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61

Entertainment / Freshly picked Tinlge's Rosy Ruppeeland

« on: August 11, 2009, 04:31:05 pm »

Really, whoever made up that name, had to be pretty high.

Well, I recently picked this one up and started playing. But the fact that the monetary system in this game is also your health system, is really a difficult concept to grasp. On one end you don't want to spend your ruppees because they are your life, but on the other end you have to spend it to get further in the game.

Well in my first try I got to the hero's tomb or something and pretty quick died. Man, that stinks. And the fat guy you hired is not really usefull, because he steers fights in your direction and in tight rooms tingle always gets involved.

Anyone has some advice on how to play this game. When am I to greedy with the money and when am I to generous. And what did you guys think of this game?

62

Coding / Link Ledge Jumping

« on: August 08, 2009, 10:32:44 am »

Update 2009-09-14: New version of the ledge jumping.

-----------------
Okay, got a bit ahead and tried to make the Ledge Jumping in MC style. I think it is close to the behavior as it should be, but still I think there is something wrong with it. So I'll post it here to see what you guys think.

63

Feedback / Broken hyperlinks

« on: July 08, 2009, 08:16:17 am »

Well I noticed that lately a number of hyperlinks are broken. For example:

One of the things I look for in a game is a graphical style that looks great and fits the game. Naturally, this game would take advantage of this. I would describe it, but I found a picture that sums it up rather well. Click here. A somber look and feel = win.

When I click on this I get first "Address not found". This is due to http//"....." being around the URL. When I remove that end up at the HTTP page of wikipedia. The only way I can view the site is, when I click on quote and copy the URL without the http://.

If this was a single occurrence, it wouldn't be a problem, but it almost happens every time. I don't know if anyone had mentioned this already, but I thought maybe I should point this out.

PS: I use the latest Firefox release.

64

Entertainment / [Warning: Spoilers] Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen

« on: June 26, 2009, 01:39:54 pm »

DON'T READ THIS TOPIC UNLESS YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE. IF YOU DON'T HAVE SEEN THE MOVIE, GO TO THE THEATER AND WATCH IT. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO WATCH IT, GO WATCH IT ANYWAY. IF YOU STILL DON'T WANT TO WATCH IT WELL, THEN I CAN'T HELP YOU EITHER.

Last night I went to this movie. Pretty excited, because I really liked the first one and have been a fan of the Transformers since they first appeared. So the risk of being dissappointed was very large. But fortune smiled upon me, because from the beginning till the end I was sitting at the edge of my seat in excitement. I can definitely say, that this is a GREAT movie.

The action and fights were great. The CGI was truly eye candy.

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In the beginning when Optimus jumped out of a plain in truck form; transforming in midair releasing the parachute and before landing transforming back into a truck.

And the movie also had its tragic moments

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where Optimus Prime was actually killed by megatron, in the first half, having big sword slammed in his back and comming out in the front. Or Sam almost dying in the dessert.

People have said to me that I can be an insensitive SOB, but at these moments even I had like "WTF"! The humor in this part is also a lot better than the first movie.

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Wheelie is great character and especially humoristic when he decided to switch sides and become an Autobot. Starting to hump like a dog against the leg of Mikaela. The twins Skids and Mudflap are also a hilarious duo. Additionally with these two there are transformers that aren't based on the stereotype Caucasian male and showing that even on cybertron there are cultural differences and those people are capable of living together and work to a better world.

Yup, even the standard American moral (/philosophical questions) is put in the movie,

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with Skids and Mudflap being examples of it. Sam's vision of the Dynasty of Primes and telling him about how the matrix is earned. Optimus' question about what would happen when the Autobots would leave and the Decepticons don't follow. And of course Optimus' closing monologue.

The movie is excitement from the beginning to the end and I still have the adrenaline pumping, but I do have to admit that some parts of the movie are hard to follow if you don't know much about the transformers. Because their are a number of new transformers, based on old faces, but they don't have a background nor go through any development. For example:

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Arcee, Sideswipe, Jolt, Devastator (and the constructicons), Sideways, Grindor and others. I even had to find out on the internet that the decepticon helicopter was Grindor and not a resurrected/survived Blackout, from the first movie.

It definitely is great movie and I enjoyed watching it a lot.

65

Entertainment / [Spoilers]X-men Origins: Wolverine

« on: April 29, 2009, 09:10:46 am »

Yesterday was the opening of the new Wolverine movie. And because I'm a sucker for these kind of movies, I went to see it. I had heard the stories about the leaked version and how bad the movie was judged by it. So I went with the expectation that it was horrible. In the end I must say that it wasn't that bad of a movie. It was a nice take on the origin story of wolverine. It is not completely in line with the comics, but of course it had to connect with X2, as it is a prequel to the X-men movies.

But there are some points of remarks I have to make:

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1) The special effects guys sometimes dropped the ball a bit and made the scenes look a bit unbelievable. For example when Wolverine is examining his new claws in the bathroom, or when Xavier stands by the helicopter waiting for the escaping mutants.

