/25/2015 04:14:51] 4.3.495 - When you replace a fainted Pokémon they show up at the right place on the battlefield, but the game treats that like a turn and the AI attacks you.
[4/25/2015 04:20:13] 4.3.496 - The correct Pokémon HUD shows up on the screen when you switch after fainting
[4/25/2015 04:21:48] 4.3.497 - The correct Pokémon's battle commands are shown on the screen after replacing a fainted Pokémon.
[4/25/2015 12:56:43] 4.3.498 - Game doesn't skip half a turn when you send someone out to replace a fainted Pokémon now.
[4/25/2015 14:27:02] 4.3.499 - Pokémon face the right way in battle, from all camera perspectives
[4/26/2015 17:09:16] 4.3.500 - When someone gets switched out of battle their sprite disappears
[4/26/2015 17:55:01] 4.3.501 - Changed the order of detecting fainted Pokémon, the AI no longer attacks you when you replace a dead body.
[4/26/2015 17:56:05] 4.3.502 - Game doesn't let you "switch" if the switch target is already on the battlefield.
[4/26/2015 18:05:55] 4.3.503 - i THINK the proper order of events happens when you switch (the AI attacks you)
[4/26/2015 18:09:00] 4.3.504 - All moves with undefined power/accuracy have their power/accuracy displayed as "---" on the fight HUD
[4/27/2015 02:51:08] 4.3.505 - Correct pokémon get switched into battle when you switch them into battle, but they don't seem to be taking damge or displaying properly.
[4/27/2015 17:02:49] 4.3.506 - Pokémon get sent out in the right turn order while switching in battle; trick room accounted for correctly; pokémon who switch into battle mid-turn take damage as they should. Battle cheers do not display properly.
[4/27/2015 17:10:22] 4.3.507 - Disabled the "press A to make the scrolling text automatically fill" because that often leads to input spamming and skipping lines entirely
[4/27/2015 17:26:35] 4.3.508 - Last update, applied to overworld text
[4/27/2015 17:35:18] 4.3.509 - Withdraw text in battle
[4/27/2015 17:38:48] 4.3.510 - Trimmed a bunch of unused graphics out of the main project file
[4/28/2015 15:46:32] 4.3.511 - Set up NPC reputation/NPC group reputation, doesn't do anything yet
[4/28/2015 15:52:05] 4.3.512 - Can scroll up and down in the console window (in case you want to read stuff more than 32 lines back, and stuff)
[4/28/2015 16:43:33] 4.3.513 - Save/load NPC reputation
[4/28/2015 17:59:07] 4.3.514 - returned the jump height to normal. guess i forgot to change it back after testing player death . . .
[4/29/2015 15:48:58] 4.3.515 - AI can now send in a Pokémon when they faint, but they get a free attack on you for some reason. Game hangs if you "win."
[4/29/2015 16:04:04] 4.3.516 - Game no longer jumps straight to the scouting screen after one of your pokémon faints (i/o cleared)
[4/29/2015 16:39:15] 4.3.517 - Game no longer runs 126 iterations of the battle loop when one of your Pokémon goes down, nor does it go into an infinite recursion and crash; it also doesn't skip over your turn when the AI sends out someone to replace a fainted Pokémon. THANK GOD.
[4/30/2015 03:10:38] 4.3.518 - Removed redundant battle continue command; end conditions of battles identified and make themselves known when they are reached; for some reason, when AI sends out a Pokémon you choose moves twice but the first one is canceled.
[4/30/2015 17:50:05] 4.3.519 - Lowered jump speed, corrected the offset on model collision masks
[4/30/2015 18:25:43] 4.3.520 - Sun/moon cycle
[5/1/2015 02:09:41] 4.3.521 - Fixed sky color between 7 and 9 PM; changed math for the day/night cycle
[5/2/2015 02:46:57] 4.3.522 - Stars show at night, vanish during the day; moon phases not working correctly
[5/2/2015 12:02:23] 4.3.523 - Moon phases :D
[5/2/2015 15:48:25] 4.3.524 - Added lighting
[5/2/2015 15:57:31] 4.3.525 - More detail on lighting
[5/2/2015 15:59:46] 4.3.526 - Lighting in battles

- I guess the nicest part of the above wall of text is that there's less code running during battles to do the same amount of work, so there's less space for things to go wrong. I don't like if/else blocks in code for more than two conditions, they're a pain to read (switch statements are only a tiny bit better), so now things like switching Pokémon, using items, running/forfeiting are all treated the same way normal moves like Thunderbolt and Swords Dance are. I want to say this is a few hundred fewer lines of code than it used to be, but that's just an estimate because I didn't really keep track of the total loc back in December, when I started with battles.

- Oh yeah, apparently there was some sort of weird recursion-ish cycle going on when your Pokémon fainted; it must have stopped itself somewhere because the game wasn't crashing and it worked the way it was supposed to, I only noticed it when I made it print something to the console and it went haywire. Scary stuff.

- Got rid of a few dozen graphical resources from the project file, which stopped being useful when I started loading maps from files instead of creating them in actual Game Maker. Only trimmed out about six kilobytes from the project file and the time it saves when you launch the game is almost zero, but I like to have clean resource trees.

- Did a few things to the game's console window, making it slightly more useful. And easier to read.

- Put a bit of math behind NPCs, in that they can form opinions about you depending on what you do/say to them. Your reputation somewhat carries over between an NPC and their "friends;" you beat a Bird Keeper in battle and all bird keepers will "think" slightly better of your battling skills, you tell a Youngster they're an idiot and all Youngsters will "think" you're a butt, and so on. Could be used to run branched dialogue trees or maybe alter the outcome of the story. Tbh I have a feeling it'll go mostly unused, but it's an interesting bit of game to have on hand.

the fun part

- Did some things to the atmosphere. The sun moves in real time, the moon moves opposite the sun and rotates its phases on a 28 day cycle, and there's a starry skybox. (The moon/phases system makes absolutely zero sense when you think about it. Quit your complaining.) Wrote a Python script to randomly generate a bunch of stars in the sky, which was kind of fun.

- Took the basic lighting I used in the map editor and copied it over to the actual game. It's a bit darker looking overall, but things like walls and buildings look a lot more well defined now.


That being said, this made the frame rate take a huge hit (from max 120+ to max 80), so I'll probably leave an option to disable it later.

Pictures    
1. The moon and stars.

2. Lighting. It looks kind of bizarre for certain things, particular wall faces that are angled away from you, but I'm willing to live with that in exchange for the shaded buildings and stuff.


I am so reusing this game engine when I'm done with Pokémon.

Dragonite July 7, 2015 09:33:30 PM

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I'm not dead!


Dang, it's been a good 2 months since I last wrote anything here. Hi, I'm Dragonite! I used to spam this thread on a somewhat regular basis. Not anymore, apparently.

Anyway, no, I haven't abandoned the game, either. Gutted a whole bunch of code again, this time making way for a fun little 3D collision DLL, which is even more fun than it sounds like, so I kind of stepped about 3 months back recently, but still working on it.

Also sort of revamped the way all game resources are stored, instead of storing strings containing the file paths of the models and textures (it was as unstable as you can imagine it being) everything's now stored in nice, neat lists and resources just point to indices in the lists and it's nice and organized. Also it's almost as big of a headache as SQL is, which it kind of unintentionally ended up mirroring, but the game should run more nicely now.

There's some of that weird changelog stuff, too, but I'll save that for the next time I post here, with actual information and stuff. For now, I'll just leave you with one of the rarest sights in video games: a clean toilet texture.

Dragonite July 26, 2015 10:25:01 AM

1 Attachment(s)
Learning tricks that the rest of the world has known for ages


Did a bunch of work recently, though somehow I don't have much more to show than the last time. I really should plan these projects of mine better, maybe then I wouldn't have to completely rewrite things every three months.

The nice part is that my map editor is about a thousand lines of code smaller than the last version that actually worked, and has fewer holes in it (that I've discovered so far).

Also now have the crazy idea to put the entire game on one map, rather than splitting it up into multiple ones. Figured out that old "use low polygon models when you're far away, or don't draw anything at all" trick. Picture below. Granted, the size of the models drawn doesn't seem to make a difference so the low polygon ones might not be the most useful thing ever, but if I've got thousands and thousands of things to draw it might. Will see.

Dragonite September 3, 2015 09:47:28 PM

wait, where did August go?


So I think I might have just, I dunno, slept through an entire month of my life or something. Anyway I've been doing . . . "stuff," which is basically:
- Rewired the way all of the entities in the maps are linked together, so they hopefully fall apart less frequently and are easier to modify when I want to add stuff. I kind of was doing this in the last post, but I've done a lot more of it since then.
- I think I might have had a world/physics testing program floating around last time too, but I've pretty much finished that, too. Could probably have just used the main game project file, like with battle code and stuff, but this is me trying to do physics and I really don't want to screw with that beast until I've finished it up. Walking around, gravity, mostly precise collision with objects, water you can swim in, etc.
- Oddly, water physics felt less like driving a pylon into your forehead than land physics did.
- NO GETTING STUCK IN WALL! (I think. I'm sure I'll find a new way to do it sooner or later, though.)
- Weather effects, a semi-realistic atmospheric haze when you go underwater, a decent amount of optimization (though, if you notice the frame rate in the following video, I didn't really take the time to do that properly here).



This isn't a map that I plan on actually using, this is just a map I threw together to try and show off as many working facets in the editor so far. And toilets, 'cause toilets.

All of the programs I used here were made by me, except for Game Maker itself, Windows, Python, and, uh, the Windows Command Line. Not sure if I'll ever put those up for download or not, things tended to go wrong when I did that in the past, we'll see.

Recently also taped together twenty (4*5) sheets of loose leaf and started drawing a really detailed map, since every map I tried to come up with on the fly so far have all came out terrible. It's nice to use the other side of my brain once in a while.

So, that.

Dragonite September 24, 2015 10:46:47 PM

4 Attachment(s)
Doing Lots of Nothing

So I have slightly under two hours to back up my computer, find a blank notebook (or make one), edit a video, compose a symphony and sleep for an hour before leaving to catch an airplane at some ungodly hour in the morning. So what am I doing? Writing up a silly dev log, of course!

I'm doing this at 2 AM local time, btw, so if you can't read this it's my problem, not yorus, but we'll pretend it isn't.

The good part is that we're going to a cousin's wedding over the weekend and I can probably sleep on the plane, the bad news is that it's outside in California and I'm basically wearing snow clothes. Also known as a suit and tie. A black suit and tie.

Anyway, so far most of September has been a lovely marathon of 40 hour video game work weeks on top of a normal job and probably a few other irl things I forgot to do. The interesting bits:

- Restarted the game again. Before you skewer me for being an incompetent programmer I didn't really restart, I just remade the engine so that the physics didn't suck, then remade the scripting stuff so scripting didn't suck, and . . yeah, and then copied and pasted and de-bad-ified a bunch of code I'd already written from the old one. Okay, now you can skewer me for being an incompetent programmer.

-But yeah, there was that little program I was using to play with physics, and then decided that rebuilding everything on top of that would be less effort than un-breaking the other one. Worth noting that I've done in, uh, two weeks this time around what took about seven months last time. Which is actually kind of surprising when you consider I spent all of one day fixing a bug caused by me not scoping a variable properly.

- Actually spent time and drew a bunch of arrows and illegible notes that probably described how stuff was supposed to work this time. So I guess now I'm at like Step #-25 on the road to making games, up from like Step #-26. End result is that most things can be changed by adding or removing one line of code (you don't even have to edit 60,000 different scripts to add 1 menu item!) which means you don't get as many crashes (the game just yells at you for doing something stupid and then pretends nothing happened in the first place) and it's not horrendously slow because most operations are O(constant) or O(small linear) instead of like O(n!!!!). The cutscene script stuff is semi-programming language-esque and not a bunch of statements that you throw at the wall. Probably would have known to do this like four years ago if I remembered to pay attention in any one of the many classes I took on this.

- I just learned my shirt has been on inside-out for like, a long time. Uh.

- Different languages. Of course I'm not actually going to translate anything but you can flip a switch and enjoy the five or six things I bothered to write in Dragon if you don't feel like doing more interesting things.

- Game doesn't lag when you have lots of control input because, uh, ??????

- Went to a Mets game. Against the Yankees (9-19-15). And they got crushed. Oh well.

- Did that 151 Pokémon challenge thing . . . blindfolded. It was fun, stupid and cringeworthy and I'd totally waste another 15 minutes of my life doing some other generation some day. Recording here.

