Hello TLOT fans. Its been a good week. I've almost got the town of Talibah laid out and I'm working on the port town (currently un-named). I've only got one NPC in any of the maps and none of the inside's of the homes are done. My plan is to polish off all the buildings for each town then go back and start filling in the blanks. I think I'm going to try to finish off the continent that contains Talibah, then release that as a really alpha looking demo. After the demo goes out, I'll try to get the battle engine working with the first complete continent. Then, I'll move on and finish the rest of the overworld. Then I'll finish whatever needs to be done to the battle engine. I'll finish off all the odds and ends like item lists, weapon lists... I'll plug a story in there and hope to be near finished. It would be amazing if this four year project came to a close this summer.

Ok, this screen shot is from the early map of the port town. I've got crates everywhere. Too bad my crates don't have shadows. I've put shadows on them, and it helps a LOT, but I don't have enough tile space to put shadows on all the boxes so that they look right under all conditions. I really don't want to have shadows on some an not others, so the shading had to go. Regardless, I think this tile set is one of my better ones. If you look close, you'll notice that in this screen shot, farmer Seth is sliding a movable box across the screen. This will be part of the puzzle element in the game (most of you know about the sliding boxes but I thought I'd mention it for the new people). If you click on this weeks shot, you'll get 5 more screens. The first is of Talibah taken from the map editor zoomed out. The next two are shots from inside Talibah. The two after that are more from the port town, one of which is on a boat.

Well, I looked around my web page a bit, and frankly, its in pretty bad shape. From a web design stand point, its got lots of problems. No meta tags, no height/width tags on images, and worst of all, old information. Just because I'm bringing it up doesn't mean I am going to fix anything, but I will admit that the thought of a site redesign did cross my mind. I'm also thinking of moving it to another server. One that would allow me to have a message board, a search engine, and lots more. I might even be able to run the mailing list from that server, I'm not sure.

Speaking of mailing list, I've gotten e-mail from concerned X-mailing list members. Yes, the list is down. No, I'm not sure when it will be back up. Yes, it will be back some time in the future.

I tried to install a true type font engine for X windows this week. I thought it was working when I finished the install, but no fonts. Then, when I rebooted it said the font server couldn't run on port 7???. I'm such a lost puppy when it comes to Linux. It makes me feel like I did about 6 years ago when I was learning DOS. Its actually kinda fun, but there's a big difference between now and then. Back then, I'd keep digging around for hours each day, learning and exploring. Now, I get a few hours a week to dig around and I get distracted with work and school quickly. Oh well, so goes life I guess.

later

Well, I got lots of world editing done. I'm building the town of Talibah right now, the first town in the game. The overworld is fully trimmed out, but its likely going to be changed a lot before the game is done. Most of the main characters have shadows, but I've got lots of editing to do. All the work I've done I did before the end of the week before last week. (say that ten times real fast)..

The picture I put up this week was actually developed from Talibah's overworld. Our new artist showed me how to make planets pretty quickly. While I still can't do it as well as he can, I'm kinda getting it. Anyway, I put a small lense flare on the bright side of the planet and after loading the gold palette it looks more like a bubble or something on the planet. If you look close, you can see the continents of the Talibah overworld through the clouds. If you click on the image, you can see the full (zoomed out) overworld and then a similar look at just the continent that the town of Talibah resides on.

Last week I was gone. First to my parents house. While there I did a lot of much needed yard work. My poor mother doesn't have anyone there to keep the place up anymore. I think she apreciated the couple of days of work I was able to do. Then, Wed night we drove 10 hours to New Mexico and hit the ski slopes Thur morning. It was perfect, the snow hit hard on our way in, leaving us with decent skiing conditions. We worked the mountain over until Sat, then drove home early Sun morning. We got home just in time to get ready for class on Mon morning. What a spring break.

Anyway, before I left for spring break, I reformatted my pII400 and put linux on as my primary OS and stuck Win98 out on a 1 gig partition. I still haven't gotten my sound card to work under linux and it keeps loosing my network card. I'm pretty green, if it wasn't for my roommate I'd still be trying to get Xwindows set up. Anyway, I'm jumping in with both feet, here's hoping.

