Menustrip 3 0 2 Crack Mind

By, November 7, 2007 ugh what a crappy last bunch of days. I've been sick and struggling to maintain consciousness, let alone a coding mindset. Miraculously i coded a tool to go through all of my screencaps from ffa and crop the status bar off of them, and learned how to use a worker thread for a progress bar. I should be able to take the concept and expand on it; big shout out to ra for all the help with that. I needed to learn it for the next tool i want to build - one that will create a tileset bitmap out of all of those screencaps, with no repeats. Should be pretty easy. By, September 20, 2007 i've been trying to keep my whining down to a minimum, but i figured i'd at least get a post in so the rest of the month isn't blank.

There's this contest for an xbox360 that i want to make an entry for. The goal is to make a fun sidescroller without using copywritten material; basically come up with your own characters and story. Its supposed to be one decently-sized level with a boss at the end. The time limit is one month, from sept15 to oct15.

The first thing i did was try and come up with a loose schedule. I think it's going to be as follows. Sept.15 - sept.21: game design sept.22 - sept.28: main coding sept.29 - oct.05: asset creation oct.06 - oct.15: debugging and cleanup like i said, its a loose sched. By this, i'm supposed to have the game designed from start to finish by tomorrow midnight. I've got my concept, and i suppose its possible to get there from here, but yesterday was my gf's birthday and we went to her parents until 10 and i got sick so we couldn't finish the night off right. So i've got to make up for that today with extra gf duties.

Which screws the schedule worse. Ideally i'll do up concept sketches of the enemies and level tonight, along with something on the player character and how it interacts with stuff. The focus of this game isn't so much the uniqueness of the genre, because it isn't going to be much more than a jump'n'bump. Four weeks isn't enough time to build anything more complicated, in my mind. Instead of coming up with something more interesting, i figured i'd better stick to the status quo and focus on the art. I've been wanting a chance to do some drawing lately anyways. [ed: next post should be about which ideas i'm NOT going to do].

By, July 21, 2005 i've decided to take the learned path and buy some REAL books on programmering. The three books i own right now are: C++ for Dummies Visual Basic 6 for Dummies Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus so yeah, i need something real. I'm going to buy four books (so far), one book every pay. Here are, in order of purchase, what i'm going to be getting: i'm probably going to need a directx9 book eventually - and probably a decent video card to supplement that. But there we have it.

I've already ordered the first book, i'm just waiting for it to be shipped. The prices they show at the linky-ends are inaccurate. I ended up paying $81.31can for WinformsC# which is listed there originally at $71.99 and if its taxed 15%HST then the price should be $82.79. *shrug* i asked and they said the prices are wrong, but didn't care to explain further. I'm getting my books regardless of the cost. By, July 19, 2005 playing in a local company baseball tournament - mcd's of course.

Truro's got 2 and 1 and i don't know about the rest - but i'm assuming new glasgow's probably the same. The other teams suck bad! We got a 2 hour break in the tournament, so i figured i'd come home and grab a bite instead of spending my (lost and found!) grocery money on a mac or something.

Is it possible to place a MenuStrip into a XNA 4.0 project. MenuStrip in XNA 4.0. Can I shoot an enemy through a keyhole or small crack of a door with.

Well its 2h and i wanted to grab a pic of the facepainting that one of the girls did for me. Current Mood: Pumped [grin] if you're wondering if i'm dead or not - well i'm not. I'm playing alot of metroid prime (and after i finish that, wind waker) and in between i'm relearning c# and winforms.

I've got a book coming in next friday or before, by Chris Sells. Don't be fooled by the price - it cost me $81.31can total. I managed to remember how to unlock Main() in a windows forms project: instead of.

By, October 16, 2007 i got started on the inventory screen. So far you can toggle it on and off, and it fills up when you pick up stuff.

I just grabbed the map cursor from zla last night and magic-wanded/erased the backgrounds out of the sprites, that aught to be in the next screen i put up. After i get that in, i'll probably have a message pop up when you've got the cursor over an item to tell you what the thing is. After that, i'll be taking the four-enum array and changing it to something that can hold more information about items. That'll probably lead to generic-izing the item drops so they more closely resemble the inventory objects.

Or just use the same structure for both. I was looking at my old stuff last night. I actually grabbed the inventory panel from, which i looked at (and played with) most. Why did i stop working on it again?

All i needed was to do some refactoring. By, May 25, 2005 Dragon Warrior (brecconary) lets get back to the town maps. Tantagel town (brecconary) is almost alright to go with - except the item shop island: err. Do i need to explain anything here?

If i were to work a beach into the town or something, i could put the item shop on a wooden-built platform, and that would work pretty well for me. (tantagel castle) i went back to look at tantagel castle again and i'm positive i'm not putting it on the shore, because it just doesn't make any sense to. I wanted to look at what having a castle outer wall would do, and i think it'd work pretty well if i need to force limited access to the keyshop and basement.

Most importantly though, i'm definitely not going to be putting the castle on the shore. Noone does that. It'd sink into the sand, or whatever. Coming back to garinham.

Jesus, this one has completely fucked my brain. What is UP with all that water! The only thing i (we - i involved a few people at work with this one) could come up with was that since the world map is zoomed out so far, a small pond or whatever wouldn't be noticed from there. I still maintain this is bullshit - but yeah i suppose its possible. All that's important though, is that you can't get into the big building without a key.

Once you're in, you need to find the hidden entrance - how to do that without giving it away is beyond me for now. Once out back, its walled off anyways so you can't access it by walking around.

That saves me some work. I'll just include that as part of the building from the outside, rather than trying to show it and giving it away. In any case, i'm axing the water in the town altogether. There's just no goddamn reason for it. Its not like its a port town right on the water or anything - there are no ships in this world.

Aren't there? Well, if i felt like pushing some interesting twists on the world, i could do that ^_^;; STILL.

The town is neither a port originally, nor is it sitting on the water, to be mistaken for a port. I'm going to post this much and we can move onto the next topic - monster ai.

