9/28/97
Well, the NPCs now talk! I've still got some work to do, but they officially talk. The way I have things designed now, only one box worth of text can be displayed for each NPC, but I plan on setting it up differently later... I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to do it. I'm debating between a few ideas. Anyway, I need to clean the code up a bit as there is still lots of temporary code in there.. but soon I will be moving on to the battle scenes. I can't wait!
I got a lot done on Monday and Tuesday, then I realized that I was a few days behind in my school work and I've buckled down the rest of the week to catch up. Then this weekend things went very sour between me and my girlfriend. This friday marked 1 year and 9 months that we've been going out... I think things are good once again, but I still got icky feeling from the whole weekend. Feel free to e-mail Aphrodite and tell her that she means the world to Zaskoda.
I donno if I mentioned it before or not, but I now have a finger available. Actually, its been there for over a year, I just now started updating it. If anyone cares, they can finger the account swd0002@jove.acs.unt.edu to get really current updates on what I'm up to. Chances are, you won't find anything useful there. Just for the record, there is no web based version of my .plan file.
9/20/97
I've kinda got a head ache so forgive me if this update is more goofy than usual.. Anyway, the NPCs are now moving around the map. They are pretty cool, its just like a real RPG, they get in the way and everything!! I will try to get them talking before the end of the weekend, but I donno if that will happen. If you click on this week's shot, you'll see a few variations of possible overlays and color schemes. I tend to change the overlay every once in a while.. but I seem to go back to the original brown stone kinda look.
I suppose I might consider releasing another demo once I have the NPCs working up to par. I'm not sure about this, I'm just considering it. I'd like to take the time to sit down and make maps specific to the demo. That way you won't have a huge and pointless void to explore like the demo I released to my beta testers. I think I'll also try to remove excess stuff like some of the menus. Then again, I may just not do a demo.
I think I will be doing another site overhaul soon. I want to redo the screenshots page with udpated shots. I also want to revise the links section. I have a "current month", 1996 and 1997 link at teh bottom of every weekly update page. I want to add two more links at the bottom of these pages, one for "next month" and one for "last month".. That way, if you are going through updates looking for something, you can go from one page to the next a lot easier...
I had another party show interest in the Snazzy engine. This could prove to be pretty cool. I won't go into any details as of yet, but he has some resources availble to him that could prove for an interesting RPG.. I am very excited about the Snazzy engine. As far as I know, this genra of gaming is totally lacking on the PC. Maybe Snazzy will help change things a little.
In about 8 hours I will go take a defensive driving class. Woo Hoo, what fun.. Not.. Atleast it won't be too much longer and I will have my ticket taken care of. That will be a most pleasant feeling.
My head really hurts.. I'm going to bed...
9/14/97
I plan on being able to customize the overlay for TLOT. Hopefully there will be 3 or 4 different overlays and each one should have adjustable colors. This week's shot shows a marble like overlay with a green color scheme. This type of thing isn't first priority so I don't know if it will make the final cut, but it is part of the plan. Another little nice addition, I'd like TLOT to have a command line parameter that will bypass all title screens and menus and go directly into a saved game. It makes me sick when I talk to people who don't know what a command line parameter is, so I will be sure and make use of them.
Also in this picture is the first multi level house I've worked on. In the village town tile set, many of the homes will have two stories. I needed a stair way from one to the next. I worked very hard to get what you see here and although it isn't even remotely close to what I had in my head before I started, I think it will get the job done.
On Deltaman's page, TLOT appears to be the first game to feature screen shots! They are the same shots you can find if you look around the site here, but you might check it out anyway.
I've been twisting the code around a bit. I wrote a few more routines that should speed scrolling up even more on lower end machines. In all honestly, I coded the entire engine incorrectly. I could do full screen scrolling a lot more smoothly than this knowing what I know now. But, fear not, I will complete TLOT as is and worry about improved scrolling engines in another game. Anyway, I'm tieing up lots of loose ends and getting ready to move into a permanant main game loop. Once I make it past that breaking point, the game will start moving along a lot faster because I will be writing a lot less temporary code.
