And King Mob are you planning on having another demo ready by the NCFC?No, I don't think so. I know I've got a couple of months but I don't think I'd be able to add anything substantial in that time. I'd maybe aim for releasing something at the proposed Winter z3, but I won't make any promises.
Maybe just a more polished version of this demo?
In Link's house, I stood to the right of the table, facing it, and accidentily tried to roll into the table. The whole game froze and I had to close it. Wierd glitch. But so random you probably don't need to worry about it too much.Hm... Was that a one-off? I can't reproduce the error, I'm afraid.
3 -*SPOILER... kind of* -Some of the dialog in the game didn't quite seem to fit in with normal legend of Zelda dialog. For example, in the town after you get your shield, one of the kids in the town say something close to "We could be like, I'll cover your back.". To me at least it doesn't seem to fit. Talking like that (in real life) is more of a recent development , and the Zelda series is staged in kind of a "old world" setting, so that kind of dialog seems a little out of place.Not really. There's a precedent for this kind of anachronistic use of language. Some characters talk in an olde worlde kind of English, but some - especially children - seem to talk in a much more modern fashion, particularly in the games made since the shift to 3D.
Just tried this and it worked like a charm. Thanks, Atrius! So simple... It does beg the question why does Game Maker decide to cancel the key press only sometimes, since there's clearly nothing wrong with the code?!Regarding the problem with key detection when switching rooms.Thanks, Atrius, I've not used that before. I will give it a go!
keyboard_check_direct works even after room switches. It doesn't have a pressed or released variant and still detects key presses when the game window isn't in focus (Which reminds me of another GM quirk, hold down a direction switch to a different window, release it, then switch back to the game)
It's your best bet for a sure solution though
hey mob i just played your demo and great work with your custom sprite but two little things that would make is look nicer in that haven ( hyrule castle town? )... the sitting seagulls could make sometimes a move like streching their wings or something like that and the flags on the custom houses could wave in the wind.The flags are definitely on the list of things to do, and I do want the seagulls to be more interactive. Like maybe they fly off when you roll into their perches or something. And I might have them snatch fish out of the water - when I put fish in there! Thanks for the suggestion.
Just a quick question... Do you have any intentions of porting this over to NDS or GBA? I assume you would need to change the resolution of the screen in order to.Not gonna happen. It's not a case of "porting" it over so much as starting it again from scratch in another (proper) language. Besides...
The GBA's screen resolution is too small for either the horseback battles to be at all playable, or for some of the boss battles I have planned. Since it's never going to be played on a handheld, I'd prefer to use a ratio closer to that of the SNES, and one that you could play fullscreen without distortion. So 320 x 240 seemed about right. It was literally that arbitrary, but I don't really see any reason to change it now, especially since I've tiled so many rooms to fit that resolution.And the screen resolution... is it equal to TMC's?Nope, it's far bigger.
I forgot to say that the only thing I disliked is the resolution. I guess it's needed for the horseback battles, but if it's possible for it to be changed, please change it to the GBA resolution.
This. Game. Is. Freaking. AWESOME!Wouldn't like to say. It took me longer than I'd anticipated to get this far and I don't want to over-promise and under-deliver. I want to revert to my original plan for the next playable release, which is everything up to and including the first dungeon - and that's still quite a bit of work, even having finished the dungeon itself some time ago. I don't plan on releasing the dungeon as a stand-alone demo, I want it experienced in context.
When do you expect we'll see the fire temple?
,;Sk;,
I had a problem with the resolution when making the game fullscreen - so just a suggestion for the final product, give options on aspect ratios and screen sizes and all that, because I really want to play in full screen.I'll make more options available from the title screen.
I liked the demo but it seemed really fast. You get the Shadowgazer too suddenly and then your kind of like "ok I have it, now what?"Aha, but you only know what the Shadowgazer is because you've been reading this topic! It's introduced as an innocuous, superstitious trinket that Zelda can use to watch over Link. That's why the game refers to it as "Zelda's dreamcatcher" - she knows it's magical but has no idea of its significance, and Link certainly doesn't, she just gave it to him as a token of their friendship. There's only one person alive who knows what its true purpose is, and they will be mightily pissed when they learn Zelda's just given it away...