By, December 11, 2004 I've been long meaning to get around and write down all of my gripes and praises about various games - in a media form that I probably won't lose to the garbage bin by my 2yr old toddler. I've longed to make 'the perfect action/adventure game' for me and my girlfriend Jenn, and I just haven't gotten past the idea stage yet. Hopefully this will propel me toward a finished product.

My ideal game combines bits from other games, much as most other games do nowadays. I'll start by mentioning the games foremost on the list I intend to 'borrow' ideas from - though there may be others involved. Here they are, in order of importance: o Diablo series o Zelda series o Secret of Mana series o Crystal Chronicles o Crystalis o Chronicles of the Radia War The first thing you might note is that there's only one PC game there - yes, I prefer a joypad to a mouse and keyboard. In my opinion, if the game requires more than 4 buttons and a dpad or analog for its main gameplay, its too complicated. This goes for any game. I actually might go so far to say that no game should require any more than 2 buttons - but that may be pushing it.

So what's the connection between all of these games? Control scheme is one of the more important points - they all play alike, aside from Diablo. The reason Diablo is at the top, however, is because it has most of the other important points in it, and has performed extremely well in those areas.

Let's cut to the chase, now. I'm now going to run through each game and make note of (noteworthy) points for each.

This is going to be a combination of input from myself and Jenn. While I've played each of the games in the list, Jenn has only played Diablo, Zelda, and Crystal Chronicles, and isn't giving into the others. ========================================================= DIABLO series ------------- For the most part, I'm going to be talking about Diablo II. I don't think there's anything it didn't improve on, as compared to Diablo I. ++ The Good ++ The biggest thing here is the item collection. It seems obvious to me that this game is nothing more than a treasure-hunting game. I've argued with n00bs left, right, and center that the game is nothing more than an RPG - but do not mistake it: every patch added to the game alters or increases the item database; the rest of the patches are just alterations made to increase item finding effectiveness.

I've gone so far as to label this a fishing game. If I ever get an action/adventure game off the ground, item-hunting will be the focus. Another important issue they tackle is world randomizing.

Every new game you start on Battle.net will dynamically create a world for you to explore. Sure, I don't see this as a free-roaming game; each map they create will always connect to the same other maps - just in different layouts. For instance, the Rogue Encampment always leads to the Blood Moor, which always leads to the Cold Plains. Treasure boxes and Monster placement is completely random as well, and that's important. The item/trading menus are straightforward and intuitive, and thats key to any play experience. Variety of enemies and environment is also a good part of the game. I like that the monsters can be special, having special powers and defenses, or increased resistances to certain types of magic.

There are even two types of special creatures - the Leader types, which have a series of underlings - and the random pair of Berzerkers/Ghostly/etc type that have double hitpoints, attack scores, or whatever. Skill Trees are welcome as well - as you level up, you choose which skills you want to learn or improve. Skills give a character an edge against the monsters, by allowing a player to use magic or special big attack to do more damage. In the Diablo II Expansion, Lord of Destruction, they let you have two sets of weapons equipped, and a hotkey to let you quickly switch between them.

The biggest reason I like this is because I often want to have a melee set and a missile set; being able to switch between them is an important feature to me. Having a safe spot to toss things you want to save for later, the stash, is key to any item-hunting game. In my opinion, the upgraded stash in the expansion still isn't large enough; people still use mules to store their stuff. Allowing players to personalize the effects on their items, with sockets and gems is cool. I've found many places where a socketed item was more effective than any gold (rare) item i could find at the time. Gambling for items is a great place to use your (for the most part) useless gold. They have rings and amulets to gamble for too, and that tends to be where my cash goes.

Dying in this game isn't necessarily a horrible thing. In Diablo I, if you died, all of your equipped items fell on the ground, and it was a real bitch to have to pick up each item and then manually re-equip them. Now, you just have to grab your corpse and you're back up and running. Having 'hirelings' and minions is a great addition to the game. Equippable hirelings is even better. Waypoints are an effective way to jump around the world - you should have some way to get around quickly in any game like this. The automap wasn't just a good idea, it's an essential tool for any experienced player.

Finding my way around a dungeon or in the desert would be a real bitch without a guide. ++ The Bad ++ As Jenn has pointed out, it seems that Blizzard took the easy way out when they decided to make the game more difficult.

As you progress through the game, each area has a higher and higher count of monsters that flood rush you; as the monsters get stronger, they're positioned in higher concentrations. At this point, the game becomes a 'pull; retreat; kill' repetition that gets boring and can even become frustrating. In my opinion that isn't quite as bad as the lack of AI in the game.

Most monsters simply rush you and melee until they die. The missile monsters get in range and start firing away. The monster healers do what the missile monsters do, as they tend to also be missile monsters. Aside from the bosses, thats pretty much all there is to them.

Another thing is that the item drop rate seems to go down as you progress through the areas. You might get an item 25% of the time in Act I, but in Act IV it seems more like 5%. In order to get better drop rates, you need to go back through the game in the higher difficulty settings. It seems like just another way to increase play-time without doing any work. This subject may need more research, however.

Like many rpg games, Diablo has a hit/miss calculation that can lead to much frustration. If I click on a monster and my avatar runs up to it and swings an axe at it, and the axe sprite collides with the monster sprite, I say that's a hit - 100% of the time. I've been in situations where my character was quite good, and I'd be spending 10sec or more just trying to get a hit on a monster. That's not fun for me. At a certain point when I had gotten so used to the game, I was ignoring regular magic drops (blue names) and looking only for uncommon (yellow), set (green), and rare (gold) items, and even later, i stopped looking for uncommons as well. Why aren't the items spread out more evenly?

