Mysterious Song development log (aka sleepless ranting)

[GUTS]

Is it too late to redraw those character portraits?  They look awful compared to the game graphics, like you ripped them out of a Color Dreams NES game.

[nodtveidt]

The character portraits are the original artist's work and won't be replaced. Sorry.

[nodtveidt]

The battle system is about 60% completed now.



Here's Spear and Tiger confronting the Mega Wyrm in Illus Pass.

I'm not so sure about some of the battle backgrounds. Some became very dithered in reduction and don't look so good through emulation. They seem to look okay on the real screen though, so they may stay for now.

Alpha #3 will likely be built tomorrow after completion of the major portions of the battle system. Only two more large parts to be coded in for it to be considered functional.

[nat]

That's definitely one MEGA Wyrm!

[nodtveidt]

Two major issues were looming over the battle system project this morning: the initiative array, and the action processor. With the use of a tagged array bubblesort (unstable parallel reference type, stability wasn't necessary since only one value was compared), the initiative array is now finished, and only the action processor remains. Fortunately, the action processor is MUCH easier to implement. Alpha 3 will be built today without question.

Some nerdly reference for the curious...

A tagged array is where you have two arrays with associated indexes, independent of the value of either. When one array is sorted, its associated array is sorted equally, except the associated array is sorted by index, regardless of its value. So, if your sort array contains values like [45, 32, 109] and your associated array contains values such as [1, 2, 3], sorting the first array will result in [109, 45, 32] and the associated array will result in [3, 1, 2]. The bubblesort is, of course, not the fastest sorting algorithm there is, and I sure wouldn't use it for an action game, but for a one-shot operation in an RPG battle system, it's small and efficient...sure beats the size of a qsort.

[nodtveidt]

Okay...the battle system is technically playable now, although it still has a lot of work to be done to it. Right now, all you can do is attack, and it doesn't let you choose a target yet. Also, the enemies don't yet attack back. But all in due time. Now, the enemy lists have to be included into the mappers so the correct battles can be fought in the correct places. This should be tons of fun.

[peperocket]

Great work    sure this game will be wonderful !

Do you always preview  to localize it with many languages ??

[nodtveidt]

Do you always preview  to localize it with many languages ??

Huh?

[nodtveidt]

Two new battle-related screenies to show off.


Leveling now works...to a certain point. Right now, characters can't earn more than 9999 experience points, which is a limitation I'll remove later on (it's due to splitting up the experience chart into high and low values).


Beware the almighty SuperSlime^TM! Yeah, this is a flaw in the calculations, but it's still funny to see.

[nodtveidt]

A few more "fun shots" before I call it a day.

Here's an interesting bug that's showing up right now...seems to be palette-related.



Two other interesting bugs...the first is due to some earlier broken code, the second is because I'm a dunce.



But of course, with battles playable now...


 

[ParanoiaDragon]

Do you always preview  to localize it with many languages ??

Huh?

I think he means prefer.  Like, as in, will all our games be multi-lingual.

[nodtveidt]

Oh, hehe. If that's the case, then...erm...I have no idea. I think it'd be a tremendous amount of work to adapt each game to specific languages but if there was enough request for it, I don't see why we couldn't do it. This one's got English and Spanish on the disc...we were gonna do French and Japanese as well, but the two people commissioned to do the work have produced nothing (I did get a little bit of a Japanese script though) and now it's way too late to add any additional translations. I can't imagine doing Neutopia III in any other language...the localization itself would be a lot of work (my wife and bonq could handle a Spanish localization, but judging from how hard MSR was to localize...), let alone a literal translation.

The palette bug I posted earlier was fixed...I was loading palettes one index too high on the world map, so the colors were getting messed up when returning from battle (since the battle system uses all 16 BG palettes).

[nodtveidt]

We're now 22 hours away from the start of beta testing, and there's still a nice-sized list of issues to tackle. Fortunately, most are minor and/or cosmetic in nature. The battle system is now very functional, and finishing up the action handler won't take a lot more work to do. The only detailed part there is coding in the last two menus.

Okay...some sleep, and then the final stretch. Here goes nothing.

[nodtveidt]

Final update:

Beta 1 preparation going smoothly, it will most certainly be ready on time. Putting the finishing touches on between-map transitions to eliminate the small flicker problems we had prior. The battle system is getting the final treatments it needs as well, mainly in finishing up the two missing menus and fleshing out the action handler. The other major part required is the treasure handler, which only exists in two places (fortunately, because it's a bitflag operation and that's annoying to code).

Okay, back to work. Much to do, little time to do it in.

[nodtveidt]

New screenie:



Proof-of-concept mainly (to test pal blackouts), but this is one badass mofo. Dragons are nearly invincible, and there's no way this party ever stood a snowball's chance in hell.