- Progress stuff:
i have no idea how version numbers are actually supposed to work    
(better code rewrite)

[9/15/15 15:49:50] 5.0.539 - Version 5, go.
[9/15/15 16:12:56] 5.0.540 - Script comments.
[9/15/15 16:43:51] 5.0.541 - When no object specified in a script, World is used implicitely.
[9/15/15 17:36:55] 5.0.542 - Variable add, get, set, remove; clear console window when it gets flooded.
[9/16/15 15:19:58] 5.0.543 - Escape sequences (variables - $name)
[9/16/15 15:42:06] 5.0.544 - Escape sequences (game text - @name)
[9/16/15 16:05:51] 5.0.545 - Scroll through the console with arrow keys. Opening the console unlocks the mouse cursor.
[9/17/15 17:24:19] 5.0.546 - Made some different objects for the camera, so it can follow/be anchored on any character.
[9/17/15 18:19:26] 5.0.547 - Added commands to camera to move it around and stuff.
[9/19/15 03:27:39] 5.0.548 - Rudimentary Help command, to show all of an object's available scripts.
[9/19/15 03:28:54] 5.0.549 - Can turn the Player into an NPC, and NPCs into the Player.
[9/20/15 00:30:34] 5.0.550 - Refactored a bunch of variables so that they're more organized
[9/20/15 01:23:21] 5.0.551 - Can't create constant variables through CL anymore, that might cause some issues in other scripts.
[9/20/15 01:26:43] 5.0.552 - fixed a problem involving forgetting to attach the current Map to the console
[9/20/15 01:29:58] 5.0.553 - Added a few color constants.
[9/20/15 01:56:24] 5.0.554 - InvertY and UseController settings work
[9/20/15 16:19:35] 5.0.555 - Started the pause menu system.
[9/20/15 16:43:33] 5.0.556 - Basic menu programming finished (but the menu itself isn't filled in)
[9/20/15 16:51:07] 5.0.557 - Control code for the pause menu
[9/20/15 18:34:47] 5.0.558 - Options menu programming started (but doesn't work yet)
[9/21/15 18:35:19] 5.0.559 - Added and implemented a bunch of game settings. Language engine started, but not implemented yet.
[9/22/15 13:23:17] 5.0.560 - Language engine finished. Some options in the settings menu have been implemented.
[9/22/15 17:03:51] 5.0.561 - Expanded the language system.
[9/22/15 18:39:48] 5.0.562 - Implemented color sliders for various settings*.
[9/23/15 03:51:37] 5.0.563 - Option menu color picket is working properly; menu values are reset when you close the menu; some changes to the menu UI.
[9/23/15 18:35:00] 5.0.564 - Restructured menu. More code, but simpler to add and remove components.
[9/24/15 03:14:32] 5.0.565 - Removed a line of code that was preventing the movement code from executing.
[9/24/15 04:43:38] 5.0.566 - Cleaned up the controls on the pause menu, re-enabled the color picker.
[9/24/15 18:16:59] 5.0.567 - Added random quotes to the various pause menu screens, and made some slight changes to the UI again.
[9/24/15 18:21:51] 5.0.568 - Changed the random function to make it more random.

* fun fact, the first time I tried doing color sliders it took three or four days to get working, they lagged the game horribly and didn't work too well. This time they were started and finished while I was supposed to be getting ready for work, they don't break constantly and you don't get single-digit frame rates when using them. What am I doing with my life.


Actually started thinking about fully converting this to C++ some day. Not any day soon, mind you, but a lot of the annoying hacks I've had to come up with to get around Game Maker's limitations could be solved pretty quickly in C++/other languages.

tl;dr I've been busy.

Dragonite January 28, 2016 10:36:23 PM

2 Attachment(s)
I'm not dead!


So it's kind of been a really long time since I wrote anything in here, and for kind of good reason, I was kind of waiting until I had more visible/interesting progress on this thing which kind of probably won't be happening for a while, so anyway:

- Learned how to actually use regex, and by that I mean I can write one without copying and pasting from stackoverflow.

- The New York Mets won the . . . NL pennant??

- I never thought I'd get physically tired doing a let's play, and then I met Bravely Default, which I've been working on for almost a year and am still probably not especially close to the end. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

- Life's been . . . either stable or stagnant, depending on whether you're me or my mom.

- Pokémon game has been neither:

uhhhhhh    
The short version:

I restarted everything, again. PUT THOSE PITCHFORKS DOWN.

The long(er) version:

Took a lot of notes on why my code was literally fighting with itself the first five times, so I know what I can copypaste over, what I should set on fire and forget about and what bits of advice I want to give myself and then adamantly ignore. HEY, HEY, I SAID PUT THOSE PITCHFORKS DOWN.

The long version:

1. No, I'm not dead, and neither is PSU.

2. Finally did what I should have done in like 2013 and migrated to Game Maker: Studio. The (potential) benefits being:
- Less ancient game making software, meaning it can do a lot more things than 8.1 could, meaning there are way fewer things I need to implement via ugly my-teacher-would-have-slapped-me hacks. There's also one specific thing that is now going to be a pain in the face because of filesystem sandboxing and other archaic technical rubbish but I'll complain about that later.
- I MIGHT be able to port the game to not-Windows operating systems . . . IF I can convert all of the DLLs involved to Shared Objects without a visit to an asylum . . . IF GMS even decides to let me do that, which I have found no evidence that it actually does so far. (Maybe in GMS2, if it gets released within my lifetime.)(Also maybe an alien will visit my backyard tomorrow.)
- YoYo Compiler is a thing, which basically means the whole thing can be compiled straight into C++ and should be many, many times faster than the games running on the ludicrously slow legacy Delphi GM interpreter. Rendering graphics might actually be the speed bottleneck instead of collision checking, like they are for . . . pretty much every other game in existence that wasn't made in Game Maker. 60fps MIGHT be a thing, but don't count on it. I'd try for 1920x1080 but my monitor isn't that big so testing something like that wouldn't work too well.
- People can STOP BUGGING ME ABOUT UPGRADING MYSELF TO STUDIO, DEUS MEUS.
- Has dedicated functionality for game HUD stuff, i. e. I can actually make HUD stuff without developing the urge to punch a hole through my monitor.
- THEY FINALLY IMPLEMENTED ENUMS.
- Shaders are now supported (and I probably won't bother to use them).

3. Found a C++ compiler that actually works and converted some of the more general math to C++ and made a DLL out of it. (Which may actually make the whole thing execute more slowly, since YYC compiles Game Maker to C++ anyway.) Anyway, that also makes it easier to reuse the code for other stuff later on, but whatever.

4. Rethought the way game data interacts with other game data, abstracting it as much as possible. This is actually most of what I've been doing for the last three months. For you not-computer-scientists out there, "abstracting" basically means the only difference between a Pokémon and a Repel is whether it's grouped with other Pokémon or other Repels. Which has, on more than one occasion, led to interesting situations such as the first attachment at the bottom.

Also, since that includes most aspects of the game, not just obvious things like base stats, I don't have to hard-code a lot of things like move ranges, which are just as important but rarely get any attention.

5. The database/map editing stuff has been grafted onto the actual game stuff, and the way the two interact is . . . decently . . . not, uh, abhorrent. Which probably sounds a like a lot more effort than it's worth, until you remembered that my last attempt had about ten different programs for editing different things like moves and Pokémon, none of them worked the same way and trying to figure out which one was breaking the game on a daily basis was not my all-time favorite thing to be doing. Also, imma be honest, the first 3D map editor I made kind of got the job done but using it was about as fun as teaching calculus to preschoolers.

6. Consequently, I don't actually know if the terrain editor I spent like a week on in September is actually going to see much use. Oops?

7. Took the opportunity to change the 3D collision DLL I was using. P3DC was nice, but this unnamed thing has better structure and is (supposedly) a lot faster.

8. Wrote out regex that should match (most) swear words without flagging false positives like Cof*grigus. Probably not actually going to use it, though, because some certain people will probably shoot cannonballs through it before I even finish writing this post which makes that easily the biggest waste of a day I have had since forever.

9. A couple miscellaneous, largely unimportant systems like day/night and achievements. The latter took all of about twenty minutes to set up. It's amazing how overcomplicated I decided to make it the first time. Actually, that describes . . . pretty much everything I've ever done with a computer.

10. Temporary checks to make sure I'm not duplicating code, spaghettifying code, using twice as many words as I need to for splitting strings (yes, that actually happened), etc. Already solved an unbelievable number of problems before they actually had the opportunity to become problems. Related, the another nice thing about YYC is that it forces you to declare your variables before using them (though it doesn't seem to care if you actually do that in the right place or not . . .), meaning I'll actually know if I misspell the word "inventroy" or something. Usually.

10-b. Fixing a bug by removing about 200 LOC, nothing like it.

11. Probably going to burn the old cutscene scripting thing I had and replace it with an actual object-oriented, more flexible, less headache-y system. On paper that made scripting cutscenes look more like programming computers and less like herding cats, will talk more about that after spending more time with it. That's probably what the majority of the next three months will be spent on, at least until I get sidetracked with trying to simulate butterflies or something.

12. Wrote a story that I actually don't hate (on like the fiftieth attempt). It turns out that removing the "save the world" bit instantly makes everything much less lame, making the story about the characters instead of about the world exploding around the characters seems to make it a lot more interesting. Might have known that already if I ever paid attention in English class, but whatever.

13. Remembering to use //comments now, so when I decide to waste three days playing clicker games I can remember what I was doing when I get back. I wish I could tell you I made that up. Go look at my Steam play times if you don't believe me (actually please don't).

14. Which Pokémon conventions get preserved and which Pokémon conventions get chucked is up for discussion. So far I'm probably going to keep the traditional 8 Gym format, but HMs are almost certainly going to be abolished, though Surf and Fly are going to be re-purposed so they actually do what it sounds like they do. Also might get rid of the Bicycle because I'm bad at spriting and pretty much everything else I can get from various character generators.

15. The actual game part of the game currently looks like attachment 2, at the bottom. Looks amazing, I know.

Actually plan on keeping it looking like that until most of the underlying systems are working. Which is the technical way of saying it'll probably be a while before I have more stuff that people will actually be interested in, like, an actual playable game and stuff. My minimum goal is going to be the better-looking parts of the screenshots I had a while ago, but that's probably a while off.

16. The old "version control" thing I had won't work anymore thanks to changes in the way GM stores its project files, meaning I'll either have to think of another way or actually learn how to use Git (the horror). Yeah, probably the former.

An interesting fact: The date created timestamp on the project file is November 14, 2015, so I've been working on this for a little less than two months and it's about as functional, easier to work with, prettier and (so far) harder to break than the 2D version I originally posted about back in 2013 (?), which was the culmination of nearly two years of work. Really hope that pace keeps up, I might actually finish before the heat death of the entire universe.

Another interesting fact: I used to kind of avoid Pokémon Essentials like the plague, and now I literally have buttons that import base stats and moves and items and stuff from their data files. And I'll probably be "borrowing" a bunch of AI code and stuff from it. Heh.


Oh yeah Magfest is in 3 weeks, if I'm lucky I'll remember this thread exists when I get home from that and write stuff about it.

Dragonite February 18, 2016 08:42:15 PM

Magfest, Day 1


If I recall last year's little trip down the coast was a little more chaotic than it could have been, involving a lot of forgetting things and not realizing until (a) I was like three exits down the turnpike or (b) standing in one of the rooms waiting for a panel to start. This year went a little nicer, did the whole drive without running into traffic until like the last half hour and actually not forgetting anything important (only a book of autographs, a working pen and a stick of chapstick). So that was nice.

Interesting people I have run into:
- Saw MasaeAnela in the hallway, but didn't stop to talk because I was trying to run around looking for the badge pick-up place (why can it not just be the same place every year . . .)
- 1Pvs2P, gaming podcast; I don't really have much to do with podcasts myself, though a lot of the things they talked about were relevant to other Internety things, too
- Game Maker dev I was talking to on Reddit a bit a few days ago about the indie game showcase, who made a thing called Harvested. Didn't get to play it too much, but I'll probably be back later on, it's fun to be able to nerd out about Game Maker face-to-face with people
- ELLEN McLAIN, THE VOICE OF GLaDOS (and a few other things)

No sign of Eyan, Turtwig, any of the other Runaway Guys, Marriland, Extra Credits or any one of the fifty or so musicians I follow who are supposed to be here, though. But a bunch of them will be on panels I'll probably decide to watch, so tomorrow should be fun!