If you find a blue item and then a yellow item, I'd like the blue item to stand a chance against the yellow item: give the yellow item 4 things, and the blue item 2 things; but let the blue be more likely to have the upper half of the range and the yellow the lower half of the range. Having your items wear out is a useless part of the game. In the middle of a group fight, I see the 'low durability' icon pop up and I swear, because I don't need my weapon to break when I'm stuck in a crowd. Durability isn't something I consider fun in any way. Stamina is another annoying addition.

I appreciate the run/walk toggle - though I generally keep it on run - but it seems that vitality just didn't affect enough stuff, so they added it in. Waste of time, not very fun. Not letting me have a battle plan for my minions and other NPCs in the party is a real let-down.

I should be able to tell my helpers to protect me or to go after the strongest monsters. The hitpoints a monster had were represented by a life bar that popped up at the top of the screen. As you connected with hits, the life bar would drop relative to how hurt it was. I'd much rather not see how much health a monster has, and just see how much damage I'm doing to it as a number or whatever. This game might have been the perfect game to me if they had just allowed single computer multiplayer. Without it, Jenn and I can't play together without spending ALOT of cash (and that ain't gonna be happening anytime soon) They had weather effects and day/night cycles, but they were nothing more than environmental effects - there was no effect on gameplay at all. This could have been a bigger deal.

ZELDA series ------------ There's quite a variety in the games in this series - but most of them follow the same formula. I'm actually going to focus my attention on the first Gameboy Zelda, Link's Awakening; it's my favorite one. ++ The Good ++ The control scheme is simple, familiar, and very polished.

Many people can pick up this game and play it without the need for a manual. There isn't any confusion in the menus; there's only one inventory screen, and equipping stuff is as simple as highlighting it and pressing the button you want to use it with. The monsters in these games tend to have unique personalities. Fighting Octoroks is a different experience entirely from fighting Tektites.

In Ocarina of Time, they worked the day/night cycle in and made important differences between the two. Every zone in the game had different things going on at different times of the day, for instance, at the start of the game, skeletons would come out of the ground at nighttime and wouldn't during the day. In Four Swords, the multiplayer was really fun. Kode Nsp Labaik Allahummah. The game was designed with this in mind. ++ The Bad ++ The game is basically a puzzle game.

I like puzzles, but once you've solved them, there's really no reason to ever play it again aside from nostalgia. Some monsters required you to kill them with specific items. If you didn't have the item, you weren't able to kill them. Not real great. You couldn't roam new areas of land without a specific item.

The item usually can't be picked up until you solve the next puzzle, so forget about travelling to the harder levels until you've gotten past everything before it. Killing monsters is pointless unless you're looking for cash or item refills.

Getting better items only happens when you solve the puzzles, and you have to solve them in order. In Four Swords, in Jenn's opinion, forcing the players to have to do formations to solve the puzzles wasn't cool. We agree that they should have focused on getting used to the controls more at first, and leave the formations for later levels. SECRET OF MANA series --------------------- Though each game is different, there are many things that are consistant throughout the series. Some of these things are good, some are rotten.

++ The Good ++ The diversity of magics and weaponry is the name of the game here. Allowing your characters to get better at a weapon or magic class through practice is a real big thing for me. Instead of just putting points into something, you have to work at it to get it better. Allowing the player to have other members in the party that they can switch to is pretty cool. That they're unique and have to be played differently is also cool.

That more than one person can play at the same time really sealed the deal. Some of the weapons in Sword of Mana let you do 3-hit combos that did more damage with each hit. If you hit your attack button at the right time, you'd follow up with a hit that did 1.5x and 2x damage. That was cool. Seeing the amount of damage you've done as a number was always informative. In any number-based game, more numerical information is better.

This might be a topic worthy of more research, though. ++ The Bad ++ You have to wait until a certain point in the story to get a new type of weapon.

You should be able to pick any weapon up at any time. The monsters weren't really very much different from one another (sprite sets aside). A little more intelligence please! Hit/Miss is always crap in my books. If my sword hit the Rabite, I'd better be doing some goddamn damage. Seeing MISS pop up instead of a damage count sucked the big one.

Finding items in this game isn't fun at all. In the first few games, you'd have to kill alot of monsters to find the best items. Eventually though, SquareEnix decided that wasn't hard enough. They came up with a new system where you had to gather materials to forge weapons and armor with, and make plants from seeds that you'd use to improve their stats. The materials for the best items in the game were nearly impossible to come by, and you'd need the materials to improve the stats along with the plants. The process is annoying at best, and if you put any amount of time into looking for the materials, you're likely to improve your character to the point where you don't even need the best stuff anyways, to beat the game.

You were never allowed to hit more than one monster in an attack. If two monsters were stacked one on top of the other, you'd only hit one per attack and the others could nail you as you recovered from the attack.

As you levelled your characters weapons and magic, the NPC you were paired with often take matters into their own hands and steal your kills. You're able to tell them to 'Stay Away' but sometimes they're forced into fights and will attack. NPCs get stuck very easily too. If you run around behind a group of monsters, the NPC won't try to cut a path through to you, they'll just try to walk or run to where you are. The monsters that get in their way will relentlessly beat on them and often will kill them. I usually just leave them to die - they're just going to get in the way of my levelling anyways. No multiplayer in Sword of Mana at all.

That was the biggest disappointment of the game. CRYSTAL CHRONICLES ------------------ There were alot of new things done in this game, but also alot of things were done really badly.

++ The Good ++ Letting the player hook up the gameboys to the system and look down to see a map wasn't just cool, it was damned useful. Casting spells was really easy to do - you just hold in the action button and position a cursor that would move along the ground, and you put it under a monster and released the button to cast. Being able to quick select between a list of actions was a cool way of doing things. You only had 4 buttons to use on the gameboy anyways, so they had to come up with a way to allow for more than 4 things to do - and it works pretty well.

The simultaneous multiplayer was the coolest part of the game. ++ The Bad ++ They set up the multiplayer to force you to use gameboys, so that forces you to have a bunch of them if you want to play. They decided to force players to work together to get through a multiplayer game in many ways. Having the maps only show monster locations or only the treasures makes you have to tell the group about what is where, or they move around blindly. Someone needs to carry the chalice around, and that was irritating. You had to keep in mind that you were stuck in the chalice's safety radius, and that was very limiting. The item creation part of the game was very boring - much like what SquareEnix did with the later Mana games.