2) The line up on mutants was a bit misplaced, some appeared just briefly and it sometimes felt as if they pushed in some mutants they couldn't do in the X-Men movies. Like Gambit, Emma Frost and the Blob. This resulted in a number of characters from the Wolverine lineup to be excluded. For example I missed David North aka Maverick and Raven Darkholme aka Mystique in the Team X, instead they had Wade Wilson (Deadpool) and Fred Dukes (The Blob).
It also contained Cyclops, but he has a complete origin story on his own which doesn't have any connections with Wolverine whatsoever.

3) It was nice to add deadpool in the mix as he is connected to weapon X, but it is to bad his final incarnation in the movie didn't have his insane chatter. In the comics he is known as the merc with a mouth. The combat action was really nice though.

4) Finally, I found it a bit anti climactic how wolverine lost his memory. It felt like the writers having an Oh-!@#$%-we-still-need-wolverine-to-lose-his-memory,-but-we're-at-the-end-of-the-movie moment.

Wolverine is definitely not the best movie, but also not the worst. For this movie the creators could have better focused on the Wolverine comics instead of the X-men comics. But it probably explains why it is "X-men Origins". All in all it I actually enjoyed the movie. I wonder who's origin story is up next.

What do you guys think?

66

Graphics / MC Hyrule Castle Ripped.

« on: April 15, 2009, 10:01:16 pm »

Well, for the CP I've started to get the world tiles with the Map viewer from VBA. After capturing some maps, I pasted them together (in GIMP) to make a complete map of Hyrule castle. This map only contains tiles that are drawn below Link and not over.

So my question is: Is it any good to make a tilesheet for the CP from it?

67

Discussion / How to rip tiles.

« on: April 14, 2009, 04:10:02 pm »

Here is the deal. I want to help the community project out by gathering resources. My focus is at area tiles for the creation of the overworld. The only program I know off is Windy's VBA Ripper. But I can only get it to rip some character sprites and objects sprites. I've only played the game until Link and Zelda go to the Picori festival. I ended up with some character sprites, some closets, the bed, some pots and 1GB on the smiths fireplace (and parts).

I didn't got any area tiles or anything from the background. So my question is: Is VBA Ripper capable of ripping background tiles?

In the case of 'No' what program do I use, or do I have to make screenshots of everything and copy/paste tiles from them.

In case of yes. How do I accomplish this?

How do you guys get the tiles?

68

Discussion / VBARipper installation

« on: April 11, 2009, 03:45:04 pm »

OK, here is the deal. I'm trying to use the VBARipper, from this site, to make resources for the community project. But somewhere in the installation I'm kind of failing. This is what I do.

Step 1: I've downloaded the zip from http://www.zfgc.com/#?action=games&sa=view&id=52. The version from 2 september.

Step 2: unzipped the files to my desktop.

Step 3: Opened the Read-me, but it referred to an INSTAL file for installation. I couldn't find it, so in my stupidity I tried "VisualBoyAdvance.exe". It gave an error that it couldn't find d3dx9_32.dll. And it told me to reinstall the application.

Step 4: After some long searching and a lot of more stupidity, I finally found the file INSTALL. Apparently it didn't have an extension and I was looking for an .txt file. Stupid me.
Opened it in Wordpad (notepad has issues with newlines).

Step 5: Skipped reading the part about Unix, because I have windows XP. I opened both gba_sdl.dsp and gba_dsp in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Express 2008 and pressed F7 for build. The following did I get:

------------------------------
------ Build started: Project: gba_sdl, Configuration: Release Win32 ------
Performing Custom Build Step
The system cannot find the path specified.
Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Custom Build Step"
Build log was saved at "file://c:\Documents and Settings\Niek\Desktop\VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.2\win32\SDLRelease\BuildLog.htm"
gba_sdl - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)
========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

========================
Build Log
        

Build started: Project: gba_sdl, Configuration: Release|Win32

Command Lines
        

Creating temporary file "c:\Documents and Settings\Niek\Desktop\VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.2\win32\SDLRelease\BAT0000019162956.bat" with contents
[
@echo off

"c:\Program Files\Nasm\nasmw.exe" -D__DJGPP__ -f win32 -o .\SDLRelease\2xSaImmx.obj c:\Documents and Settings\Niek\Desktop\VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.2\src\i386\2xSaImmx.asm



if errorlevel 1 goto VCReportError

goto VCEnd

:VCReportError

echo Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Custom Build Step"

exit 1

:VCEnd
]
Creating command line """c:\Documents and Settings\Niek\Desktop\VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.2\win32\SDLRelease\BAT0000019162956.bat"""

Output Window
        

Performing Custom Build Step
The system cannot find the path specified.
Project : error PRJ0019: A tool returned an error code from "Performing Custom Build Step"

Results
        

Build log was saved at "file://c:\Documents and Settings\Niek\Desktop\VisualBoyAdvance-1.7.2\win32\SDLRelease\BuildLog.htm"
gba_sdl - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)

-----------------------------------------

From "Basic Installation" it read like it was meant for Linux. I am doing something wrong, I just know it. But I can't figure out what. Can someone help me?