Dragonite February 20, 2016 10:36:34 PM

Magfest, Days 2 and 3


There's one more day of the convention but the only main thing I'll be doing tomorrow is the closing ceremony, so since I'm sitting around waiting for some video to process right now I might as well write this . . . well, now.

Been busy. Panels (and similar stuff) I visited:

- Extra Credits, don't even know what to call it, I guess Q&A except that implies there was some kind of order/organization. It was great. There probably wasn't anything too controvorsial in this year's, but I was out of the room for about a half hour and haven't gotten to re-watch that part of my recording yet.
- Horror Writing, wasn't originally planning on sitting in on this one but I was already in the room when it started, didn't feel like getting up and moving (this was after midnight) and wanted a word with one of the people on the panel anyway.
- OCRemix, not much to say about them. They talked a lot about upcoming album projects/ones that they've already finished but I somehow missed hearing about. Well, I guess I know what I'm listening to on my drive home.
- Future of Gaming, that one was kind of surreal in that a lot of people seem to be predicting that gaming as we know it will be changing a LOT . . . SOON. We'll see, I guess.
- Games as Therapy, my mom's actually a physical therapist who sometimes works with people who use Xbox Kinects to recover from strokes and stuff, though this one was more about using board games for mental kinds of therapy. I'm not a board game person but it was pretty interesting to hear people throwing around the names and rules of different board games like I would throw around Pokémon Hidden Abilities.
- Emotion in Games, or also known as "Why Undertale Works." More games need to pay attention to that kind of stuff, honestly.
- GTFO: Women in Gaming, documentary (with a bit of commentary from the lady who made it). What it sounds like. Yes, I recorded the commentary, yes, I'm going to post it, yes, I am looking forward to keeping score of how many people tell me to go die in a hole because I'm "destroying gaming" or whatever this time. Hey, do we still have that Debate section open? :D
- Pokémon Mythos, how local Japanese legends/literary tropes influenced the design of most of the Pokédex. Apparently the only Pokémon panel at the entire convention this year.
- Thrown Controllers, game show. This year's ending was one for the ages. Also (finally) put together a formal collection of autographs from Tim, Jon, Emile, Masae and Lucahjin (who I guess would be "Reese" if I really wanted to list first names).

Somewhat unusual for me being in National Harbor for video game parties, the weather was actually nice. Spent a good amount of time just walking around outside when I didn't have anywhere else that I particularly wanted to be. First two years I went it was FRIGID, this time I was walking around for a while in just a tee shirt.

Streetpass out the nose. Still currently having problems with the Internet connectivity bit of my 3DS but I could only go about ten seconds all weekend without that little green light flashing. Played Bravely Default a bit while waiting for panels to start using almost exclusively summons I'd collected, building up Norende nonsensically fast, etc. Also learned how to actually send people moves in that game, so maybe my main file's team of level 70s will actually be of use to a few early-game players now. Haven't got any SD card in my 3DS now because those are all being consumed by digital camcorders right now, but I'd imagine (finally) finishing off that blasted puzzle thing would have been fairly easy, too.

Still no sign of any Eyans or Turtwigs or any of the other people I wanted to meet, though, which is a shame. Got a few more hours to maybe do that, but I guess it's not the end of the world if I don't.

Apparently there are other places to eat around here than that one hamburger place. Which is good, since every time I tried to go there so far the line has been out the door.

Right arm is now VERY SORE. Wouldn't expect that considering that I remembered my tripod this year, but I guess using my hand to pan around and zoom in and out takes its toll after about four hours.

Have video of various things rendering right now as I write this, so probably some time later on I'll link some of that stuff here, in case anyone wants to see controllers being thrown or something.

Post script: Did manage to meet Eyan/Collette at the very end, though. Didn't get to talk for very long, but better than nothing. Both of them seemed pretty tired :/

Dragonite March 13, 2016 02:46:38 PM

Okay, more or less scrapping the terrain editor I mentioned a few times earlier, I'm just going to leave this here right now. Hopefully I'll finally be able to write more about this soon-ish (and I know I've been saying that for about two years now) :P

Dragonite April 27, 2016 01:56:08 PM

So I wanted to have this done like two weeks ago, I guess you can blame Reddit for the fact of that not happening or something. Anyway, here's a video of NPCs and stuff:



No sound, except for the message tone that totally wasn't recorded straight off a HeartGold game.

There's also a download link in the description over there, if you want to mess around with it yourself. I recommend reading the file that says "important things" on it.

If not, basically, NPCs are now a thing. Again.

Dragonite May 7, 2016 09:00:24 PM

Another small-ish update. Download in video description.

Did a few more things with the menus, and also added (a) door that can open and close properly. And a moon, that looks acceptable now but runs in pseudo-real-time so it may or may not break into pieces a couple phases from now.

Right click/hit B/whatever the equivalent on other controllers is to throw a ball around to test how it collides with things.


Dragonite May 21, 2016 08:53:24 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Not a "real" update, but I got a few things done - most importantly, figured out how to get rid of the annoying blurry pixel effect in front of NPCs and other transparent textures.

No download or fancy video today, but it did also finally occur to me to manually write down things when they get done:

the wall of text hath returned    
1:21 AM 4/30/2016	Started keeping a progress log. Which I really should have been doing from the start.
1:21 AM 4/30/2016 Added more settings, implemented a few of them, wrote down instructions for adding more in the future.
1:22 AM 4/30/2016 Made an actual distinction between Player and NPCs. Made programming inventory and a few other things somewhat less cumbersome.
1:57 AM 4/30/2016 Fixed the thing where sea level vanishes if you turn the starbox off.
2:09 AM 4/30/2016 Pokétch is now invisible while in the pause menu and talking to NPCs, so the screen is less cluttered
3:13 PM 4/30/2016 Added TMs to Pokémon base data
6:02 PM 4/30/2016 Added status messages at the top of the screen, in case you don't want them at the bottom for whatever reason
4:04 PM 5/1/2016 "Enter" now works as the A button (in addition to E and Left Click)
4:38 PM 5/1/2016 "Chuck" option now works in the inventory
5:19 PM 5/1/2016 Can't select "give item to Pokémon" if you have no Pokémon
4:47 PM 5/4/2016 Load Abilities, Pokémon Base Data, Items and Moves from a file instead of declaring them in GML (thank god)
10:10 PM 5/4/2016 Created Trainer Classes
5:16 PM 5/5/2016 All Pokémon are linked to their base form (i.e. Venusaur -> Bulbasaur)
6:25 PM 5/5/2016 Load Types fom file instead of declaring them in GML
6:48 PM 5/5/2016 fixed some problems with loading types from file (and with the way types work, in general)
12:45 AM 5/7/2016 implemented the moon (properly this time)
1:30 AM 5/7/2016 random team generation (not accounting for levels/evolution)
12:03 PM 5/7/2016 more random team generation ("pokémon species rule" was trying to compare the wrong values and not working)
11:45 PM 5/7/2016 doors work, and you can bounce a ball of things to test physics (released 7.0.0.1)
2:33 AM 5/8/2016 Re-enabled the terrain editor; entity "render distance" setting gets properly set to its model's default render distance setting
1:47 AM 5/9/2016 Terrain editor: option to only save triangles that are above water (z>=0) to the model, to save space
2:32 AM 5/9/2016 Terrain editor: added variant of "average" function that will only bring the ground to z=0 (and not below)
5:10 PM 5/9/2016 Re-enabled object editor
5:45 PM 5/9/2016 Object editor: Took out a few broken things (object scaling), fixed others (move to contact with floor), simplified some of the controls/made them work with gamepad. Why I want to make this work with a gamepad, I have no actual idea.
9:46 PM 5/9/2016 Added fences. LOTS of fences.
1:37 AM 5/10/2016 Object editor: snap to grid.
12:27 PM 5/10/2016 Object editor: make an object solid or not solid.
6:07 PM 5/10/2016 Object editor: make an object solid, not solid or random encounter space. (Include things not traditionally thought of as random encounter spaces.)
12:20 AM 5/11/2016 Started the geometry editor.
4:41 PM 5/11/2016 Geometry editor: boxes formed act as solid. Mostly. Except for the left and right (dx=0) faces. I don't know either.
5:24 PM 5/11/2016 Ball(s) "collide(s)" with the ground (z=0) again.
10:31 PM 5/11/2016 Changed the way "render distance" setting for objects works. Objects just disappear after distance to camera > render distance rather than drawing their collision models instead, since that just looked really weird and had debatable impact on performance anyway, and objects set to "Long" CAN disappear if you get far enough away from them.
1:54 AM 5/12/2016 Object editor: Add, Select, Move, Floor and Rotate functions all work
2:03 AM 5/12/2016 Object editor: Delete function works. Almost forgot about that. Kind of important.
2:20 AM 5/12/2016 Object and Geometry editor: switch to one mode when you click on an instance of the other.
2:22 PM 5/12/2016 Geometry editor: collisions for geometry works properly; geometry is created with a small buffer so you stop moving just in front of a face rather than exactly with your face/camera in the wall.
4:51 PM 5/12/2016 Object and Geometry editor: no longer crashes sometimes when switching modes
11:32 AM 5/13/2016 Object and Geometry editor: camera zoom and rotate functions no longer share the same buttons.
11:36 AM 5/13/2016 Made controller d-pad up/down/left/right map to the actual up/down/left/right keys on the keyboard (why did I not do that earlier?)
11:38 AM 5/13/2016 Geometry editor: removed rotate around x/y axes because they weren't working properly, breaking things and probably wouldn't get used too often anyway
2:49 PM 5/13/2016 Added a grid at the player's feet to make properly aligning objects in the world a bit easier.
3:36 PM 5/13/2016 Hold down B to throw the physics ball harder. Doesn't make testing things a whole lot easier, but kind of fun.
4:28 PM 5/13/2016 Geometry editor: fixed the floor function, so that it works as intended when (z2<=z)
5:30 PM 5/13/2016 Geometry editor: implemented HUD, and most clickable functions (except "merge")
12:05 AM 5/14/2016 Moved some of the old general math functions that used to be in a DLL for some reason to GML code
12:13 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: finally got the "convert cube to triangles" part right, now need to find out why it's being drawn in all black
12:25 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: fixed the problem with textures not working properly.
12:49 AM 5/14/2016 Changed the way the ocean layer works; water settings are no longer a property of Maps, but the entire game. Added the cave water tile (I think is from HGSS?)
1:02 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: took out rotation around z axis, also, since it'd be an unbelievable pain to implement now (i like trigonometry as much as the next nerd, but this would require staring at an entire amorphous wall of it for like an hour)
1:07 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: Fixed a bug with assigning top/side tiles. Geometry objects are now highlighted in red when selected, the same way regular objects are.
1:15 AM 5/14/2016 Object editor: NPCs are now highlighted in red when selected, as normal objects are.
2:01 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: Refined the floor function, so that a block will now come to contact with ANY point in the collision world that touches its bottom face, rather than just its four corners. In other words, I can now precisely make heavy stone cubes slam down on NPCs' heads when I get bored during testing.
11:48 AM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: show/hide different faces
12:21 PM 5/14/2016 Fixed jumping. Like two lines of code were in the wrong order. Grr.
2:55 PM 5/14/2016 NPCs are now drawn with their feet at (z), rather than slightly below that so that their feet clip through the ground. Also made them slightly smaller so that they look less weird compared to doors and stuff.
6:45 PM 5/14/2016 Different entities can be selected by clicking with F5 to add to the list to be merged into one model
10:41 PM 5/14/2016 Geometry editor: merge works, for collision models. the main, properly textured part doesn't work, and the top part saves incorrectly.
1:08 AM 5/15/2016 Geometry editor: top part saves correctly, main part has surpassed gravity physics as the most evil thing in game design. New blocks are now created with the same texture as the previous one.
1:11 AM 5/15/2016 Object editor: non longer adds a dummy model when you click on one of the separators in the object list.
2:11 PM 5/15/2016 Scrubbed out the main.vir file, got rid of some information that would never be used, corrected Egg Groups, accidentally erased Catch Rates, saved strings with one byte per character instead of two
2:22 PM 5/15/2016 Got rid of a bunch of unneeded GBinFile functions.
2:41 PM 5/15/2016 Got rid of a bunch of unneeded collision functions.
2:00 AM 5/17/2016 Object, Geometry editor: added a "locked" variable for map entities, so they can't accidentally be picked up and chucked around
2:38 AM 5/17/2016 Object editor: can designate entities as "interactable" or not
12:56 PM 5/17/2016 Scripting: implemented a "wait" script
10:15 PM 5/17/2016 Scripting: fixed the "wait" script
11:30 PM 5/17/2016 Removed a bunch of stuff related to shaders; disappointed that I can't use them now, but getting them to work in 3D is a pain and there are no tutorials I can find on them
1:11 AM 5/18/2016 Scripting: playing music works
2:51 AM 5/18/2016 Game now keeps a register of NPCs (as opposed to just having a collection of interactable Actors you can talk to), so that they can refer to each other and "remember" how many times you've defeated them and things like that.
10:37 PM 5/18/2016 Different types of objects can have different code for displaying their name under the player's cursor.
1:58 AM 5/19/2016 Added a few more types of solid objects.
3:49 PM 5/19/2016 Increased the whole game's distance factor by 32 (before, 1 pixel unit = 1 meter, now 32 pixel units = 1 meter). Eliminated most of the z fighting, in exchange for most of the lighting effects.
3:32 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: can split a Geometry block into objects like trees or flowers that are basically just repeating textures for purposes of landscape.
5:32 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: squished it together with the Geometry editor. Still going to refer to it as its own thing here, though.
5:40 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: works without having to force the Geometry block to be outwards-facing now
5:45 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: works with variable sizes/number of branches now
5:50 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: have not changed anything, but proved to work with multiple selections of texture now
9:32 PM 5/21/2016 Radial editor: "texture select" works, removed the problem where textures would get painted on upside-down if they were selected bottom-to-top instead of top-to-bottom
12:23 AM 5/22/2016 disabled texture_set_interpolation, because it caused some REALLY annoying AA effects on semi-transparent textures
12:30 AM 5/22/2016 Added a textured rectangle behind the text that pops up when you face an NPC, etc. to make it easier to read.