You did a good job with the rocks and such (could you PM me as to how you were able to arch the rocks, I wanted to do the same thing in my game but with a special type of arrow).Will do.
As far as play, it didn't seem (so far) that there was much purpose to the night/day system except that people were in different places. Of course this will be useful later on right. In your demo the day faded nicely to night but your demo had "The ship Din's Fire has left for Calatia..." so I'm wondering if we'll ever see the nice fade?The passing of day and night is absolutely central as it will dictate when the NPCs sleep i.e. when you can save them from their nightmare. I don't want to give too much about how that translates into gameplay just yet, but yeah, there is a point to it.
And the fade at the beginning? Call it a camera trick. It's an illusion, used just for carefully orchestrated cinematics. Trying to get the tilesets to fade between eachother during play is unfeasibly demanding (both on the system and on me!) An instantaneous switch is easy. Think about it: if it faded in real time, I'd need to show the boat pulling out of the harbour, for example - things like that, that are just too impractical; and it would be a ridiculous amount of work to have NPCs adhere to timelines where they stop what they're doing, walk inside their house and go upstairs and get into bed, all following the clock. Having that nice cut-off point where they're either awake or asleep is just cleaner and infinitely easier to work on. The idea of using the Port Authority announcer to cover the switch just fortuitously fell into my lap. The day and night stuff is all about the gameplay not graphical niceties...
Are the puddles in Hyrule Castle Town your own sprites? They add really nice atmosphere to the place. And the birds?The puddles are from the swamp area in The Minish Cap, but the gulls are mine.
Screenies look nice, but what in the world is making this file size so huge O.o. Are you using MP3's?The music is MIDI actually, but the sound effects are WAVs and, as I've explained, bump up the filesize considerably. This is a hangover from the project's very beginnings and I do intend to work on a solution to this.
Anyway, to slightly fix the room-to room vs key bugs, simply put the movement code in the Room start event of Link.Pretty sure I've tried that already. Was a while back...
Regarding the problem with key detection when switching rooms.Thanks, Atrius, I've not used that before. I will give it a go!
keyboard_check_direct works even after room switches. It doesn't have a pressed or released variant and still detects key presses when the game window isn't in focus (Which reminds me of another GM quirk, hold down a direction switch to a different window, release it, then switch back to the game)
It's your best bet for a sure solution though
Your rock has a huge arc and it has to land exactly on the enemy - which I guess is all right, but in the original MC, it was a really quick, linear type throw, which would hit anything in its path.Yes, but the way I've done it makes the thrown object travel in a more realistic arc, with proper gravity, not just in a straight line diagonally down - something I've never liked, visually speaking. Neither do I like the idea of rocks or pots smashing against something it would realistically sail right over, like the octos. I prefer mine.
Just a few suggestions though. Make Link able to push rocks and pick up bushes.I'm not going to make it so you can lift bushes - you'll need to cut them. I've got quite a bit of backstory to get through before the quest begins and I don't want players wandering all over the map from the outset, so I'm blocking a couple of paths with bushes. I could just get all the storytelling out of the way at the very beginning, but it would be overly long and I'm trying to break it up with gameplay and tutorial-like areas (hence the octos for practicing shield deflections on.) Once you've got your sword, which you'll get shortly after talking to Zelda, the map would be opened up slightly, with areas blocked off by bushes now accessible. Besides, once you can cut bushes, when would you ever go through the hassle of lifting and throwing them?
You can't lift bushes in every Zelda, and this is one in which you can't. As for rocks - my pushable rocks/blocks are different to the ones you can lift and throw. Just my personal preferences, I guess.
edit - just thought of something. Sicne you said it does keep the key press sometimes, it must be an issue of either when or how it checks. possibly changing the check from/to a begin/end/standard step event would have an effect on this? I don't know, but it's worth a try, and amybe the observation itself will give you some bright ideas. The game is so brilliantly coded it'd be a shame to see it released with this very annoying bug still in it.Yeah, I've tried shifting the keyboard checks around the Step events, even putting additional ones in the Create event and destroying Link and creating a new one when he's 'arrived' in the new room. The checks are always the same too. It just seems it sometimes forgets about any keys that were being pressed upon exiting the previous room!