In this, however, you have to have a design for whatever you're looking to create - without it, you can't create the item. Once you have the design, you need to find the materials by killing monsters. Killing monsters is only useful if you're looking for items or gil. The ring command system worked ok until you had too many things in the ring.

Suppose you have 8 commands on your ring and you're looking for Heal, chances are you're going to overshoot it when you're spinning the ring. It's also very inconvenient when you need to switch between your attack spells quickly, chances are you aren't going to remember what order the things are in your ring. CRYSTALIS --------- ++ The Good ++ Clean inventory system. The game was like Zelda1 on crack to me. You were able to level up your character and choose between different weapons. You also had a series of spells to cast too, which was a new thing in an action/adventure.

Though there was a bit of hand-holding in the game, they let you go to a bunch of areas before you were actually able to progress through them to make you feel like you were allowed to roam a bit. ++ The Bad ++ Your attack range was terrible. If you attacked in any one direction, you'd stab outward from yourself, and only attack on the x or y axis. A sweeping motion is better for these games. CHRONICLES OF THE RADIA WAR --------------------------- ++ The Good ++ As you progressed through the game, you picked up NPCs that would fight along with you.

You were allowed to tell each one a general command in battle - how you wanted them to fight. ++ The Bad ++ Your NPC helpers were dumb as doorposts. Often they'd target a monster in a group and get surrounded - and the monsters would beat the crap out of them. ========================================================= Before I part, I want to mention some random things I felt might improve on any of these games.

Horses and Mules - Riding Horses or Mules would increase the speed of the character and allow better travelling. If a game has large zones or is completely free-roaming, you're going to want to let the player get around the world quickly and efficiently. If it were a Mule, you could also have a moving Stash of sorts - and it would explain away the inconsistency of Diablo's stash. Having Horses and Mules would also open up the possiblity for a breeding side-game. [edit: I'm not sure if I ever really completely finished this up, I only worked on it for 3 hours or so over two days. I'll probably get back to this stuff again.]. By, January 10, 2008 if i had known it was going to turn out this way, i woulda started off as simply as possible.

I'm working on the collision detection and response code again, and its just such a pain in the ass. Ok so i've gotten it so you can crash into the fortress and slide along its walls. There's no prob there anymore.

The problem is more about aesthetic as far as i can tell right now. See, what i wanted to do was have a PreCollisionLogic and PostCollisionLogic bit, and have the collision be done by a generic collider in between. I overcomplicated it before it was even working, i know. Here's a general idea of what i'm doing in my game logic right now: - move player along x. - check for collision between player and tilemap. - if colliding, reflect velocity in x and move player back along x.

- move player along y. - check for collision between player and tilemap. - if colliding, reflect velocity in y and move player back along y.

Now you can be sure this code works. If i could leave it be, i'd be golden. I just can't.

See, i'm going to need to do collisions between more than just one tilemap. For every object (or list) i need to collide the player with, i need to add the code twice.

Looking forward, every other object that needs to collide with the tilemap also has to go through this process. Thats why i came up with the precoldet and postcoldet stuff. But i can't seem to come up with a way to do the above code in a cleaner one-step manner. I have to move twice, and check for (and deal with) collisions twice. Anyone have any clues i could use?

By, December 10, 2006 one of the things i do in most of my allegro-demo thingers is i have a timer variable that tracks how long has passed (in msec) since the program was started. Its granted that i can't really do alot better than 10msec granularity, so thats ok, thats what i have it set to. I'm using an unsigned int that rolls over after. X3 works it out to. Msecs /sec /min /hr /day /1000/60/60/24 = 49.71027 days. I'm never going to see that happen in any of my games, i'm sure of it. One thought i just had was about the granularity.

If instead of cranking the time passed by 10msec, how about i just crank it by 1 and multiply the resulting yeild by 10 when i want to use it? That means i can use it 10x longer. (assume average 365.25day years) msecs /sec /min /hr /day /yr 0/1000/60/60/24/365.25 = 1.360993 years. I'd say that was a fine solution, but in a worst-case scenario, i think that i could keep another unsigned int that stored the number of days that passed and knock the timer back 24 hours every time it rolled over. I don't even think i'd need to use an unsigned for that.

I'm actually going to go build that right now. [edit: yup it works great, it can go to the maximum of an unsigned long in days before i have to worry about timer overruns. Hmm how many years is that. Calc says ~11,759,000 years [grin] if i were to use an unsigned int, i'd get ~179.425 years out of it. That'd be damn good enough for me.]. By, October 3, 2007 both a blessing and a curse, i've obtained my dad's old rig. Used up most of my day setting up a wireless network and copying over my stuff from jenn's.

I hope the box gives me a couple of months at least. XP already bluescreened on me, so we'll see.

I've got my stuff in the office (my room durr!) so i've got a haven now. Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz (2 CPUs) Memory: 1024MB RAM Display Chip type: RADEON 9100 AGP Display Memory: 128.0 MB Sound: SB Audigy 2 Audio [A400]. By, November 13, 2006 4 months of no gdnet+ and i put the $40 bucks forward and re-enlisted. I wonder to myself if it was a wasted $40 - do i need a journal and ftp space here that badly?

Then i realize that i'm going to be blowing 4x that on fast food this month. Yeah its worth it. Even if i only write three entries by the time my subscription renews, it'll still be worth the money.

Any of you that know me would know that i'm a longtime fan. For the past two years they've been putting on this thing called, and they're doing it again this year. You pick a children's hospital near you and buy something off an list that will be given to the children there - video games, books, dvds. All of the ds' for Halifax have already been purchased. Since amazon doesn't do paypal i ended up donating $40 directly instead of buying something, i don't have a credit card.

But seriously, even $20 could make a sick kid happy over christmas - its a damn good cause. I didn't realize that a person could be oversaturated by gaming goodness, phoenix told me recently that it happens.

But i'm starting to feel it. I've got a library of probably about 40 games across a variety of platforms that i want to be playing, but i don't have time for them all. Its hard to just pick one and go with it sometimes, but the other games aren't going anywhere so its not too bad i guess. Right now i'm playing.

I thought i was going to hate it - i bought and played the accursed demo disc and had my mind made up about it. Then i cracked and put the $50 on it and took it home. Worst case, i'd have something i could trade in at eb games for a decent price. The battles are a little tedious, just like they've always been, but their stories are always stellar and this time is no different. In my downtime i've been playing for the ds. It isn't a stellar game, but its pushing console action/adventure even closer to Diablo, and thats where i want it. I still say is the pinnacle of the Mana series thus far, but children's still good times.

It makes me happy to see that people are still making 2d sprite-based games. I've seen some beautiful 2d sprite games, and sometimes you just can't get that anime feel quite right in 3d. The tales games is a good example of that - compare their 3d games against their 2d games and you might see what i mean. The 3d just doesn't look as good. I've become a Tales enthusiast, even a fanboy if you wanna go that far. I fscking love Tales games.

Take a standard console rpg and do the fights in realtime. I'm on my second playthrough of. The american voice acting was pretty tight this time around.

There's no Colette, at least. I'm super pumped about the, i'm even considering buying a japanese PS2 and importing it - its hard to tell what they're going to do to it if it ever comes over. The air-combo system is. I picked up, and i got it started a little, but i didn't get a chance to really get into it yet.

They finally added free-roam to their battle system, it really pissed me off that it wasn't there in Tales of Symphonia. I really like the fonom circle system, it makes all of the element attacks more complicated, but it really gives you a sense of how powerful the characters in other games really are.

Cast a spell on the ground to give an area a particular element, and then perform a standard special attack from there and it upgrades to something more powerful. Lightning Tiger Blade, for example, requires you to put down a lightning area and then to perform Tiger Blade while you're touching it. I thought that was a really awesome idea.

Unfortunately, putting it into practice is a pain in the ass for me still. I haven't pulled any enhanced attacks off yet. It looks like zelda twilight princess is going to be out soon. I'll probably just pick up the gamecube version.

I can't justify buying a wii for it alone. Maybe if a Mana game came out for it along with a Tales game. Alot of people are going to buy it just because its new and interesting - i'm curious but i don't care all that much. I just don't have time for all of these games! I just picked up guitar hero 2 and its awesome but i don't think i'm going to play it much on my own. The gf loves it, and that'll mean i'll be logging more hours on it before i die, so i guess thats cool. I'm in the middle of okame (i got my sis' bf hooked on it) and i highly recommend that you at least rent it and give it some serious attention.

By, May 12, 2005 Dragon Warrior i completely forgot to go over the magic spells. Well, they're going to work like the items do, you assign them to a button and then press the button to cast. I'm thinking that i'll have their icons in the inventory/spell screen be books with various symbols. Let's start by listing them, along with their cost: Heal 3MP Firebal 2MP Sleep 2MP Radiant 2MP StopSpell 2MP Outside 6MP Return 8MP Repel 2MP HealMore 8MP Firebane 5MP for every spell you cast, i was thinking we just make it look like the dust is being thrown in the air by a small air circle around you as you cast.

Like, arc-sweeps that travel around and away from you - like fred perry does in his gold digger comics, to indicate impacts. I can't find a picture of it, but i'll draw it to show it when i start working on the art. I think they do it that way in street fighter iii. As you cast it, and for the duration of the spell, you're going to be vulnerable to attack - you can't do anything until the spell is done. (heal and healmore) Heal and HealMore obviously heal your character. A shower of shines (many more in the case of HealMore) will go over your sprite and the number of HP you gained back from the spell would pop up in green. If you gained more than you can hold, the number is still shown - you're just capped at your max.

Heal gives around 30HP and HealMore gives around 100HP back. I'm going to want a randomness to it, i'm pretty sure its that way in the game. I'll have to play and record some numbers if i want it exact, but i'm pretty sure i can guess: 24-32HP for Heal, likely, and 96-104HP (maybe a bit bigger range here) for HealMore. (firebal) i'm not sure about firebal yet, probably a ball of fire shot in the direction you were moving last?

I know that in dw2+, firebal damages a series of monsters, so i could do a half-circle fire arc that would work just like you were swinging your sword, but further away from you. That would cover more ground and be alot more useful than a projectile.

If you can never hit with it, you'd never use it. Well, you would, but you wouldn't like it. (firebane) if we were to go with the fire arc for firebal, then firebane should be a full 360' blast that does more damage. You'd use it alot if you could nail a ton of monsters with it at the same time. I hate missing monsters with higher level spells that do more damage - this takes care of that, its even easier to use than firebal. I'm liking the sound of this ^_^ (fire spell immunities) the great thing about the fire spells is that they completely ignore DEF.

When you hit, you get the spell's full fury every time. Gotta like that. Unfortunately, some monsters are actually immune to them! I know for sure that Metaly and DracoLord are immune - this is something interesting to go through. [working] Firebal: 16-19 damage Firebane: 54-58 damage ok, i'm having a bit of trouble here.

I was assuming that if i hit the first time, it worked always, and if it didn't work the first time, it never worked. Well, i fought a Druinlord and man i got confused!

Firebal wasn't working but firebane was! Then i tried firebane a few more rounds and it worked off and on. I'm not sure what that means.

I know that the metaly has to be fully immune. I'm pretty sure that the dracolord's 2nd form has to be fully immune too, as well as any of the full dragons. The wyvern took damage but the starwyvern didn't, and as i said before, the druinlord was iffy. I can't test it on golem yet, but i can make that up if i want. Err, well, Dragons take damage from both firebal and firebane, so i can't jump on that one.