While I put linux on my main box, I took it off of my 133 (the machine I use to develop Talibah). In doing so, I pissed of the boot loader (lilo) and lost the master boot record. I ended up re-installing linux (and lilo), backing up my main drive, reformatting, and then installing Win98. Damn, Win98 kills my poor little 133. I've run Win95 OSR1 since the day I got it, never re-installed or upgraded. Tonight is the first time in over a week that my 133 has been operational enough to work on Talibah at all. I'll hopefully get some more stuff done this week.

So, who's ready for a massive RPG developed specifically for Linux? Wonder how hard it will be to port to the Play Station 2!

Oh yeah, before I close, I realized I never gave anyone the URL for the website I created for my Uncle. Its Bob-Sky Knives. Check it out, buy a knife! As you may very well know, Gerwin uses Bob-Sky knives exclusively!

Umm.. I fixed it.. It was most definately my fault and a really stupid mistake at that. I had a pointer out there that I wasn't allocating space for. Pathetic part is the fact that it wasn't in any of the sub-routines I blamed it on. It was right there in the fight loop. I just hope I didn't break anything else trying to fix it. Funny how things behave when you start writing to random places in memory.

Fixing that bug got my blood pumping today. Tried to work on my game all day long and didn't get a thing done. Everytime I started getting into it, something interrupted me. The neighbor wanted to go work out, my business partner wanted to work, my girlfriend wanted attention, and lots of other little things.

But, I did add a shadow below some characters today. Well, I modified the old one. I really like it. It anchors the characters down. I've got to add it to all the sprites now. I've spent a while sorting through all my old sprites. Got lots of junk ones to sort out, only a handfull of usable ones. This is really exciting... I can't wait to get the battle stuff going!

I've decided to reformat my big box and install Linux as my primary OS and WinNT as a secondary. I'm not a Linux buff at all. I have it as a secondary OS on my 133 and I don't really use it. But, I'm tired of things crashing. I'm tired of Microsnot products. I'm tired of all the bullshit. That and the fact that the OS on the Playstation 2 is Linux. I might get into Playstation development. I think the SDK is like 600 dollars. Starcraft is the only reason I'm install NT on my box and I'm not sure if thats a good enough reason.

One other note: this week's update was a tad early (friday morning) but I'm going to be gone most of the weekend. I won't be back at my machine until the week after next, so the next update will be somewhat belated. The week after that I should be back on track.

Well, I ignored the error for a while.. played it off as a compiler error as I was sure that my code was right.. then today I finally decided to get into it. I decided to work from the windows IDE as the DOS one never generated an error until I exited the entire IDE. In windoze, the program will actually crash with an illegal operation at some point.

I'd written a number of routines to load and unload stuff quickly and easily. Later on I added some features. For example, I put all the sprites into a single file. I had to go back and modify all the routines I'd written. I didn't think I'd made any mistakes.

I still don't know where the error(s) are.... but atleast now I'm fairly certain they are my mistakes. The problem is I had felt very secure about the functionality of that chunk of code and pretty much forgot how it worked... with my lack of comments in the code, I'm having a really hard time tracking down the error. Its taking me a while to understand what I did.

A year ago I would have stayed up all night working on this until I got it. Tonight I keep thinking about the things I have to have done tomorrow and I can't hardly concetrate on it. Maybe I can keep working on it this evening.. I'll have to see what happens.

So, the bad news is, its a serious bug and it won't be easy to fix. The good news is, its my bug and it is something I could fix. This greatly affects my outlook on restarting the project. Sure would like to finish it..

I'm not sure what the story is with the mailing list.. when I find out I'll let everyone know.

In my working life, Tempest completed another site. I logged most of the hours on this project so its really my site. Check it out, Muenster Milling.

I'll see you guys again next week... (yeah, another update in about a week, thats the goal)..

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