Known Errors, Deal With Them Later:
- Fletchling/Fletchinder/Talonflame's evolutionary family is not properly linked
- Whitewash fences have some annoying texture mapping problems are are most likely going to need to be remade from scratch
- Accidentally deleted the catch rate information for all Pokémon while fixing main.vir (I think they all got set to zero)
- Gatehouse collision model: the ramp representing the stair doesn't work properly for some reason
- Actually, a LOT of models need to be remade; collision "walls" should be thicker than the visual walls, so that you can't get too cloes to them

Other things I need to do:
- Make a way of patching errors in main.vir that's easier than re-saving it and copying it back to the Included Files
- Get rid of the "food" variables of Items in main.vir (they're already gone from the program files)
- Implement scr_walk, scr_stop, scr_turn

Dragonite June 12, 2016 12:38:59 PM

Wow, it's been a really long time since I've actually used this thread as a "blog," rather than "a place to copypaste my changelog." As I like to say, life is dumb, so that's why they invented computer science.

i wont be offended if you don't actually read this part    
2:09 AM 5/22/2016	Fixed the disappearing cusor when walking around like regular on the overworld. Fixed the way NPCs turned incorrectly when you talk to them. Updated a bunch of textures.
2:25 AM 5/22/2016 Object editor: fixed the "move" command
2:36 AM 5/22/2016 The starbox got corrupted? Somehow? I fixed it?
4:22 PM 5/22/2016 Radial editor: now saves a collision rectangle for the thing it generates
5:08 PM 5/22/2016 Radial editor: made the settings controls more intuitive; fixed a bug involving the texture selection acting really strangely
5:14 PM 5/22/2016 Radial editor: "density" setting implemented, though it does not generate an accurate collision mask and I have no interest in making it do so (for now)
9:58 PM 5/22/2016 Radial editor: now in complete, working order
12:53 AM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: saves collision information without the need to be split into triangles via gmmc (apparently my collision dll doesn't recognize non-triangle shapes in the models :| )
1:40 AM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: can disable textures now, if you don't want them used.
1:47 AM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: individual units are generated with a random rotation, to make it look a little less neat and orderly and unnatural.
1:52 AM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: added a setting so that units on the perimeter will always spawn, regardless of the densitys setting. Useful for solid things like treelines, to avoid having invisible walls.
1:34 PM 5/23/2016 Fixed the problem where NPCs' feet clip through the floor - I could have sworn I fixed that already? Also you can now specify NPC sprite sets to use when creating them through code.
2:01 PM 5/23/2016 Implemented Nurse Joy, sort of.
2:02 PM 5/23/2016 Removed the test grid, because it wasn't working the way it's supposed to and I wasn't using it anyway.
5:29 PM 5/23/2016 Added more character sprites, removed the need for characters to have both left and right-facing sprites (the right-facing set is never used anyway, since the game just mirrors the left-facing one)
8:20 PM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: random rotation around Z axis is now an on/off option, since it looks good for some graphics (flowers) and really weird on others (trees)
8:43 PM 5/23/2016 Radial editor: now generates units without scaling, displaying things at thir proper size and height regardless of spacing.
12:26 AM 5/24/2016 Radial editor: made some grass clusters and tree clusters. Fixed the "always spawn on perimeter" option.
12:44 AM 5/24/2016 Editor: can save settings, though it probably won't work without compiling executable thanks to dumb GM sandboxing.
12:54 AM 5/24/2016 Refactored "actors" to "cutscenes." Nothing exploded.
2:42 AM 5/24/2016 GOT SHADERS WORKING AND RE-IMPLEMENTED THEM! Lots of the code to make them work is still placeholder nonsense, though, the only one that's actually currently working is "brightness/contrast."
2:13 PM 5/24/2016 Finished implementing shaders, but haven't tested any
3:33 PM 5/24/2016 Fixed a game-breaking bug with scr_do_if, and implemented tests for most of the shaders
8:32 PM 5/24/2016 Added a bunch of signs. I mean, a LOT of signs. Stop, Yield, Routes 1..31, and an "unpainted" route sign.
4:37 PM 5/25/2016 "Locations" system is working. Each 1024z1024 zone on maps have a "location" assigned to them, which would dictate what random encounters you can run into and whatnot.
5:17 PM 5/25/2016 Graphic now pops up in the upper-left of the screen when you enter a new location.
11:23 PM 5/25/2016 Severely nerfed the jump height. This was very badly needed.
11:25 PM 5/25/2016 Stars are now drawn much farther away, so they don't ever appear in front of nearby objects.
2:03 AM 5/26/2016 Made the first-person camera sit slightly /behind/ the player so it's a little harder to clip it through walls weirdly.
2:50 AM 5/26/2016 Started updating the pause system; Main, Save, Settings and Quit menus now run on their own variables (not the hard-to-read "pause_primary_n" and whatever)
3:10 AM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: Inventory main screen
4:20 PM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: Inventory main, category contents, item actions and "chuck" screens work (and have the cursor positioned properly)
4:32 PM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: Draw the item pocket's icon next to the name in the inventory.
8:29 PM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: Pokémon main, action, switch, summary screens works
8:49 PM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: implemented "un/register to L and R for key items," but can't test because I accidentally removed Key Item data
9:53 PM 5/26/2016 All those textures I had the game generating on-the-fly are now normal UI backgrounds, reducing the number of required texture swaps by quite a bit and removing about 200 lines of code that i'd otherwise have to maintain
11:00 PM 5/26/2016 New Pause System: got rid of the "back" button on the Pokémon Summary screen, since it just seems a bit out of place
11:05 PM 5/26/2016 Apparently the "nickname Pokémon" script was assigning the nickname as the name of the entire Pokémon species, rather than the name of a specific Pokémon. Oops.
1:57 AM 5/27/2016 Object editor: added "is textured?" option, so some models can just be drawn without textures. Lighting can get a little weird on those, though.
2:15 AM 5/27/2016 New Pause System: can give items to Pokémon correctly, although it doesn't ask you if you want to switch if the Pokémon already has an item (it just does it automatically) or confirm that you gave it other than retreating to the Items menu.
12:26 PM 5/27/2016 New Pause System: "give" option from Inventory works properly, though the cursor position does not update the way it should
12:46 PM 5/27/2016 New Pause System: "give" option works, and the cursor position updates correctly
7:06 PM 5/27/2016 Updating a bunch of models, removing unneeded polygons, going with a more paper-y graphics style since it's easier to make and easier to maintain
1:35 AM 5/28/2016 Object editor: Created "Object Templates." Basically sets of objects that can be expected to be created over and over with little/no variation, so just the template can be added, randomized and forgotten about.
2:07 AM 5/28/2016 Object editor: Templates work and can split themselves into their component models properly. Honestly surprised this took less than an hour of real time. Will need to be extended in the future to allow for the creation of things like NPCs and item balls and stuff.
4:38 PM 5/28/2016 Object editor: shows the number of triangles in the model and collision model when you add it, and a range of triangles for model templates. Also shows a short description of the model templates when you mouse over them in the menu.
6:09 PM 5/28/2016 Object editor: No longer crashes when turning a template into its component parts and the cursor is still over the base model.
7:21 PM 5/28/2016 Object editor: implemented "summary" for object list, like the template list
3:51 PM 5/29/2016 New Pause System: draw item sprites next to their names in the inventory (although i haven't added any sprites yet and it actually just draws a square with an X in it for the time being)
7:33 PM 5/30/2016 Made the "render distance" option in the Settings menu actually do something
8:52 PM 5/30/2016 Made "movement sensitivity" option in the Settings menu actually do something
10:15 PM 5/30/2016 Put flavor text in the Settings menu. Some of the text is more helpeful than others.
12:54 PM 5/31/2016 Objects remove themselves from the collision world if they're sufficiently far away from the player and add themselves back in when they get closer.
1:06 PM 5/31/2016 Pause system: draw a tomestone where the Pokémon's sprite should be if Nuzlocke is enabled.
1:39 PM 5/31/2016 Put flavor text in the main menu. And I wonder why I never get anything done.
3:39 PM 5/31/2016 New Pause System: Pokémon\Item\Take works, both when you do and don't actually have anything to hold.
5:32 PM 5/31/2016 Apparently I forgot to enable text wrapping when talking to NPCs.
6:04 PM 5/31/2016 New Pause System: added a way for items like Trainer Card, Pokédex, Books to take over control from the pause menu when "used" without resuming play
12:06 AM 6/1/2016 Explicitely set the vertical alignment on crosshair text to "middle."
12:15 AM 6/1/2016 Implemented Play Time statistic.
12:20 AM 6/1/2016 Key Item: Trainer Card
12:48 PM 6/1/2016 Trainer card: Can edit the quote on the back
1:42 PM 6/1/2016 Pause system: fixed a bug where the game would crash if you moused over the "back" option in the Pokémon menu with a full team
1:44 PM 6/1/2016 Fixed the text alignment on input strings when talking to NPCs.
4:01 PM 6/1/2016 Fixed the game freezing when trying to assign the player an invalid random quote.
4:49 PM 6/1/2016 Pokémon Seen/Caught updates properly when Pokémon are obtained and the Pokédex is already in your inventory
4:54 PM 6/1/2016 Pokédex will automatically scan your party and storage for Pokémon and register them as "caught" when obtained
5:23 PM 6/1/2016 Added option for metric/imperial measurements, since there's usually not enough space on the screen to display both.
9:48 PM 6/1/2016 Key Item: Pokédex
6:33 AM 6/2/2016 The Java parser was screwing up the base stats and writing the HP value for Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Special Defense and Speed. Fixed that immediately.
6:41 AM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: displays number, name, height, weight (rounded), species, description and stars for base stats
12:55 PM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: can navigate by clicking on the number and typing
12:59 PM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: displays type
1:24 PM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: can navigate by clicking on the name and typing
3:45 PM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: opens to the correct entry when first used (instead of a null entry), shows a sidebar with names that can be navigated by clicking on a name (or "???" if not yet seen)
4:09 PM 6/2/2016 Pokédex: complete except for displaying the Pokémon picture, cries, alternate forms, etc.
3:31 PM 6/3/2016 New Pause System: Can jump go straight to a Pokémon's pokédex entry from the Pokémon menu
5:59 PM 6/3/2016 Added an NPC type to represent "items;" this functionality COULD be done with the current NPC system, but it'd be nice to have a one-line-of-code solution to adding items to the world
8:21 PM 6/3/2016 Items delete self from game world on being talked to
8:23 PM 6/3/2016 Got rid of ray_mouse variable, since it was redundant (ray_mouse==(ray_object!=noone))
8:41 PM 6/3/2016 Items add selves to inventory, display the appropriate messages and remove selves from world when deleted.
8:51 PM 6/3/2016 Ground items can specify their orientation, or will otherwise spawn with a random orientation.
8:55 PM 6/3/2016 Enabled ground items to be hidden
12:28 PM 6/4/2016 Some formatting on item names when you pick them up (pluralization, etc)
12:50 AM 6/6/2016 Dowsing machine works; hidden items become represented by stars blinking randomly around where the item should be. May implement some kind of "settings" to affect the way hidden items are rendered in the future.
1:25 PM 6/6/2016 Increased look sensitivity
1:27 PM 6/6/2016 Dowsing Machine object UI
6:14 PM 6/6/2016 Scripting: scr_turn (sort of)
1:25 PM 6/7/2016 Removed redundant code for direction/zrotation
1:52 PM 6/7/2016 scr_turn is less fancy (turns in t=0 instead of making the target spin) but is less of a headache to use
2:08 PM 6/7/2016 Cursor centers when cutscene scripts finish.
2:30 PM 6/7/2016 scr_walk and scr_stop.
2:32 PM 6/7/2016 scr_jump.
2:36 PM 6/7/2016 Renamed all_items[Items.none] to "No Item," so it displays properly when used as a placeholder
10:47 PM 6/7/2016 Can free the camera during cutscenes.
2:53 PM 6/8/2016 Object editor: Model Template list no longer crashes when scrolling in it (caused by both the Model list and Template list using the same index variable)
3:18 PM 6/8/2016 Object editor: splitting a template into its component objects ignores the world edit snap setting, which was causing some components to spawn in the incorrect location.
9:59 PM 6/11/2016 Semi-implemented Nurse Joy. Added the Pokémon Center model(s).

