Mysterious Song development log (aka sleepless ranting)

[nodtveidt]

I figured I'd start up a little thread about the progress made to the game, if anyone wants to see it...

In an effort to get PCEMAP to functional status, I converted the two towns created in mappy to PCEMAP's format. Wasn't easy...mappy is pretty inefficient, and I spent at least a half hour per map reorganizing tiles with PCEMAP's "Tile Swap" function. When all was said and done, they looked great in my shiny new editor. But the real test would come next...how successful will the map export be?

After fumbling with more tilesets (was working on the final area), I decided to get some sleep. This was about 5:46 in the morning. I think I slept till about 9ish or so, maybe 10ish. Time to get back up and go back to work. I had finished mapfile generation not long before I crashed this morning, so now it was time to put it to the test. I finished zoning the town tileset and copied over the definitions from Toren into the new area, Fawna. Compile the game, mount the image, run in the emulator...



Success! Toren's NPCs are here, but that's fine...I just wanted to make sure the mapfile generator was working, and indeed it is.

This is the first town that is linked in to the game. I wanted to make sure the town handler was perfect before introducing any more towns (Toren Castle is considered a town to the game engine, so it was the prototype for all towns to come). With Toren working perfectly, all the towns can now be added.

All of the original maps have been developed, some need some finishing touches but the skeletal work is 100% completed. There are two new maps that were not in the original game, exclusive to the PCE version. They have not yet been developed but that is on the to-do list for about a week from now.

Well, that's enough for now. Back to work! More updates later, and I expect to release a prototype of PCEMAP later on today as well.

[peperocket]

Very nice job !!

Can't wait to try PCEMAP !

[2X4]

Awesome!   

[nodtveidt]

Another day, another bug in the code.



Looks like coffee cups! Seriously though, it looks like a VRAM corruption problem. It seems the clib has a few bugs in it regarding the put_string and put_number functions. I've replaced put_string with my own put_alt_string function which is based on put_msr_string, a slow-text function that writes the normal dialogue. For some reason, it always works perfectly regardless of where the scroll is...I'm to assume it has something to do with it being based on put_char. I've not delved too deeply into the clib to see if I could fix the problems with put_string and put_number and I don't think I will anytime soon, but maybe after this production goes beta I'll take a looksee.

The other fun part I was able to duplicate time and time again is this nice battle kickout flaw...



This of course also shows the palette problem with the Tiger profile sprite, should be easy to at least fix that. Of course, he's also in the wrong place...a lack of sleep will do that I guess.

Alright, back to work.

[nodtveidt]

Frozen Utopia has a new logo, courtesy of Equuskia. This new logo is now being used in the introduction of MSR. Logo compare...old one on left, new one on right.



Aside from that nice new touch, I decided to rework the title screen itself, since it was a bit blurry. Compare the two screens below...left is the original, right is the one I did today.



Might not look that different here in hi-res but it sure does in-game.

On the code side, I've still not been able to discern the cause of the put_number problem. Might end up just writing an itoa function or something along those lines. Ah well, we'll see. In the meantime, work goes on.

[Keranu]

The title screen looks much better. I really like the new logo, especially for merchandise, but I always kind of liked the old logo when used for the boot up screen.

[FM-77]

The new logo is a massive improvement. I've always found the old one to look rather... well, not very professional.

[shubibiman]

Awesome! It looks much nicer than the first screenshots! Wonderful!
I can't wait to get my hand on a copy if it!

[Equuskia]

Wow, i didn't know people would like the new logo so much! I'm flattered  :oops:

[nodtveidt]

Although Equuskia and I had to go to work today, I still managed to sneak in some time afterwards to get some more bug ironing done. Found a pretty major one in some of the preemptive code I had written awhile back...was a menu error with the Status option. Kinda funny to see stats showing up that were absurdly large, such as 10001 experience, 545 Strength, etc...



After a minor recode, everything now works as expected. So then, Tiger now has stats:



Another bug bites the dust.

[nodtveidt]

Some more updated information on the progress of the game code...

The combat system is VERY close to completion at this point. All the complex menus are just about done, and the battle loop only has one part left to code: carrying out the actions selected by the player and the computer AI. The battle system is an out-of-order style, initiative randomized based on each unit's agility score. There's one minor "bug" in the battle code regarding the top menus at the moment but it will be rather easy to fix once the loop is finished.

I also had a chance to work on other parts of the game code. Last night, I got the credit scroll added, and it looks great. Here's a preview:



Prepping the cutscenes for insertion has been a tremendous effort. Most are ready for progression code but there's still a long way to go on those. They will be amongst the last things finished right before the deadline, since they're only a matter of syncing animation to audio so the work is straightforward...although tedious.

More screenshots later...back to work for now.

Addendum: Now this was fun...I managed to completely break Magic Engine with my battle engine test code...break it so much that even the application X didn't work. Had to kill it the old fashioned way.

[GUTS]

You guys ever think about using your real names like actual real game developers?  That internet psuedonym stuff doesn't look good at all.  I mean you're putting all this work into it, it seems like you'd want it to look as professional as possible.

[nodtveidt]

They don't seem to want to use their real names, so I just played along as well. Besides, Japanese developers often use pseudonyms too (look at the staff roll of any Samurai Spirits game for a good example).

[Keranu]

Hey I said I would prefer for my real name (Keelan McKenna ) to be used, but even better would be something like Keelan McKenna (Keranu).

[FM-77]

I'd prefer to use my real name as well, partly because it looks more professional, and partly because I don't want to be known as "Seldane" anymore, ugh. However, I don't want to reveal my name (I'm uncomfortable with doing so), so it will not happen.