If anyone really wants to help me with my game, go ahead and start spreading the word. I did want to wait until I was closer to being finished with the game, but I think I'm ready to start making TLOT a little more known. I'm getting to the point were I will be moving out of a temporary main loop into the final game loop. That means that things will start moving much faster from the code point of view. To help me out, post to usenet about TLOT. Particularly to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg, alt.games.final-fantasy, and alt.games.phantasy-star. Also, if you frequent any games pages drop them an e-mail and see if they have any "inside info" on Talibah. Please though, don't give out any information about Talibah. First of all, I don't want to start the spread of any false rumous! Secondly, I'd like people to be curious about the game and ask more questions. Soon I will update the links page on my site and only include links to TLOT related pages.. (such as Deltaman's page and Ronny's Fan page)...
I have a lot of paperwork to do tonight so I will have to cut my weekly update kinda short and skip my e-mail. Speaking of mail, due to the huge amount of Spam I get on a regular basis, I might get another e-mail account and move as much of my personal mail flow to it as possible.. but if I do this, it won't be for a while and I will keep my old e-mail account active.
9/7/97
The screen shot this week is of the NPC editor built into the map editor. Its not finished yet, but its functional enough for me to change what sprite each character will have. I now have an external file that contains 256 names of sprites. If you set the sprite id to 10, then when you run TLOT it will seek position 10 in the data file, read the 8byte string, and open that sprite file. Hopefully in the final version I will have all the sprites in one file and I will just seek the 10th position in that file... but anyway...
Every time I started a new month's worth of weekly updates, I was editing every previous month's page so that they all linked to each other. Every month, there was one more page to do than the last month. I've been making updates for over a year now and this was starting to get old. Now I have three links at the bottom of each months page. Listings for 1996, 1997 and the current month. This should make the work a lot easier.
I did a lot this week, wich is surprising with school having just started. At the beginning of the week I added a bit of flash to the start-up screen of TLOT. If you click on this week's image you can see a capture of that start-up screen. I have a slightly dated version of TLOT on my hard drive with the sound code in it. With the sound init/loading routines, a lot of stuff can scroll through on this screen.
Speaking of sound code, I did something rather cool today. I went into MOD4WIN and opened up some very large .XM files I have.. I found a couple that seemed like they'd make good RPG music and turned them into .WAV files. I recorded about 60 seconds of sound. At 44k, 16bit stereo, this came to about 10 megs. After I reduced the sound down to 22k, 8bit mono, it was less than a meg. I did this with two songs and played them in the background with SMIX like any other sound effect.. It sounded really good actually. The final music will NOT be like that, but I may have an optional sound pack with the shareware that has a few snippets of music from the CD so that people can get a slight feel for the music.
I think I've also decided not to release all of TLOT as the shareware. I'm not sure about this yet, I've got a lot of thinking to do. I've just been working on TLOT since 1995 and I'd like a few registrations. I'm afriad that not enough people would be interested in buying the game if the full version was so easily available. BUT, on the other hand, I may also want to spread TLOT as much as possible regardless of how much money I make. That way, more people would be interested in future projects with the Snazzy engine as well as future games with the TLOT story line. I just donno..
Those who have subscribed to the mailing list may have noticed a number of hickups here and there. Please, just hand in there. Nathan was very generous in providing me with a mailing list and he has done a pretty damn good job of administrating it. Besides, it was free! If you are having difficulty, just wait a little while and resend your messages.
I tore into the artwork for the battle scenes. I know, I haven't finished the NPCs yet, I just felt like playing with this. My problem was mostly the palette. I needed to create a palette with less than 64 colors that would work for all the images without any degragation of quality. (character and monster images).. Brian kept a fairly standard palette on most of them, but not all. After many hours of dealing with Paint Shop Pro's pathetic palette support and the many wonders of an old DOS based proggie called Improces, I managed to develop a pretty good palette that supported all the images very well. Improces has the best color matching/reducing routines I have ever used in any art program. Version 4.2 is available on the net and the author has stoped taking registrations so it is free. The registration key is also available. Anyway, I've got a good part of my fight scene artwork sorted out now. I was kinda worried about how I was going to do that.
Here's my future plans. I want to move into C/C++ programming sometime next summer. This fits into my school schedule fairly well as I will be taking classes about that time revolving around C/C++. TLOT is in pascal and I want to be done with Pascal when I dive into C/C++. Thus, I want to finish up TLOT before that time. Many weekly updates back I posted a vague list of what I had ahead of me, I'll do the same again. Remember, this isn't an official list I keep, this is just off the top of my head:
