My projects and demos

[Nixola]

What's wrong about the export feature?

[pgimeno]

Sorry Pangit, didn't want to hijack your thread so I'll reply privately.

[Pangit]

Sorry Pangit, didn't want to hijack your thread so I'll reply privately.

No its totally fine, I find it an interesting issue also. Anyway makes the thread somewhat more lively and less like watching paint dry for people who have read this far with my endless project talk & me moaning about my project for 8 pages

Update for today, well going to keep at the pixel pushing. I want to really master grafx2. I think I can get the location backgrounds done in a consistent style with a nice stable application. My skill is unfortunately not great but still better to get something done than nothing at all. I can always go back and fix stuff later when I get better. For now its enough just to get place holders.

With all that said, this is pretty bad. PSML. Well everyone starts somewhere right...

cybercafe.png (7.94 KiB) Viewed 7618 times

The plan is to make things blended a bit better, learn the application inside out and read through the old deluxe paint tutorials. One big win is check out the file size.. no more worries about asset size in the program. Really the limitation is only my time and what's more I can start to script a lot of the tedious work as double bonus Grafx2 appears to be written in Lua (at least the scripts are..)

Really need to get my hands on a cheap graphics tablet.

Time to get busy with making some more interesting wall textures.. here is a screen that's part done. As you can see the entrance is unfinished.

rectohotelexit.png (312.66 KiB) Viewed 7604 times

Notice the huge difference in file size between the two, it would seem that getting more detailed with the texturing really causes the file size to take a hit.

Here is a tentative game window.. as you can see its just the frame at the moment and some junk dialogue and a name place-holder..

gamewindow.png (6.78 KiB) Viewed 7600 times

Plan is to have the icon menu on the bottom left. The text window will be on the right and that big black box will be the game scene window.

[Pangit]

As I couldn't help myself, here is a mock-up from the earlier tests.

mock1.png (15.98 KiB) Viewed 7595 times

[4aiman]

Considering the text area..
I think light_gray-on-black would do better.
Or even a green-on-black.

[Pangit]

Yes that's true, the font has a couple of weird issues like the m character seems be malformed. Will find another. Really the choice of a white background was down to Neuromancer using that style of interface but one of the annoying points of that game was the font was hard to read sometimes - especially on the C64.

mock3.png (521.13 KiB) Viewed 7583 times

here is another mockup with a scene that definitely needs some TLC lol. Take your point about the black background. It does make the text pop more this way. Cheers.

[4aiman]

Legarda Station...

What I always hated in games were the confusing proper names.
An own universe is *cool*, but proper names should either be easy to memorize or be spoon-fed to a player.
Just like in real life: throughout years one learns all the streets and alleys of his/her neighborhood. Then come the suburbs. Then - other cities and states/regions/countries.

Have played through SEGA Megadrive's (Genesis) Shadowrun like 20 times but after all these years, if you'd ask me the name of area with Ret's Nest or Lone Star Headquarters, I wont be able to tell you a thing.

My point:
if someone asks to take X and deliver it at Y point - you *already* should have been to Y.
Or there should be a map.
Maybe with only your current location and the Y location available ATM.
Name it in anyway you'd like to, but let your players learn your universe step-by-step.

[Pangit]

The structure of the game is a series of interconnected hubs based around the cities projected transport network. I wanted to avoid an open world game because I figured it would be to ambitious and I wanted to do something where I can make the experience a bit more targeted. So a lot of the quests a player can choose to take are randomly selected between these hubs. Navigation is part of the game the player gets to explore and use the map to figure out how to complete the quest/job. I remember back in the day I had paper maps of most of castlemaster where I had gone through and recorded where the items were, the monsters ect. That was part of the fun. A big part of Neuromancer was you would play the game - find out a new fact about the game. write it down and next time you played you got a little bit further or took a new approach.

What I am trying to do is figure out a way that NPCs can take the jobs/quests so its more dynamic and creates some sort of natural flow in the game of NPCs being busy and doing there own things.

the delivery quests once done, are just the inverse of the fetch quest. So that's the next on the list.

[Pangit]

Today's Updates:

Well much like yesterday spent what free time I had reading through the deluxe paint books/magazines for ideas. While its not exactly the same its close enough to be able to use in grafx2.

Here I wanted to make a weird screen for the AI to have as a background. You can see as I began this I didn't have a clear idea how to center the circles properly but by the end I had figured it out pretty much. Like I said its all a learning process - lol just some of us learn slower than others.

Still if i can just get a few screens a day done in a few months that will be good progress.

mosck4.png (35.09 KiB) Viewed 7523 times

Been thinking about how to implement the quests/jobs in game and it would seem that a table is going to be the best option.

[4aiman]

Been thinking about how to implement the quests/jobs in game and it would seem that a table is going to be the best option.

Tables are nearly everything


Here is a rough idea on how one may try to organize the data.
Hope it's "Ok" to suggest something like this.
What has been taken into account:

• NPCs
• all ingame items
• types of shops with tiers
• stations, facilities at every station
• quests: from/to/time_left/etc

Code: Select all

contacts = {
   Deadface  = {},
   Norman    = {},
   Stinkhoff = {},
   ...
}


items = {
   pistol  = {
      type  = "weapon",
      power = 2,
      clips = 8,
      rapid = 0.4,
      ...
   },
   firstaid = {
        type         = "ailment",
        hp           = 10,
        side_effects = {...},
   },
   ...
}

shops = { 
   weapon = {
      { -- tier 1
        items = { -- items to sell
           pistol  = { price = 120 },
           shotgun = { price = 640 },
           ...
        },                       
      },
      { -- tier 2
      },
      { -- tier 3
      },
      ...
   },
   drugstore = { ... },
   ...
}

points = {
   Legarda = {
      population = 300,
      longtitude = 45.6,
      latitude   = 120.1,
      shops      = {weapon = 1, drugs = 2 , inn = 3}, -- every station can have some shop of some tier. All tiers are predefined above.
      crimelevel = 20,
      police     = 10,
      magicpower = 100,
   },
   Leplaza = {
      population = 300,
      longtitude = 45.6,
      latitude   = 120.1,
      shops      = {weapon = 3, drugs = 1}, -- no Inn for you in this crime-center!
      crimelevel = 60,
      police     = 20,
      magicpower = 40,
   },
   ...
}

tasks = {
   fetch = {
      {
        start_point = "Legarda",
        end_point   = "Leplaza",
        item        = "pistol",
        pay         = 25,
        timeleft    = 150,
        contact     = "Deadface",
        availableat = {"Legarda", "Some other place"},
      },
      {
        start_point = "Leplaza",
        end_point   = "Leplaza",
        item        = "firstaid",
        pay         = 5,
        timeleft    = 10,
        contact     = "Poorguy",
        availableat = {"Legarda", "Leplaza"},
      },
      ...
   },
   deliver = {},
   ...   
}