Known Errors, but Deal With Them Later:
- Fletchling/Fletchinder/Talonflame's evolutionary family is not properly linked
- Accidentally deleted the catch rate information for all Pokémon while fixing main.vir (I think they all got set to zero)
- Gatehouse collision model: the ramp representing the stair doesn't work properly for some reason
- Actually, a LOT of models need to be remade
- Item pocket data accidentally got erased when writing to the binary file. Go through and replace it some time. For now they'll all go in the General pocket.
- Bridge2 (the suspension one) is so big that it leaves the bounds of Model Creator. That could be a problem.
- Most models probably need to be recreated anyway. Even though they're not visible, triangles in walls need to be double-sided so that normals respond properly.
- Change the file extension of main.vir, since apparently antivirus software stores virus information in .vir files and that may cause problems for some people.

Other things I need to do:
- Make a way of patching errors in main.vir that's easier than re-saving it and copying it back to the Included Files
- Get rid of the "food" variables of Items in main.vir (they're already gone from the program files)
- Get rid of the "Required," "consumable" and "script" variable of Items
- bridge02 does not have a "top" model
- If nuzlocke mode = wedlocke, individual Pokémon need to track a "spouse" and should probably draw it on the status screen.


Which is to say, things have started to get slightly more interesting. Videos:

Graphical Shaders
The Pokédex
The Dowsing Machine

I've also started recording myself making 3D models for various things, which looks sort of interesting when played back at 10X speed, I guess.

Pokémon Battle Arena
Pokémon Center

So, yeah, game's actually starting to sort of come together for the first time in over a year, with a few useful systems like Key Items and cutscene scripting in place. Hopefully I'll be able to keep making progress as time goes on, we'll see.

kakashidragon June 15, 2016 01:42:07 PM

Who are main trainers for your game? I dont i seen u post those yet?

Dragonite June 15, 2016 02:03:17 PM

Yeah, idk really what I'm going to do for the main characters. I have the ability to make NPC sets for RPG Maker, but unfortunately those people don't really blend well with the Gen 5 NPCs, and I don't have the time/patience to learn how to make sprites myself so that's not really an option. I much prefer doing the 3D models, but that only really works for blocky geometric things like tables and Pokémon Centers.

Most likely I'll just keep the Blond Knight, Blue Pirate, etc. character sheets around until the very end, when either I'll contact someone who actually knows how to do pixel art or can sit down for a week and do it myself.

I do have kind of a story, but that's more of a thing I write when I'm waiting in like at the dentist's office and less of a thing that I put serious work into.

kakashidragon June 15, 2016 09:50:01 PM

I wonder if i could use my flipnote 3ds app to make a sprite trainer? Cause flipnote is basically pixel art, plus its easier to do as im not staring at a computer screen. The colors would be limited to 6 colors tho.

Dragonite June 16, 2016 06:46:05 AM

Probably not, but I guess it might be an interesting experiment. Ż\_(ツ)_/Ż

kakashidragon June 17, 2016 02:50:26 PM

Hey if i do make one what style do u prefer? 5th gen or 4th gen style? Plus do u need actual size or more blown up like up close? I have an idea for a character u can use as a NPC at least, maybe u can put into the game.

Dragonite June 17, 2016 05:20:01 PM

1 Attachment(s)
The ones I use (N, Cynthia, Joy) are 5th Gen, though I don't really have a preference. Attached one of the files as a template, if you want it.

kakashidragon June 18, 2016 03:34:32 PM

So mostly 5th gen huh? You know im thinking of finding them custom trainer sprites on google, and edit one to my likeing and see if u like it to add or something?

Dragonite June 18, 2016 06:52:01 PM

You can if you want to. I'd rather not mess around with other peoples' sprites, though, 'cause that makes it kind of hard to keep track of who needs to be credited and things.

Cat333Pokémon June 18, 2016 07:32:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dragonite (Post 298506)
I'd rather not mess around with other peoples' sprites, though, 'cause that makes it kind of hard to keep track of who needs to be credited and things.

Pretty much this. Credit is essentially required to reuse someone else's work, even if they don't ask for it. :) In the worst case, you could have someone upset with you for not asking. I've seen plenty of times where people put "Credit to Google Images" like someone who hasn't learned the importance of citations in their language classes.

kakashidragon June 18, 2016 10:02:15 PM

So how would i go about of making my own then?

Dragonite July 6, 2016 10:35:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kakashidragon (Post 298511)
So how would i go about of making my own then?

I'm not actually sure what other people use, come to think of it. I'd imagine you can use Photoshop or Paint the GM sprite editor or any other image editing program that lets you zoom in and edit the individual pixels.

Dragonite July 22, 2016 01:13:20 PM

4 Attachment(s)
I finally put something together worthy of a download version for you to try, if you want that. See the bottom.

I finally began my foray into real map design! Made a floating island and I'm probably going to outfit it with houses and a town and stuff eventually, but I'm not quite sure what else to put in it. Alternatively I could make it a sort of miniature forest/meadow/nature preserve, though I like the concept of having a city sitting half a mile in the air for no reason. Somewhat inspired by Zeal of Chrono Trigger.

Screenshots at the bottom, as attachments.

please do not question the logistics of keeping a massive clod of rock floating in the air

There's also a bunch of other things, like this.



Also it seems that I've been forgetting to bore you all to death with the changelog. This one includes a very fun incident involving completely breaking collision detection and having to dig out a backup and start all over!

i swear it gets longer every time    
8:05 PM 6/12/2016	Game window can be stretched around, or it can go into fullscreen mode. Everything works except for updating the cursor position accurately in menus.
8:42 PM 6/12/2016 Cursor position works properly
9:42 PM 6/12/2016 Mouse look in full screen works properly
10:45 PM 6/12/2016 Removed "use controller" option because it was pretty useless, replaced with a "control setup" option that doesn't do anything yet, re-implemented a formal "switch to/from fullscreen" option
6:11 PM 6/14/2016 Made movement a little bit more smooth.
12:16 PM 6/15/2016 Added CRT shader.
5:44 PM 6/15/2016 Model templates can have components that move.
4:10 PM 6/17/2016 Models can have alternate "skin" forms; i.e. the Route Signs are now all stored in as piece of information with multiple sub-models (but the same collision, texture, etc. properties)
8:10 PM 6/17/2016 Added options to change the crosshair, since a few people didn't really like the default one.
8:22 PM 6/18/2016 Object editor: Some formatting on model names in the list that you can click on to drag objects into the world. Makes it easier to read.
1:17 PM 6/22/2016 Modeled some flags, implemented them so that they can be added to the world as model templates. They're animated and flap around with speed proportional to the map's weather intensity setting.
1:14 PM 6/23/2016 Mailboxes, water fountains, a few other things. Made entity types with different data scripts, so I know how to do that now.
1:42 PM 6/23/2016 Fixed a bug where ground items wouldn't show up properly, added ground items to the list of Model Templates, made a data script for ground items
2:00 PM 6/24/2016 NPCs can be added through "model templates" menu, and you can edit (most) of their relevant properties
1:29 PM 6/26/2016 Object editor: Changed the "floor" so that it uses an actual collision model and doesn't just raycast downward from the (x, y, z) position
3:03 PM 6/26/2016 Game now uses global variables W and H for positioning things on the screen instead of room_width and room_height
5:11 PM 6/26/2016 Expanded the game window and made the Debug Stats thing its own little window instead of an annoying overlay at the top of the screen.
5:13 PM 6/26/2016 Removed the Pokétch because it looked pretty bad and will probably eventually be replaced by Key Items that do similar things.
1:32 AM 6/27/2016 Real-time/not-real-time in-game clock, plus setting to change how it ticks.
1:57 AM 6/27/2016 Sea level not drawn as part of "atmosphere" anymore. Not sure why it ever was to begin with, tbh.
2:39 AM 6/27/2016 Moved the required dll files to the root directory instead of some sub-folder somewhere, because that might have been causing problems because dlls are weird.
5:55 PM 6/28/2016 Got rid of Geometry Editor, because it's kind of useless now that I've taken to making game environments in GMMC.
11:38 PM 6/28/2016 Got rid of the SG Audio dll because it was causing problems for some people. Using the built-in audio system instead. Music is not working.
2:40 AM 6/29/2016 The problem with music was a problem with Windows having a fight with the GMAssetCompiler, not with the code. Music is working again. Wonderful.
3:04 AM 6/29/2016 Fixed a few annoying edge cases that have to do with things like starting and stopping a sound at the same time.
3:59 AM 7/1/2016 Programmed Cut and Rock Smash, plus templates that can be filled in to do the other HM moves. Some of them can accept multiple moves to activate the effect, i.e. Slash can also work for Cut. You know, since Slash is less useless in battle and carrying it around might infuriate fewer people.
4:13 AM 7/1/2016 Added "duplicate" HMs to represent the alternate moves. Also, it turns out you can give two items the same name and the game won't complain. That's kind of cool, I guess.
6:16 PM 7/5/2016 Moved a bunch of GUI code out of the GUI event, because for some reason the GUI event takes way longer to execute than the regular Draw event. Consequently, shaders now affect GUI elements, so be careful with that.
7:31 PM 7/5/2016 Removed the Terrain Editor, because I decided to run with the sort-of-grid-based DPPtHGSSBWB2W2XYORASSM terrain style.
11:49 PM 7/5/2016 Game fonts load from a sprite sheet instead of the normal resources. Quite convenient, for a number of reasons.
1:42 AM 7/8/2016 Added a few mountains, reformatted debug screen, optimized a few things (most notably the starbox)
REVERTED TO THIS ON 7/20/2016
12:36 AM 7/9/2016 Programmed a special terrain grid system, a dummied-down, automatic version of regular models. Each cell is 1024x1024 and has its own visible models (and ideally LOD models, in the future) that are drawn automatically, and they automatically load/unload their collision models when the player enters/exits the cell.
(Currently this ONLY covers the cell that the player is standing in, and will ONLY do collisions for the player properly 100% of the time. If you try to check collisions for, say, an NPC or the physics ball it won't detect the terrain geometry of other cells and will probably not behave as intended.)
* 12:48 AM 7/9/2016 Added a data script for ModelTerrainCell that basically says that you can't select it.
* 11:24 PM 7/16/2016 Draw water with models instead of d3d floors, which turn out to be unbelievably slow
* 10:58 PM 7/17/2016 Added yet more information to the "time scale" menu option, because . . . I can.
* 11:25 PM 7/17/2016 Fixed a bug with the game's internal clock not updating properly and now apparently several otherwise problems related to that system have been magically fixed. All I did was scope a measly little variable.
* 11:50 PM 7/17/2016 Fog depth does a transition when you enter an area with different weather settings.
* 12:02 AM 7/18/2016 Size of the sun does a transition when you enter an area with different weather settings. It looks INCREDIBLY strange. Also made the color of the sun yellow instead of colorless, which it should be.
* 1:30 PM 7/18/2016 More weather settings.
* 3:51 PM 7/18/2016 "Darkness" and "Total Darkness" are now weather types, defined by things like low fog distances, black sky and no sun. Total darkness also has a gray lighting instead of white.
* 7:02 PM 7/18/2016 Added a plain old "Fog" weather stype. Weather types now render clouds and the option to not draw stars.
* 1:53 AM 7/19/2016 Almost all weather works, except for the fact that most of them sort of override "night." I imagine this shouldn't be TOO difficult to fix.
* 10:02 AM 7/19/2016 Collisions with non-terrain entities don't work. Traced the error's appearence back to July 9, when the terrain grid was introduced, but I have no idea what the cause is.
* 2:43 PM 7/19/2016 Removed the objects-removed-from-collision-if-certain-distance-away code, collisions with non-terrain entities still don't work.
* 3:09 PM 7/19/2016 Took a break from collision problems and added map points that show up on the overhead compass and on the overworld.
8:52 PM 7/20/2016 Still can't figure out why collisions stopped working so i just went back to the July 7 backup and will be re-adding EVERYTHING. (this is not going to be fun.)
4:29 PM 7/21/2016 Re-implemented compass points, some of the weather code, and slowed the physics ball down so it doesn't go rocketing fifty miles if you hold down the B button. Game compiles, starts and doesn't crash, thank god.
9:23 PM 7/21/2016 Object editor: caught a potential array index out of bounds error. Removed the Pokémon DLL and implemented all of the math in native code to keep things simple.
4:48 PM 7/22/2016 Removed the Pokémon DLL and SGAudio DLLs from the Included Files, since they're not used anymore.


Download

Here. Windows only, extract and double-click the executable to run it, all the usual stuff. Hopefully shouldn't trigger your antivirus, although one of the data files has the extension "vir" so let's keep our fingers crossed.

Tested the executable a little and it SHOULD do everything properly, though if you find anything let me know. You can run around and talk to people and run up the side of that round mountain because I haven't made a proper collision model for it yet and the slope is technically still within the game's "climb height" (and the unfinished mountains don't have collision information associated with them at all, yet).

You can hit F2 to go into the editor and screw around with a bunch of settings if you want to, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

Right click/press B to throw the physics ball, which is good for testing collisions with distant objects.

There's a semi-functional quest marker system, the dude that gives you a bunch of items has an exclamation point over his head, though unfortunately nothing you can do will make that ever go away.

If you're in the editor, you can leave it with F2 and the camera'll zoom back to where your character last was. If you want the character to zoom to the camera instead, hit Right Mouse + F2.

Escape pauses the game, you can quit or change a bunch of settings from there.

Have fun!

Dragonite August 20, 2016 08:47:56 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Amazing Adventure Known As Cleaning My Room


So I lost a One Piece book ages ago and was trying to find it and eventually just decided to turn my room inside-out to find it. My room doesn't really have the traditional "looks like a tornado hit it" theme going on and positively looks like a biology lab clean room when compared to my siblings', but it turns out there were some unbelievably weird things accumulating in it over the last sixteen years anyway. Here's a list!

The original list was longer but my I spent so long writing the post that the browser page expired and I had to re-write it.

- A box of staples
- An entire shelf of baseball books from the 1970s
- A whole wad of National Geographic magazines
- A whole wad of those unfolding paper things they always stick in National Geographic magazines
- Every piece of literature that's been written on my high school cross country team in the Star-Ledger since the Bronze Age
- Baseball ticket stubs from 2009
- Enough computer wires to cross the Atlantic
- Plastic insects
- Plastic arachnids
- A bottle of plant fertilizer that spilled and caused weird green crystals to start growing on the bottom of the drawer (that has to be some kind of health hazard)
- A computer hard drive that was so ancient it had its own power supply that was apparently full of Pokémon music and video game TrueType fonts for some reason
- Dental floss
- Twenty dollars plus about a half a pound of loose coins
- a Wii, a Wii Wheel for Mario Kart, a GameCube controller and all of the wires that went with them
- Homework from 4th grade
- Homework from 8th grade
- I'm guessing there was homework from all of the other grades in there somewhere but I wasn't going to search through every single sheet of Loose Leaf I found because that would have taken about a week
- Notebooks that stacked into a pile about eight and a half inches tall (photo attached)
- Pokéddexy stuff
- A user manual to a cell phone I owned in 2009
- A jar of marbles
- A Barnes & Noble gift card that's god knows how old
- A ridiculous number of hats
- Baseball cards
- I'm writing "baseball cards" twice to try and drive home the point of how many of them there are
- The bottom panel for my 3DS (it had to be removed when the capture unit was installed)
- Markers that have somehow managed to not dry out yet
- Bleach-splattered pants
- A CD-ROM that apparently had a C++ compiler on it, but I'll never find out because everything on it was for MS-DOS
- Newspaper clippings
- Apparently I've never thrown out any birthday or Christmas cards in my life ever until today
- Rocks
- Two separate reams of printer paper, both about half-used
- A vacuum cleaner appendage thing (??????)
- The original of this thing that I drew back when ORAS were announced
- Newspaper clippings
- All of the promotional material the high school Robotics team made and didn't manage to give away apparently ended up in my room
- Gloves
- A Whiffle ball that I painted like a Poké Ball
- Socks
- Piano sheet music (I don't even play the piano)
- A clock that doesn't work
- Some of those generic orange "Admit One" tickets
- Bicycle chain oil
- A whole bunch of ancient Popular Science/Popular Mechanics magazines
- A bunch of glasses cases, plus a pair of glasses from several prescriptions and a smaller head size ago
- A confusing number of USB cables
- An entire shoe box full of art supplies
- Eighth grade graduation cap
- a box that says "Wii U" on it
- Comic strips I drew in middle school
- Flower pots
- Duct tape
- A library card that expired five years ago
- Enough books that were falling apart at the spine to give a librarian a heart attack
- A whole bunch of hair ties
- Postage stamps

I didn't even start to investigate these things (I'll probably do it in the morning)

- My closet
- Most of the drawers in my desk

Things I didn't find

- The One Piece book

I guess if it never turns up I can see if that old B&N card is worth anything now, right?

Something about Pokémon fan games

Later.

Dragonite September 27, 2016 09:10:46 PM

Oh btw I found the One Piece book. Was buried in a desk drawer. Took me long enough, right?

Been a little while since I did this, hasn't it?

Been trying to work towards releasing another tech demo thing hopefully soon-ish, probably including at least a little bit of what one would consider "map design." As opposed to the blank field with random scattered Entities like last time.

Refactored some stuff, hunted down redundant pieces of code (there was a considerable amount), maybe shaved a off a couple nanoseconds per frame.

Made toilets that you can flush and coffins that you can "sleep" in to restore your party (I was playing Dawnguard recently, okay?)

Also started playing with particle effects, text effects, animations, and a few other things.

Still haven't done any battle programming. I still want to put that off to the end, so I can make sure everything else works and all that stuff.

Here we go again    
10:10 PM 7/23/2016	Implemented toilets. Made data scripts for toilets (and doors). What am I doing with my life.
7:49 PM 7/25/2016 Reorganized the Settings menu, splitting it up into a bunch of sub-menus.
8:43 PM 7/25/2016 Implemented "Restore Default Settings" options in each of the settings menus.
11:33 PM 7/25/2016 Created a loading screen.
12:35 AM 7/30/2016 Actors no longer stop falling at z=0. Instead there's a very large sheet object at z=0, and actors stop falling when they land on it, just like any other part of the collision mesh.
2:08 AM 7/30/2016 Playable character calculate how far/fast they've been falling when they hit the ground. The physics ball does the same thing, but accounting for three dimensional movement.
2:16 PM 8/2/2016 Removed Trainer Class team generation rules and about 300 lines of code. Created game data arrays with array_add before filling them in; overall startup improved by about a second. Created a special move category for Psyshock which uses physical defense.
5:21 PM 8/2/2016 Player now stops when about to step over water. Collision models need to have a buffer space around their land area unless you want the player to stop moving when they hit the edge, thanks to the way collision chunks are loaded.
11:07 PM 8/4/2016 You can buy stuff from NPCs. You can't sell stuff yet, though.
4:20 PM 8/10/2016 Player stops before stepping over water, now using some kind of movement state machine thing.
7:02 PM 8/10/2016 Check for movement status /after/ updating collision cells. you can move freely between cells without getting stopped for no reason again!
9:44 PM 8/11/2016 Can add events through the "Events" tab. They don't react to the player stepping on them, though.
10:15 PM 8/11/2016 Markers for HMs 2 through 8. Copy and paste of HM01, really.
12:50 AM 8/13/2016 Fixed the moon (finally). Disabled phases because they simply looked bad.
9:58 AM 8/13/2016 Changed the Object and Event editors so you can change an object's model or event's cutscene indexby clicking on an entry in the list on the side.
11:51 AM 8/13/2016 Player stops moving automatically when talking to NPCs. Events trigger when you walk into space designated for them (!)
2:37 PM 8/13/2016 Teleport works; added "turn" cutscene script and made it actually work. Teleport blocks make you turn around and walk a few steps if you decide to not take them, meaning you can get spat out into a wall if you approach them from specific directions. I think it's amusing so I'm leaving it in.
2:48 PM 8/13/2016 Event spaces don't work when you interact with them; now you actually have to walk into one to trigger it.
2:53 PM 8/13/2016 Events no longer get triggered if you leave one that is the same as the last one you entered.
5:33 PM 8/13/2016 Can change the UI color(s), plus the brightness of the autotexture.
12:03 AM 8/18/2016 Added an editor so Pokémon base stats can be changed on-the-fly; also changed the way stats are calculated
4:50 PM 8/18/2016 Database editor: Pokémon main, TMs, Egg Moves, linked alternate forms (missing only Level Moves and Evolutions)
3:07 AM 8/24/2016 Database editor: finished Pokémon tab, including Evolutions and everything. Re-arranged some parts so they fit on the screen a little more nicely, especially so that the base stat bar graph has a little more space.
2:23 PM 8/26/2016 Default shader now lets you mess with the rbg color values. It's actually kind of a bad idea to do so, but whatever.
4:19 AM 8/27/2016 Database editor: Items tab and most of the Moves tab; consolidated all of the move flags into a single unsigned int with lots of bitwise arithmetic and stuff
11:57 PM 8/29/2016 Made a structure for BattleEffects for things like Moves, Abilities and Items. Filled them in, although all of their scripts are set to null and half of them don't even have names yet because there are just too many of them.
12:21 AM 9/1/2016 Database editor: Abilities, Items and Moves all filled in; buttons for editing MoveEffect information work properly.
1:58 AM 9/1/2016 Database editor: Pokémon evolutions have been simplified. They don't crash. Lots of code is commented it out and some of the text displays incorrectly, though.
2:34 PM 9/3/2016 Game data is now a global variable instead of attached to the World object, so they should perform a little better now.
11:26 PM 9/3/2016 Database editor: Trainer Classes (why did I make this a tab in the editor, again?)
11:42 PM 9/3/2016 Game stops taking input and shows a message over the HUD when the game window loses focus. The GMS manual says window_has_focus() is only valid for HTML5, Windows 8 and Tizen. Lies.
11:50 PM 9/3/2016 Database editor: Removed the Egg Group, Trainer Class and Type tabs. Honestly don't know why they were there in the first place, since I'm not doing this for mod support or anything.
12:50 AM 9/4/2016 Object editor: Can edit individual bits in the objects' collision masks. Had to change the way the game looks at collision masks in general, though.
7:28 PM 9/4/2016 Code for saving/loading Abilities to file again (not actually implemented); color-coding in Object\Collisions tab
8:02 PM 9/10/2016 Save/Load: works; reprogrammed the way most Items work
11:10 PM 9/10/2016 Added "Collectors' Cards," they sit there and rotate but don't do anything (the goal is to make them like the wizard cards in Harry Potter)
1:37 AM 9/12/2016 Implemented particle effects as "aster" models instead of actual particles, since they look way better. Cards get "collected," despawn and explode into said particles when you pick them up. Some other minor fixes.
2:13 PM 9/13/2016 Achievement book, sort of.
1:47 AM 9/14/2016 Most functionality of the achievement book, a few fixes related to cards, added triggers for achievements in various places in the game, fixed a few things that would have broken the YYC
7:31 PM 9/15/2016 Better water, plus reflections, plus a slight performance increase (how often do you get to say that all at the same time?)
12:06 AM 9/16/2016 Water now can be collided with (within the game grid). Some other minor fixes.
7:28 PM 9/16/2016 Merged Entities with Characters and a couple other things with each other. Less redundant code. Model Templates also run on less code.
1:02 AM 9/17/2016 Background music works. Each area has a set of background music types that it can play (for both day and night). When one song stops, another starts. Can be stopped for cutscenes and stuff. Not sure how it'll work with a "radio" object, though.
8:42 PM 9/20/2016 Added a default weather control script. There's a 1 in 16 chance of creating normal rain. Weather cycles every 10 minutes by default (or every time you enter an area).
9:36 PM 9/20/2016 Added push notifications. They appear when you pick up ground items or collector cards instead of the message boxes. I think that looks a bit better in 3D. Also, yet another mechanic totally not also stolen from Skyrim.
3:56 PM 9/22/2016 Added random encounter space. Makes crunching sounds and sprinkles particles all over the place when you walk through it. Volume of both of those is determined by your movement speed. Also there's a random encounter countdown but it doesn't do anything yet.
6:28 PM 9/22/2016 Random encounters are generated based on the encounters defined for them in const_environment
12:12 PM 9/24/2016 Can change maps. Contents of previous map get deleted, new map loads. Can't load from a file yet, though.
7:04 PM 9/24/2016 Title screen: camera. Does nothing else, though.
9:12 PM 9/24/2016 Title screen: menu. navigation and Quit works.
9:15 AM 9/25/2016 Changed the way Fog works so that it appears on the title screen. Changed the way it's initalized, too, so the default fog distance can be changed relatively easily.
11:46 PM 9/25/2016 Only cells, entities, etc. within sight of the camera are rendered. Can boost performance immensely.
9:36 AM 9/26/2016 Object editor: fixed data scripts so that they show up again (broke by merging all of the different entity types together), fixed the NPC setup, fixed the "select base NPC" option in NPC data script
9:50 PM 9/27/2016 A bunch of miscellaneous fixes related to thinking about finally releasing a playable version of this game, such as:
- Route sign text is drawn through code instead of contained in the model
- Fixed bottom of palm trees on the texture sheet
- Added music
- Music starts and stops correctly when the same song repeats itself (although it would be nice to be able to avoid repeating music at all in the future)
- Music only cued to change when
- Some route icons
- Probably a few other things