I'll have to go hunting for Blues and Reds to test it on. Also, what about MadKnight and AxeKnight? I'm assuming that everything else should take damage. Well, maybe not the Metal Scorp. [working] AxeKnight is partially immune, as is BlueDrgn. RockGolem and RedDragon are completely immune. DracoLord's first form is partially immune, and surprisingly, so is his second form.

I was wrong, but oh wells. I'll talk about the dracolord when we come to the monsters - he's only supposed to be damaged with the Loto Sword.

But not in this game, i guess. (radiant) lets move on. When you enter a cavern, you should only be able to see a little bit around you - its going to be dark. When you cast radiant, your view radius increases dramatically; as time passes, the radius recedes - eventually it will shrink back to the start radius. There will be two parts to the circle of light, the inner half (or two-thirds), which will be full light, and the rest, which will be half light. I'm assuming the half-light will just be hatched black and see-through. This ties in with how the torch item works.

(repel) we already went through this one last time - with the repellant item. (return) look up the warp wing item in teh previous post. (outside) fades from screen to black and then to the entrance you used last.

(the underground tunnel has two exits, so i gotta specify that) the game plays the 'pluck pluck pluck pluck' noise of your feet shuffling down stairs - might as well keep that one as a nod to the original. All that's left now is stopspell and sleep. I left these for last because i know the least about these two spells. Stopspell obviously stops monster spells and sleep obviously puts them to sleep.

The one thing i don't know about them is their duration. How the hell do you figure it out?

I'm going to have to wing that. The other thing i don't know is how to figure out if the spell even works. Blaupunkt Navi Software Download. Honestly, there's just no indication aside from 'it works better when you're stronger'.

I gotta get some shuteye. I'll think on this at work tomorrow. By, March 5, 2007 err so yeah, i went about the one-week all wrong. I misunderstood that i was supposed to log hours towards an ideal work week. I've learned from some of my mistakes on the project and i'm restarting from scratch. I'm following the outline. Right now i'm still on my first couple of hours, setting up a framework that will hopefully do the job.

I was copying 's event manager and halfway through his code i was like 'wtf, i don't understand most of this, how am i going to put it to use?!' I mean the guy's using templated functions as member methods, and its full of stuff i don't see anywhere near this section of the book. By, June 14, 2005 oh teh boredom. Yeah i'm a paint program n00b and dont know enough about 'em to pass a class yet. But i can draws a little!

(trying to draw glasses on the punk was a b1tch! No eyewear for you~) [EDIT: wanted the (.) speech balloon originally, didn't want to fight anymore. I got it in now!] [EDIT #2: fyi, stole the idea from 's capture the bear shirts. Spawned from #gd chat. 3:31pm) cut it out 3:31pm) * Mushu cuts it out 3:32pm) ph34r teh muer 3:33pm) ph34r teh cut3 mu3r 3:33pm) * SteelGolem spills some bullets at mu3r's feet and takes a pic 3:33pm) hahaha 3:33pm) muer-b4k4:D --sg!].

By, January 14, 2005 jesus christ. I don't know whose idea it was to set the default editor settings in dev-c++ but, man! It makes the ugliest code ever known in this age of man. Getting allegro to run was a bit of a pain too, i had to uninstall/reinstall everything and get the newest packages before i could get anything to run. Here's what happened: i decided to go check out the showcase (as i do every morning) and there's this tetroids game there () and i try to run it. It gives me diahorrea all over my desktop: well he's gone on to explain that he's using allegro.

I've used allegro for a long time, so i figure i can help the guy out. Well man, none of the stuff from my old journal (archived to cd now) will run on the comp! I was thinking it was my hardware, so i run dev-cpp and try a simple allegro app, and everything's borked. Anyways, its completely reinstalled and i have the newest version of allegro and it works fine. Getting c++ to do my bidding was a bit of a challenge.

I'm not used to forward declarations anymore, and i'm not happy when i can't see the params of a function in a tooltip as i type it out. Sure, its an open-source project vs a huge corporation, but devcpp has been around for quite a long time.

All those options are silly when you compare the features of vcpp against it. Who cares if my brackets highlight if i can't see what's in a function param list?

Long story short, i have allegro going again, so if anyone has any allegro-related problems, be sure to drop me a line. I sorta remember a bit of it. By, February 18, 2007 sorta. I lost alot of steam while my gf was off work.

I haven't done much on the game, just starting to make the game work a little less chunky. Nothing big, just got it so you can slide around instead of jumping from tile to tile.

Also got a joystick buffer system built and ready to patch into the system. Allegro only has instant button info, nothing like a dos keyboard buffer. So i made one. Takes care of a few icky gripes i had with menu systems and whatnot. In my 'spare time' today i figured i'd assess my material possessions and file them all in an html somewhere. I'll be updating sporadically.

By, June 20, 2005 wow. Above and beyond mIRC, the only thing left (in my mind) is to give the beast scripting capabilities. I tried to change my name across the 4 servers i had open, and had to do it manually. No aliases, no scripting. But its on the todo list, i just gotta wait a bit. Oh wells [grin] Gameboy Hardware Specs i'm using only one as a reference here, but who cares.

It can't be far off. Original gameboy specs (what i'm aiming this game at) says: CPU type:Z80 8-bit CMOS CPU speed:4.19 Mhz RAM memory:64 Kbit (8 Kbyte) Max resolution:160 x 144 pixels Colors Available:4 colors (greyscale) Max colors at once:4 colors Max sprite size:8 x 16 pixel or 8 x 8 pixels (switchable) Max sprites:40 sprites Min/Max Cart Size:256 Kbit - 16 Mbit Sound:4 Channel i'm going to have to do a bit of magic to push some of these numbers, but i don't see this game really needing much more than that. The 4 color part was the real Q i had, i already knew the res. I suppose knowing that the cpu runs at 4mhz and that i've got about 8kb ram to work with is good. [EDIT: holy shitballs! Way better info!] Dragon Warrior (typical game run) we left off at garinham. We visited here for the first time, and now all we can do is wander around and get stronger until we stumble upon kol.