As for the boats idea.. I think it sounds fantastic.Great way of creating dynamic changing environments with a cyclical pattern without the irritability that Majora's Mask had. Are you planning to make separate sprites for the other boats though, eventually? Becaus eI think they'd look better that way. Nothing major, just change figurehead maybe.I do intend them to have different figureheads, yes. Plus the sails, when unfurled, would have different emblems on them. Just not designed them yet. Din's Fire would retain the dragon/serpent figurehead they all currently have, but my ideas for the other two are either a hawk or owl, and a most likely a wolf - so, familiar Zelda motifs. I'm going to try and stylise them quite heavily. I'm looking at the carvings on Native American totem poles and Viking longships, but it's not quite coming together at the moment...
good mechanics.. when you enter a new map you have to retrigger movement keys
edit - oh, I remembered one other complaint I had, which applies to most Zelda fangames. When you leave a room/area and go to a new one, if you were holding down the arrow key, you still stop and have to let go and press it again. Please fix this, it gets super annoying.You're telling me! I've tried everything I can think of to fix it but it's always been there. It doesn't always happen though, does it, so it's nothing to do with the code, which is so simple there's no scope for it to behave abnormally. Like you say, it happens in most Zelda fan games ('most' being developed in Game Maker, I would presume) so it would appear to be a quirk of GM that when you go to a different room it sometimes ignores any keys being held upon creation of the new room, prompting you to press them again. Why it doesn't always happen, I don't know. If anyone's had this problem and overcome it, I'd be grateful to know how.
I love the boat did you really make that customThanks. Yes, it is custom. It's not quite finished, but I finally like it (been through several incarnations...
)I only get lag inside the village, not on the trail.This is the problem with GM, I find. A room that runs slow on one computer is fine on another. Like I say, I was having the reverse problem on my old computer. Running the village is actually less intensive than the trail, so there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Well, I guess I've found a threshold. I won't be making any rooms more densely populated than the village or the trail!
Oh... I forgot to say... I love the night and day system. You should add enemies that only come out in the night. Good luck.Thanks, I'm going to.
I also love that you've given Zelda a real personality.Thank you. Since I've decided to set this game after WW I wanted to make it clear this Zelda was a descendant of Tetra and not the sad, tragic Zelda of TP. So she's going to be a feisty and headstrong tomboy, but I'm also making her a little less serious - not quite gained her characteristic wisdom yet, and she doesn't really want the responsibility that comes with being a member of the Royal family. She and Link will grow up quite a bit during the story, I hope.
Oh and where did you get those WW sound effects they'd be very useful for WWA.I'm hooking my MP3 player up to the TV and recording them from there. They're not great quality heard on their own, but with everything else that's going on in the background it doesn't seem to matter. I'll make a more complete set and make them available for other people to use.
I was wondering, could you change it so you can roll as diagonally as you can walk? Not really important, but still.I could, yes. It might look a bit odd, but I can't think of anything it would cause problems with... I'll give it a go and see how it turns out.
I don't know how important having diagonal rolling movement is, (As was suggested earlier) but it would've been nice to have a separate button do that. As Link seems to roll instead of interact with objects sometimes.Really? If you look at the old tech demo, the context-sensitive Z button would only change if you were stood still and in contact with an interactive object - if you were moving the roll attack action would always get priority. It was suggested that I change that so that the object's action would get the priority, as otherwise it would be annoying opening doors and trying to talk to people. So I did change it, and I was pretty sure I'd covered everything. If you're still rolling when you think you should be doing something else, could you tell me what the circumstances are? I can't find any myself... One thing I am already planning to do is enlarge the 'triggers' for interacting with objects, so that might help in sorting this problem out.
Could I make you a hud? The game looks great and you custom work isHmmm... It wouldn't really require much change to the code, but I'm not a fan of slapping fancy 3D-style HUDs on 2D games as they tend to obscure parts of the playing area. It's not a problem in a 3D environment where the camera POV is always changing, but in my opinion, in 2D, the very simplest HUDs work better. I might think about stylising it eventually, but it will be some way down the line.exceptionalgodly, but I'm not too fond of the hud... But changing it drastically would result in needing to change up code I assume, so maybe not...