Between you and me, this is actually slogging along faster than I thought. Will probably mash together a bunch more map cells in the next few weeks and see what happens from there.

Attaching YouTube videos this time 'cause I have more of them than screenshots and I'm being too lazy to take any.

Playing with fountains


Water effects



Haven't been doing this so far but I might start if I remember, but lines of code is an interesting (if not perfectly accurate) way to measure the growth of a project.

Current lines of code: 21905

Not sure how much all of the code for hundreds of move effects, item effects, ability effects, etc. will take up (on top of the battle programming/AI that's bound to take up a ridiculous number of code) but I guess for now I'll stick with my old estimate of 100,000 lines by the time this is finished. We'll see.

Dragonite October 11, 2016 05:31:39 PM

I meant to write this like a week ago but forgot

So, long story short, I finally compiled a playable version of this game. At least, I hope it's playable. More below.

relatively short because I only copied the parts that are included in the executable    
11:52 PM 9/30/2016	Added fire and one type of torch. Fixed the Fountain model template.
2:48 PM 10/1/2016 Made Cards work again, made Items work without needing a cutscene index, implemented leaf piles that explode and possibly give you an item when you walk into them. Removed item rarity variable.
10:33 PM 10/1/2016 Added some kind of global boolean variables. Doors can be locked using these variables - they also contain information on which Gym Badges you've won and stuff, so you can have doors that only open if you have a Gym Badge . . . or an item that "unlocks" a Gym Badge. Also, doors animate and the speed that they open can be controlled by the creator.
1:02 AM 10/2/2016 Removed almost 500 lines of code by refactoring data scripts. They're better organized now, too, and code isn't duplicated when creating data scripts for sub-objects of an Entity or Event type (since it can just call its parent object's data script). Also, leveled items work properly.
12:10 AM 10/3/2016 Filled in a bunch of the @todo notes (mainly math, which may or may not actually work)
10:15 PM 10/3/2016 A few unrelated things:
- Particles are quite a bit more efficient, appearing about 4X as dense for the about the same amount of computing time
- Water rings are more circular than they used to be
- Created CompassPointLocations, so the location icons appear on the compass if you're within about four cells of the location on the map (but there are no floating markers on the actual overworld)
11:26 PM 10/3/2016 Changed the way day/night audio is handled; instead of having multiple audio types for different times of day, the game pitches the base file differently depending on what time of day it is. Night = 0.8, morning = 0.95, afternoon = 1.0, evening = 0.95.


Here's a sister video to the "water effects" one of last time.



The interesting bit

This is currently a demo that does not contain plot, RPG battles or a lot of other things that are standard fare in completed games. But don't worry, as long as I don't die before I finish it, it will some day. Right now I'm kind of looking for people to fool around with it and find ways to crash it.

You can hit F2 to go into an editor which lets you throw around 3D objects, edit Pokémon, items, move data, etc. and a couple other things which may or may not work. You can zoom around with WASD like usual, and turn the camera with Middle Mouse. You can hit Right Mouse + F2 to jump the player to where the camera is in the editor - useful if you manage to clip through the terrain geometry or fall below z=0.


All of these links should go to a Google Drive folder that contains a Default.zip, a YYC.zip and a .gmz. Default uses the standard Game Maker interpreter and should work on all Windows computers but is somewhat slower, YYC has been compiled to machine code and should be considerably faster but may not work on computers with potatoes for graphics cards (example: mine), and the gmz can be extracted in Game Maker Studio to let you play around with the source code and let you laugh about how bad of a programmer I am. The parent directory also has a couple things in that which might be found interesting, but I don't remember if I enabled sharing on it or not.

Yes, these start at version 7.0.2.x. Shows you how long I've been screwing around with this. (Numbered versions not listed were probably shared for testing between me and my friends and never actually posted anywhere.)

Version 7.0.2.16

edit: forgot about this part

Current lines of code: 22,256

Lycanroc October 21, 2016 03:51:46 PM

WOW! GAmes are hard to make and u must have alot of pateince to do this, do u need help?? Ill download and try it if i can sometime.

Dragonite October 23, 2016 01:17:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lycanroc (Post 298852)
do u need help?

I don't really like working with people, but what do you have in mind?

Dragonite November 4, 2016 05:24:28 PM

In terms of real life I started a new job this month, which I guess is sort of useful, but I'm guessing most people reading this aren't interested in that part.

this has been fun    
3:06 PM 10/4/2016	Compressed all of the existing models. Changed the way water rings and splashes spawn. Fixed toilets. Fixed a bug in the db editor. Fixed what might have been a bug in the background music system.
8:12 PM 10/4/2016 Changed the way particle types are indexed the game. Fire now rises in the direction of the wind of the current weather.
1:11 AM 10/6/2016 Re-implemented HMs; animated Cut, Fly and Surf interactions
8:06 PM 10/6/2016 Animated a bunch of HMs, don't really like the way any of them turned out but whatever
11:08 AM 10/7/2016 Removed some useless stuff, added a raytrace shader, added a clock tower. Don't know if they actually work. Game Maker beta updates are being weird. Edit: it's working.
12:38 PM 10/7/2016 Added a pendulum to the clock tower and simplified the windmills. Dutch windmill pillar model somehow got un-textured. Oops.
9:09 PM 10/11/2016 Changed the way collision cells are loaded, maybe a few other things I don't remember
11:34 PM 10/14/2016 Bunch of things:
- Removed "textured?" information from models
- Removed "draw snow?" code (since footprints are drawn automatically anyway now)
- Removed obsolete NPC animation code
- Updated ETypes
- Updated NPC image system
9:00 AM 10/17/2016 Many more things:
- Fixed "RemoveItem/RemoveItemStack"
- Overhauled models; removed most of them from the game filesystem, on the assumption that most static ones will be saved as part of the level file anyway and the only ones that the editor needs access to will be ones that can be interacted with, etc
- Removed the "Interactable" switch, since now by default objects are interactable anyway
- Added tombstones
11:09 PM 10/19/2016 Book items partially implemented. They look really weird.
3:16 PM 10/20/2016 Recreated the game database file because it got corrupted somehow and Items/Moves were being read out of it incorrectly. Every single type of item can now have its own model representing it on the ground, instead of relying on the template defined by the Item Pocket. (Collision boxes are still the default Poké Ball, though, since I can't be bothered to implement that part.)
1:02 AM 10/24/2016 Fixed movement so it's not restricted to up/down/left/right (especially with controllers with analog sticks). Allowed for changing of a map cell location in the editor (apparently I never bothered to do that earlier). Added the Forest of Zeal visual cells and music for the same location.
6:11 PM 10/26/2016 Made comets that shoot down from the heavens at night. That's an hour of my life that I'm never getting back. They look pretty, though.
12:53 AM 10/27/2016 Fine-tuned comets.
5:29 PM 10/27/2016 Entity saving/loading from map files. Fine-tuned comets some more.
10:32 PM 10/28/2016 Comets drop items if they pass over the cell you're standing in.
12:27 AM 10/29/2016 Saving/loading NPCs from map file. Fixed "team" array; Test Pokémon cutscene works again.
12:40 AM 10/30/2016 Pokémon menu:
- refactored a lot of code
- reorganized the one massive script into many smaller scripts
- removed a few useless features (they can be readded later pretty easily if i ever get bored enough)
- straightened up a few errors in the GUI
- menu actually doesn't break when you use it constantly
4:07 PM 10/30/2016 Implemented volume control for different types of audio (music, system effects, etc) plus a Settings menu for it plus fancy slider bar things for the Settings menu.
10:40 AM 11/1/2016 Following NPCs. Normal NPCs can switch between following and not following through scripting.
11:36 AM 11/1/2016 NPCs can follow any character. They turn to face random directions when not following anybody. Created a variable to enable random movement but haven't implemented it.
11:40 PM 11/3/2016 Implemented NPC Pokémon. If they're linked to an NPC (or Player) they'll be treated as a party Pokémon, otherwise they'll be treated as the Species defined for them.
8:56 PM 11/4/2016 You can send out NPC Pokémon, or have them return to their Poké Balls. Fixed the annoying problem with texture pages causing NPC Pokémon sprites to contain random pixels of each other.


Main interesting things are the comets that appear at night time on occasion, the NPCs that follow you and the Pokémon that follow you. Especially the last one. I'll leave a video for the last one (although there are also videos for the other two things).



I'll also be trying to include semi-playable downloads more often now, since the game is sort of starting to take playable form. Same rules as last time apply. Also same as last time, the Default version should work but I have no idea about the YYC version because my computer literally can't handle my own compiled code.

Version 7.0.2.17

Current lines of code: 23,473

In other news, the Game Maker Studio 2 beta came out a few days ago. Been messing around with it a little. Looks extremely slick. Can't wait to use it once I get back into 2D games.

Dragonite December 2, 2016 07:49:00 PM

The code base of Theseus: does a game engine that has had all of its major systems rewritten remain fundamentally the same project?

Anyway, normally I'd wait until I have a longer change log to post this, but it's unlikely that I'll be getting much done in the coming weeks thanks to (a) busy work schedule, (b) computer troubles and (c) Magfest so I'll do it now anyway.

As you can see, most of what I've done relates to the paradox cited at the top of the post.

4:54 PM 11/12/2016 Still rewriting pause menu code. Everything appears to be working. Some items implemented, particularly PP-related items. Also defined a bunch of important settings for Items and such.
3:12 PM 11/20/2016 Implemented TMs (although nobody's got their TM learnset set up yet). Can use escape sequences to insert special text into strings (particularly TM/move names and descriptions).
11:00 PM 11/25/2016 Began thinking about battles. Wrote code to generate NPC Pokémon.

There are also a couple other partially-completed things but I won't write about them until they reliably don't crash the game enough to put in the changelog.

Also also, Game Maker Studio 2 is out and I'm totally not going to waste my time trying to port it over to that (although it might be fun just to see how precisely it decides to blow up).

Download

Same rules as last time apply. Also same as last time, the Default version should work but I have no idea about the YYC version because my computer literally can't handle my own compiled code.

Version 7.0.2.17

Current lines of code: 24,668

Dragonite December 20, 2016 10:49:19 PM

1 Attachment(s)
A bit different but I finally made a way to make maps without dropping every single tile down by hand. This is like the third 3D terrain editor I've made in the last two years but at least this one outputs maps that sort of look like the game I'm trying to make.