I wonder why we're not told about it? Well, they mention that the princess was taken east in garinham, so maybe thats indication enough. Tell them to go east, but make them explore on their own. - desert cave - a trivial maze with two floors awaits. No monsters bother the player in here. When you get to the 'end' of the maze, a tablet is found, and you read it.

It tells about 3 items guarded by 3 people, and you need these three things to get to charlock. On a side note, just one torch is all you need to go all the way in and out of the desert cave, even if you go the wrong way every time. I'm going to need to figure out the torch regression speed sometime.

By, January 19, 2005 one of the things i wanted to talk about was how i was planning on doing the equipment graphics for the diablo-game. It seems that they made a few attack sprites for different types of attacks and made two sprites per weapon/hand that would fit where it should.

I say two, because depending on the direction, the weapon/shield sprite should be drawn over the player sprite (if weapon should be seen in front) or under (if seen in behind). Here's an example: is made up of: (i had a hell of a time fighting with my image manip programs.

I almost had it with proCreate but the layers were going all see-through and stuff. It was retarded. Then i was dumb and saved out as jpg and it made a mess of the images. Then i was even dumber and couldn't get psp3 to paste an image over another and have transparent bits not show. Been a while. ) so here, we have the cardboard tube at that view as being in behind the monk sprite.

Isn't there going to be another sprite for the cardboard tube that would just be a fully transparent sprite? Well, that seems silly, doesn't it? Why not just tag the view for that angle as in front or behind? That makes more sense, come to think of it. I was thinking there would be a point where you'd need to have it in front AND behind - but what would ever be that way that couldn't be altered? In secret of mana, its pretty obvious. They drew a series of weapons doing their attacks, walks and idles, and then made the character sprites fit the weapons.

Every character holds and uses every weapon exactly the same. It certainly isn't going to be very easy to do differently sized characters, but you can make the animations much more generic. By, May 12, 2006 another of my cut&paste journaling efforts! I'm not gonna bother putting this in the GDS, as its not really worth anything. Made with vc#2k3, so make sure you've got the.net runtimes before you try to run it. Oh, and it uses mdx9 for the joystick interface.

I'm guessing there ain't too many people that'll even bother with it ^_^ [edit: hotlinked some of the interesting trackbacks. Notepad don't do that for me!] [edit: updated exe with crappy try/catch block so the thing isn't as ugly as 'unhandled exception' dumps] [edit: hmm still dumps on craig's compy.

Maybe he doesn't have the mdx runtimes?] - 2006/05/10 - whoever invented date ordering is fucked. It should be year, month, day. Things are arranged better in my folders that way.

Lol i just read a gamasutra article i found on the [gdnet forums >gdnet contest] thread, found here:. Alot of the stuff i felt i already knew, but having it put in my face again was refreshing. Some of the stuff i learned was really just direction - the most important thing i pulled out was that i need to prototype before i try entire projects. Sounds obvious, huh? So where'd i miss that bulletin? Anyways it got me to thinking, what projects am i not doing anything on that i want to. A ton, that's for sure!

One of the simpler ones was goign to be dragon warrior. But as i thought more and more about it, the game merited different designs, some seemed to make more sense to use than others. For instance, if i was only going to ever have one monster battling you at a time, why would i bother letting the player face in any direction other than the monster? Why would you turn your back or side to it? I suppose that in certain situations you might want to hit it in the back or something, depending on the monster defeat mechanism for the particular monster. Anyways, i digress.

As i thought on it i realized -- why aren't i making prototypes of these ideas? Some of my gameplay ideas are 2d, i don't need a fancy sprite engine for that; i can use basic forms stuff to do it. I just need a playing field and some sprites, the window background and a few (one?) picturebox will do fine for that. Thinking ahead, i could even do that zelda bow&arrow idea this way as a prototype if i were so inclined in the future!

Now i will chronicle my prototyping efforts! Its 3:21pm and i gotta start getting ready at 8pm for work. Thats a little less than 5 hours.

I should be able to get this prototyped and be able to play it by then for sure. Let's see how well i can deal with distractions!

-- prototype design begin -- so what is it i'm prototyping? Well, one of the possible control schemes i had in mind for a zelda clone was a dual analog kinda thing. Something like loaded/reloaded or smash tv, you use the left analog to move, and the right analog to face your player.

Pressing some other button would shoot, but this is gonna be zelda, so we'll have him swing his sword. I've done this sort of thing once before, it wasn't hard. I think it was a smiley face that had a crosshair cursor that would move around the face and when you pressed the shoulder button you'd make a bullet fly in that direction.

There'd be a target somewhere random and the point was to get as many as you could in the time you had. I'm not aiming for any kind of game here, i just want to see how well this kind of control scheme could work for melee battle. The idea is to use the left analog to move link around (we'll use the gameboy sprite set for simplicity's sake - plus i like it ^_^) and the right analog will aim link for his attack. When you press R1 he'll swing his sword through an arc - i might need a slider or something to allow for different arcs for testing.

There'll also be a slime moving around at random that you can attack. Already i'm thinking about having the slime do two different kinds of ai, but i should save that for a different prototype. He'll just slide around and thats it. No, even better, we'll just not have him move at all. Put him in the animation and just have him sit there.

We'll detect whether link hits or not, and put a message up every time he attacks that says whether there was a hit or not. We might want to draw the boundtest regions over the sprites. Can i do that? Maybe two sets of sprites then.

And have a checkbox that lets you turn them on and off. I'm probably going to need to draw a line from the center of link and out to represent where the right analog is being pushed, so you can have a better guess at where you're going to attack. We'll start with a 90' arc like he gets in Z:LA and let him attack in 8 directions instead of just 4. When the player pushes the right analog, we should face link in the direction that matches it best - but we'll only have 4 facing dirs so it won't look as great. Its good enough. I'm going to do alot of hardcoding and dirty stuff, prototyping means just getting something up and thats it.