PS: Oh yes, if you tell me it is somewhere in the install file please tell me where, because I'm dyslectic and will most likely read over it.

69

MC Link's Awakening / Mapping the Overworld

« on: April 07, 2009, 07:11:15 pm »

OK, it seems as the staff has given green light to the community for creating the MC styled Link's Awakening. At least for the resources part. If I'm correct a select few people are still working on the engine part.

So I would like to start this off (if I'm allowed) with this topic about creating the overworld of Koholinth in Minish Cap style. Now there are a few things that have to be put straight. Guidelines as to speak for making the maps. The following questions I would like to have answered? Some may sound trivial.

• The size of the tiles are 16x16?
• The separate maps will have the size off 320x256 or different dimensions?
• For the objects in the world like trees, do we stay true to the sizes from MC (like in Jeod's Koholinth LttP style) or do we resize them to fit LA's dimensions (Like Xfixium's Koholinth)?
• Which resources do we use? VGMaps, Spriters Resource or others?
• Where do we start? Mabe Village, Toronbo Beach, Koholinth Castle or somewhere else?
• What program do we use to create the maps?
• What file format does the map need to be in?
• Am I forgetting something?

I'll update this first post once the guidelines are set. Or the staff will if they make the guidelines for us in order to be compatible with the engine.

Let the bombardment of replies begin.

UPDATE: Please don't start mapping just yet, some major issues still have to be resolved.

• The main tile size is 16x16 pixels. For some decorative purposes tiles of 8x8 pixels are also allowed.
• We stay true to the size of the tiles and objects from MC. Objects won't be shrunk to match similar objects from LA.
• Making custom tiles are allowed, but offer a small sheet of the custom tiles along to the new part of the map, in order for the custom tiles to be put with the resources.
• We start mapping from Mabe Village and continue following the story.
• Name the parts of the map according to the area in the Game and the grid coordinates. For example the top left most area of Toronbo Beach, just below Mabe Village Library, is Toronbo_Beach_1-1. And the part to the right of that Toronbo_Beach_1-2. Some areas may have some special building which can be taken in the naming like, Toronbo_Beach_2-4_Tail_Cave

70

Entertainment / Formula 1 2009

« on: April 05, 2009, 11:25:24 am »

In 2009 the rules are drastically changed. Now the skills of the drivers play a bigger part in the game. Now Ferrari and McLaren aren't the top dogs anymore. The smaller teams are getting more chances at a victory. More action, more surprises is what I'm thinking this season is.

Today in Malaysia the rain fall was so heavy that the officials had to end the race even before the 75% rule. Really just two races have happened and I'm enjoying it more than the previous ten seasons.

What are your thoughts on F1 2009?

71

Graphics / Town in Minish Cap Style

« on: March 15, 2009, 08:18:47 am »

When I joined ZFGC I found the following town (see attachment) here on ZFGC. It looks really great and I'm trying out to make a town myself. I can't find some of the tiles used in this town in the Minish Cap (like the main road) and the little fountains at the entrance. This means they are custom made.

I am unable to find this image again. I've looked through the graphics resource on the site, but only found a similar looking image. What I'm asking is if I can use the tiles and if so, who do I credit for these?

72

Discussion / Story progress tracking.

« on: March 12, 2009, 08:23:14 pm »

I was just wondering, how people keep track of the progress of the story in a game. It doesn't really matter what programming language.

For example: A character has to say something that leads the player to a dungeon, once this dungeon has been cleared the same character is in a different area of the map. The character then leads the player to a switch that opens up a new area, after which the character continues to be nothing more then generic until the player completes several dungeons and meets some other characters. This character then plays a role in a sidequest.

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Some more concrete examples: In OOT when does the game know that Sheik has to turn up at the temple of time, then death mountain, then Lake Hylia, after which in Kakariko Village and then in the desert and finally back in the temple of time.

OR:

In the minish cap when Talon and Malon have to get back in their home, link has to go in the house; get the key; get out of the house and then give the key to Talon. Resulting in Talon being in the house, Malon with horse and cart in town.

OR:

again MC. When does the game know how to activate the scene in North Hyrule field when Vaati attacks Link, coming out of Hyrule Castle, in between the four trees. Or to trigger the scene that Vaati takes over the King.

I was think about two options:
1) some local variables denoting the state of instances in the world, which results in many variables being saved in a save file. Variables which can be unnecessary in a linear progression of parts.
2) using a finite state machine. Less variables to save, but can be big and confusing when there are a lot of nodes and transitions. Especially when there is not a definite linear order of the nodes. But the problem of size can be solved by making more and smaller finite state machines.

As I said it doesn't matter much in which language, it is more about the  design.