This particular geographical feature is kind of supposed to be my Throat of the World (biggest mountain in the game) but it ends up being kind of flat due to the fact that the sides can't ever have a slope over about 45 degrees and in most places the grade is even lower than that. Not sure what to do about it but I'll probably figure something out.

For the record the entire mountain (16 or 20 cells) took about as long to make as a single cell would have with my old system, so I guess that's a good thing. Plus it's now not impossible to go back and change something if I don't like it. The collision model it spits out is pretty badly optimized, though.

Current lines of code for the terrain editor: a measly 728, but I'm probably going to be adding onto it so that I can plop down things like trees and tall grass and stuff, too.

Dragonite January 8, 2017 04:20:45 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Magfest Spoils of War: JRPG Edition


Dragon Quest 4, 9, Final Fantasy 4, Radiant Historia and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. I actually brought money with me this year.

Pros

- Probably some of the tournament winners

Cons

- It's not a CON, it's a FESTIVAL :^(

Everything else

- Even more Colossus Roar than usual, somehow.
- Spent most of my time floating between panels with smatterings of the indie space, marketplace and console games area thing. One concert, that being "Triforce Quartet" and not any of the more high-intensity performances that Magfest tends to be known for.
- The highlight of Thrown Controllers was literally people chanting "BUTT! BUTT BUTT!" for about thirty seconds straight
- Will try to post the rest of my footage shortly.
- If you've been anywhere near Twitter in the last four days you probably already know that Team Skull cosplay was this year's Undertale.
- Eyan wasn't there this year, but I met a few other people I know from the Internet, which is always cool.
- Learned the real reason you're not supposed to use "if" statements in shaders.
- Laptop decided to stop working for no reason on Friday so I had to go down to the hotel lobby to borrow a screwdriver and take it apart and check all of the battery connections. I'm a true nerd.
- Stopped at Maryland House for late lunch on the drive back. That's about an hour north of National Harbor. There were literally people doing the Colossus Roar in the parking lot and the guy at the register actually said "how many of y'all are coming from Magfest?!" when he saw my badge.

Cat333Pokémon January 11, 2017 03:39:28 PM

Now, the real question is whether you paid fair prices or if you were ripped off.

Dragonite January 11, 2017 04:38:47 PM

Judging by what I see on Amazon, most of them were pretty reasonable $(20..30). A few different vendors were charging like $75+ for varying conditions of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver . . . but, well, those are HeartGold and SoulSilver.

Cat333Pokémon January 12, 2017 11:21:55 PM

Yeah, during the late summer, those were going for $150+ for complete copies.

Dragonite January 29, 2017 08:08:52 PM

Whoa, has it been more than two months since I posted a major update in this?

Spoiler Alert:    
11:08 PM 12/4/2016	Code to manually load models from files, which will hopefully get rid of the memory leak issue that's apparently built into d3d_model_load with vertex-normal-texture-color.
8:14 AM 12/7/2016 Got rid of the code that was supposed to fix the memory leak, thanks to YoYo (apparently) fixing the GMS bug in an update.
9:23 AM 12/7/2016 Got following Pokémon to move around again. Not sure what was wrong in the first place. Controls are still backwards and you can still "talk" to "yourself," though.
9:57 PM 12/7/2016 Player invisibly "follows around" a controlled EntityNPCPokemon, so that takes care of the weird issues/annoying lag that happens when the controlled Pokémon is in a different cell from the Player. Also you can hit Escape (or talk to "yourself") to return to the regular Player.
10:14 PM 12/7/2016 Cutscenes (and events in general) disabled when controlling EntityNPCPokemon. Corrected the thing where all of the controls would be reversed when controlling one.
12:29 AM 12/8/2016 Speaking of control, there is now a basic ability to rebind (most) of them. Movement not counted since dealing with the sticks on a controller is a massive pain.
10:55 AM 12/8/2016 Control customization works, with some limitations.
12:27 AM 12/9/2016 Control customization, wrote a script to draw a pretty little button prompt on the screen when desired.
1:46 AM 12/9/2016 Stuff to go on the HUD when you're controlling a Pokémon (attack buttons and the battle info thing).
1:57 AM 12/10/2016 Controlling Pokémon HUD is probably finished. Have one "main" move attached to the A button, and you can cycle through with L2/R2. Can "use" moves (which don't do anything) and dock PP, until you run out of PP. Messages are done with the push notification system currently, which is kind of ugly.
10:00 PM 12/10/2016 Default move animation is a cloud of colored particles shooting off in front of the user. They stop when they hit a wall or run out of their range, but don't do anything to whatever they hit yet.
5:56 PM 12/12/2016 An event is triggered when an object is hit by a move. For now it does nothing but pass on the x, y and z of the collision and the IDs of the caster and the target.
2:38 AM 12/13/2016 Added a few FieldEffects, one that just tosses out a yellow spark on contact and one that creates a fire on contact.
6:02 PM 12/13/2016 NPCs frown at you when you hit them with an attack. My life is complete.
7:30 PM 12/13/2016 NPCs may show emoticons or complain when you hit them with an attack. This may be my new favorite feature to have programmed.
10:25 AM 12/29/2016 Added terrain made in the terrain creation program (parts of it, anyway), expanded the plane of water and simplified the collision mask, fixed a few bugs with the Yo Yo Compiler, maybe some other stuff
10:56 AM 12/29/2016 Confined the player's position to the actual game world, fixed some sound effects
3:46 PM 12/29/2016 Did some more stuff? (This is mainly just here so I can back it up to external drives)
2:41 PM 1/3/2017 Most of the game world has been added, size of the game filesystem has ballooned. Some progress on the stuff in the game world, including a few NPCs and lamp posts showing where the (intended) paths lead. Fixed an annoying bug where the YYC version would crash if you had a Pokémon use a move.
11:01 AM 1/4/2017 Sped up the "loading map" bit by somewhere between 30 and 50%
4:45 PM 1/4/2017 Increased run speed, increased jump height, removed random encounters, made fov expand while running and jumping, made footprints only spawn while you're on the ground
8:49 AM 1/5/2017 Run speed and jump height are functions of combinations of the character's calculated Speed stats and the moves they posses. Move limit has been reduced to two. An array of smaller changes and fixes.
10:07 AM 1/13/2017 World loads via buffer now, considerably faster than with the old method(s). Fixed teleportation. World collision shapes are cached because there appears to be a memory leak when freeing them.
10:59 AM 1/13/2017 Removed UI color options.
11:30 AM 1/14/2017 Took out a bunch of code related to battles, including battle effects and Abilities. Changed the Control Pokémon UI so that it's less cluttered and you only see the option to use A and B for your two moves. Fixed a bug involving controlled Pokémon not having the proper move data and crashing the game.
12:37 PM 1/15/2017 Implemented Mind Read, totally not ripped from Golden Sun.
11:08 AM 1/16/2017 Added random quotes to all loading screens, fixed data script for windmills.
11:56 AM 1/16/2017 Teleport move works. I don't have an model that could be used for the teleportation target, though.
12:36 PM 1/16/2017 Levitation works. Default behavior is to hover 32 pixels (6 feet) above where it started; things may behave oddly when they fall back to earth if there's something underneath where it wants to be. In any event, you can walk underneath the objects and I'm thinking of letting the player levitate Rock Smash boulders out of the way instead of destroying them if they want to.
9:59 PM 1/16/2017 Ironed out some bugs in various field moves, and fixed the way that projectile moves are cast into space.
12:38 AM 1/22/2017 Implemented Vine Whip, maybe a few other moves, made Teleport look a little nicer.
9:23 PM 1/23/2017 Rock Smash now has a charging animation, Pokémon can't water walk anymore, corrected the text showing the button prompts when controlling a Pokémon, maybe a few other things
6:21 PM 1/29/2017 A lot of bug fixes. Implemented "drowning" as opposed to the player stopping at the water's edge (where you return to the last NPC you spoke to when you enter the water without Surf). Gutted Natures since they did nothing and just crashed the game.
11:47 PM 1/29/2017 Edited demo island text so that it fits in the text box, and even remembered to create icons for the demo areas.


I haven't been updating that thing nearly as often as I should have been, but battles have officially been scrapped and this game is now entirely devoted to HMs, which I know the whole planet is going to be thrilled about.

Media

I'll update this post with video and probably screenshots tomorrow, it's kind of late and I want to sleep and stuff.

Download

Same rules as last time apply. Unlike last time, there's no Default version, only the YYC version, since I got that working on my computer and all the computers I've tested it on. You can have the source code too, if you want it.

Version 7.0.2.28

(You can assume the version numbers between the last one and this one were tests that I sent to my friends without officially putting out for the world to see.)

Update: game has several crashes. Since I'm moving on, I may or may not be fixing them.

Interested in game design?

Hit F2 while you're running around the game world and you'll have access to the game's debug mode. Or you can go into the game's filesystem and see what you can find. Feel free to play around, you might learn some things. (I will not be fixing crashes related to things that happen in Debug Mode, it's not the most stable thing in the world.)

Current lines of code: 24,506

It actually peaked at about 27,000, 28,000, don't quite remember, but I deleted a lot of scrapped features (and a lot of battle code) so it shrank quite a bit.

The end of Pokémon, and a new beginning

Yes, you just read that. For better or for worse, Nintendo's been way more pushy about enforcing their trademarks and all that jazz since even the last time I updated this thread, and between that and this game sticking out enough from the usual RPG Maker games I'm legitimately worried about getting shut down if this game ever gets big enough.

The source code and graphics and what have you isn't going anywhere. The Game Maker files'll still be in the download section for whoever wants to open it up and play around with it, and if the world of intellectual property ever relaxes itself (probably not) or if I'm still alive when the trademarks on Pokémon ever expire (it's complicated) I'll see if this project can still be opened up on future-generation technology and we can continue from there.

In the mean time, I'll be gutting the Pokémon graphics, data, sound, etc. from the VirgoNova engine and, at long last, making something original. Stick around, it should be a fun ride.

Cat333Pokémon January 29, 2017 08:43:55 PM

It may perhaps be best for it to no longer be a Pokémon game, but it can at least be one in spirit.

Dragonite April 19, 2017 11:21:34 AM

That new beginning I talked about

After a few weeks/months of piddling around and getting pretty much nothing done, I've done . . . this.



(Here's the "GDD.")

It's now a new, "original" game using characters that I made up in like third or fourth grade and a game world based off of nothing in particular. Will continue posting about it here, probably, as long as I remember to.

Current lines of code: 19,208

Real Life

I'm . . . going back to school???

Dragonite July 24, 2017 09:16:38 PM

memento mori

I don't really know if I should talk about this or not, but this'll be the last post I write in this thread, possibly on this entire forum. I was never around during the site's heyday, unfortunately (or maybe extremely fortunately, fifteen-year-old Dragonite was a bit of a terror on the Internet) but it's still been a fun ride. I guess I'll finish up by listing off some of the highlights of my time here on Victory Road.

- Showing up in November 2013 looking for Cat's Primal Dialga midi for a game which was never even remotely close to being finished. I still have it . . . somewhere . . .

- Making that "I'm dropping out of school" post and getting a bunch of really nice responses to it, it went over better here than pretty much anywhere IRL. I'd link the post here but I can't find that thread \:

- Battling with Kakashi, Matty, Trees and a bunch of other people. More often than not this ended in my head (metaphorically) being separated from the rest of my body. Who really cares. I miss Gens 5 and 6.

- Meeting Reuniclus and a few other people at Pokémon Symphonic Evolutions. It's odd, the only things I remember about that concert are my 3DS dying in the middle of a battle with a guy during the intermission, twenty-odd thousand people singing the original anime OP and Reun shouting "DRAGONITE!" at the top of his lungs while the entire admission queued up to squeeze through a gate the size of a thimble into the parking lot. Oh, and getting lost and arriving home at 3 in the morning.

- Posting about making games in this thread, all of which are either on hiatus or cancelled indefinitely. Realistically I'm never going to actually finish making a game, unless you count that Rock Paper Scissors thing I did in high school to test Game Maker, but who cares.

- Writing a Regex script to comb the front page of Victory Road and find the code for an Azelf pet. It's still in my signature!

- I'll edit this post if I think of more (I'm probably going to forget though)

But, alas, it's time to move on. If you want to keep in touch I'm probably easiest to get in contact with through YouTube (linked ad infinitum throughout this thread) or Discord (Dragonite#7992), or if you're a site admin I'm usually somewhat responsive to email (just say you're from here so I don't assume you're spam).

Thanks for everything!


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