I had some pretty insane lag in the middle of the first town, was this because of the uncompressed audio? Probably not, so I don't know.
so far I have one problem. and that's with the damn speed of my computer. I'm guessing I was getting 5-15 fps most of the time.Ugh. I don't quite know what I can do about this. I suspect the audio isn't playing a part, but I'm curious, Soulrivers - do you mention the village because it gives you the most lag? What about Kakariko Trail (the one with the octos?) Using debug mode on my computer (i.e. the one I'm using to develop this) I was noticing a slight dip of 1 or 2 frames in certain areas of Kakariko Trail, but nothing in the village. This was backed up by the other, older, computer I have access to. It ran a little slower generally, but the dip in framerate was definitely more noticeable in the trail. Those two are certainly the busiest rooms.
If you could elaborate on any bugs you say you've found, I'd be grateful. Cheers!
) this demo will introduce you for the first time to a concept I've previously only made cryptic references to, revolving around the passing of time, and the comings and goings of the passengers and crew of three ships in the sea ports of Hyrule. Yes, we're on the Great Sea again. This game is loosely set some vague number of centuries after The Wind Waker, and the water has begun to recede and three new provinces have been established. Travel between them, however, is still only possible by sailboat. There are three ships (named Din's Fire, Farore's Wind and, yep, Nayru's Love) that sail around Hyrule on a continuous round-trip journey that takes three days, i.e. a day in each port, travelling through the night. Each ship will dock in all of the three sea ports over the course of the rotating three-day cycle - think of them as following each other in a circle (or triangle ) round the map.
I feel like z3 being constantly delayed is holding everything up. So like I say I may just forget about it and release the demo shortly anyway. You never know, by the time z3 actually happens, I may have a bigger demo to release!Can I ask you a question. I know this may have been answered already but I haven't been on the forums much.Pretty sure I answered those questions for you just a few pages back... Yes, yes I did.
When's the next demo and what will it have?
The updated tech demo works brilliantly on Vista! And since my Vista laptop is much faster than my slow Win2000 desktop, it also runs a lot faster and smoother in my caseThat's good to know, thanks.
The trailer is great, but riding on Epona looks weird - like the animation seems to be MUCH too slow. Otherwise, amazing.
Great job King Mob! Everything in this game looks so smooth, eventhough I'm certain that the slow speed of the animations is due to the video FPS and not the game itself. I have been waiting for an update like this in quite long time, so keep up the good work and may the demo rule them all!Thanks, and yes, running FRAPS slows the game down quite visibly, and as Scooter said, it makes Epona look like she's running too slowly. But it might be worth pointing out that you may not have noticed there are two sets of animations: one for galloping and one for just slowly trotting along - that might be confusing the eye a little.
Holy !@#$% !@#$%, please tell me that demo will run on Vista or I shall eat you and your children >_____<;Well, as you suggested, I've recompiled it using the GM Converter tool to make it Vista compatible, and done the same with the old tech demo, but I can't test either myself.
I'm working on the game all the time, and would post updates more frequently, but I feel they have to wait. The demo has to come next. I may wait for z3, I may not - it's becoming less and less relevant to me. But by way of a compromise, I'm posting the trailer that I'd intended to accompany the z3 demo.I vote King Mob posts his project and screws z3. Seriously, when the hell is it, we've been waiting since March or something, maybe longer.I'm considering this. I'm rather bored waiting for this whole z3 fiasco myself. I want to move on, but I feel I'm holding myself back for this very reason... Expect a decision in the next few days.
I personally hate using the stylus to move in Phantom Hourglass. I don't see why it would be a good idea to have a pointer-only or point and perform Wii Zelda. Don't give me a "this is incredibly vague" BS like MG-Zero did, because 90% of the interview is about PH's controls.Nope, MG-Zero is right. Nowhere in that interview does Aonuma state that the next Wii Zelda would be pointer controlled. Doesn't even hint at it. It is entirely your own inference, drawn from a few deliberately cryptic words.
and posting them here for us to comment on - why, I have no idea. It's impossible to have any sympathy with your argument since it has no basis in reality. Sorry, but this is pure conjecture and therefore a non-story.Having just finished the wonderful Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo DS, Aonuma is enthused about the future of the Zelda series, and says that his teams will create similarly re-envisioned Zelda experiences on both Wii and DS.They are his words, and his emphases, not Aonuma's.