Its by no means an end product. I just wanna see what it looks like. -- production begin -- ok lets start with our project. Basic windows form in c#. Let's get some coding music going. [now listening to: guitly gear music folder] crap my coffee is empty and my tummy's acidy.

I need some coding snacks. Forget it for now. First thing's first, i'm gonna add a groupbox (playAreaGroupBox) so i can set aside some of the space for any controls i might want to add. Gotta lock the window to a fixed size, don't want to deal with people screwing with that. Throw down a picture box for link (playerPictureBox), and one for the sword (swordPictureBox).

Ok now we need to make and add some pictures to the resources for stuff. I need 4 standing pics of link, and 8 sword pics for each angle. Gonna need to make 'em first. [ripping/drawing] hmm looks like i still have some stuff from when i was. Sword's done, i just need link in all 4 dirs [looking] hmm i have E and W but no N and S. Easy enough to get.

[working] ok now to break up the sword bmp [working] cool, done. Lets grab our mockup background and set it to the groupbox background. [working] slapping some graphics on our two pictureboxes, stretching them to doublesize, and doublesizing the background image - just too small! [working] hmm setting map as groupbox bg is just too ugly.

Adding another bmp and pushing to back. [working] ok now we need to set up the game loop and timing stuff. [working] hmm i can't seem to get Utility.Timer(DirectXTimer.GetElapsedTime) going. What reference am i missing? I got ms.dx in there. [looking on msdn] argh, i'm not sure what reference i need to use the code.

I poached it from mdx9 kickstart, but looks like i gotta do it manually, with Sys.Env.TickCount. [working] ok i think i got the main loop and logic timing set up. Now lets get some joystick input and move link around.

Crap, a vector class would be keen. I wonder if directx's vector will do the job? Let's get the joystick in. [working] got dx.di ref added in, and using clause. Added an Init() routine, we'll set up the joystick in here. [working] holy crap he moves fast!

Gonna need to slow that down. [working] there we go.

Now we can face the bugger. -- breaktime -- crap its like 6 now! Ugh my tummy needs food. [fooding] mmm cookies. Added a label on the right, to show what the space is for. [fooding] next thing i should do is get rid of the purple background of the sprites.

Probably gonna need to go to gif for the translucency. [fooding] mmm triple decker pb sammich (and milk!!). Crap i'm getting crumbs in my book. Someone should do a survey about what kinda power lunches people eat while they're coding. [naptime!] filled my tummy, and took a nap. Now its almost worktime.

Gonna set up for the next step, right analog. This one isn't as easy as the last one was, because i don't remember what the two axes are. I think it might have been Z and Rz but i'm not sure. Do i still have the shooter thing?

[looking] yup,. The (x,y) pair for the right analog is (z,rz). Good to know. - 2006/05/12 - back to the grind. I've got 4 hours this time. I had a hard time getting the drive to come back, but i was thinking about children of mana and it got me going.

So we're going to get the right analog and use it to choose a new direction for the player. Pretty easy, get a vector, and check what direction is biggest. That'll tell us which sprite to use. [working] well now, there's a mystery. I need to figure out which direction has the most on it, but wait, its just two axes i need to compare, huh? Well thats way easier. [working] its dirty, and i'd say we'd more likely be taking the vector's angle and using that to pick from a sprite set.

[working] ok i'm set to pick, but i don't have any pics in the resources to choose from yet. Time to slap them in there. Gonna have to read about that, first. Probably winforms book will help me best. [looking] hmm he spells it out pretty much for me. [working] or does he?

Seems he doesn't tell me how to do what i'm trying to do. Just a bunch of shit about culture and resx files.

He tells me how to add a resource and how to get it to build as embedded, but then he doesn't tell me how to get it out and use it. Guess i can't really build anything this complicated with embedded shit. I could load the stuff from file i guess but i'm feeling defeated and giving up. Olu pointed me at - i'm gonna give it a shot. [working] huh, that did the job alright!

The last little thingy at the bottom was what i used. Funny that it's using the N image for up and down. Hmm [working] oh, i was checking the leftAnalog by mistake.

And there we go, now i have the right analog facing the fecking player. Looks like vs.net still needs work on the resources part. Screw it, i have a working solution.

Ok now we got link running around and facing, now we add the swordy! So first we detect the button press.

[working] R1 maps to button 7. [working] ok, so we know we're arcing over 90deg only.

We need to do it over some period of time, of which each of 3 images will be displayed and positioned. I'll have to do this with an angle variable. [working] only thing left to figure out is where to drop the sword picture.

Take the right analog, snap it to a 45 and extend it to the size of the player bmp. Then slap it wherever that is, relative to th player. [working] argh so close!

The angles are coming up wrong though, and the pictures are exactly opposite! If i hold to the right and attack, the starting value should be 45degrees. Heh turns out originally i was having such trouble because i wasn't converting radians to and from degrees. So whats the problem NOW. [looking] lol i flipped the reposition Y to negative and the pictures are being shown right!

But now if you face up and attack, the sword comes out of your ass! The left and right works perfect, i just gotta figure out. Should i give tan2 a negative y? [checking] lol yeah.

Stupid worldspace vs screenspace. Negate those Y values, dammit! I should be able to compile a release ver and have a fully standalone test prog. [checking] yup, it works fine.

Gonna want to get rid of that purple shit and speed up the sword a little more. [working] seems there was a problem i had in my mind before. Something about what happens when you're not directing the right analog and you attack. If its a problem it'll crash or the bug will appear sometime. Anyhow, yummy prototype!

[testing] hmm, it won't do transparency for some reason. Oh well, i'll deal. My default control isn't as glaring as purple is. ^_^ its good enough to release for now.

To try later: - if right analog not being used, left analog should change direction - look at adding targetting cursor or something, you can't tell where you're aiming right now.