Community project

[Sage Orator]

....I may have trashed it or something. Anyway thanks. Works amazingly now.

Anyway I have all of the bows done. The regular bows are rather small though.

[bananaman]

Those are pretty cool.

The sourceforge site is up and running. I'll set it up pretty well so it can be used tomorrow and post a link. Meanwhile I have tile sprites for the castle and gate and portcullis and path. I also have the store demo working. I'm putting Pindur on my Comp and will upload a screenshot. I will also edit the map engine so the main character is masked and the ground beneath him is seen around his sides.
I started working on the stats for all weapons, but they will probably all change around a bit during testing and we realize that some are stacked. For the weapons I decided that your character will have to be at a certain str, speed, range, etc. in order to equip certain weapons, that way when you get a noob vassal late in the game you will have to spend the money to put him through training and not just buy him the best weapon. I also dedided that certain types of weapons will get bonuses vs. others like, halberd +5 attack against cavalry. If you ideas as to which weapons should work best against others, please post ideas.

[Sage Orator]

Sounds good. Mind sharing the weapon stuff that you have so far?

The axes are down to numbers 3 and 5 I'll work on that and try to think of some bonuses.

[bananaman]

I'll put something up tomorrow, I'm going to bed now, see ya later.

[nitacku]

[bananaman]

I was thinking about a different way to mask the sprite, but your's is just as good and shouldn't take any longer or extra code. I also majorly optimized your code for the movement of the character. I'm sorry I can't upload anything, My dad took my flash drive to work with him and my computer doesn't have any internet capapbilities except for dial up. I will get the sourceforge up and running later tonight though. I have to go to church first.

[Sage Orator]

Eh that's too bad, can't wait to see it. I got the hand axe done and will start working on the battle axe and the dagger and have them up sometime soon...

Axe:

[elfprince13]

pwnish axe.

[bananaman]

Definately. That axe is amazing.

Edit:

Here is the link to the sourceforge. I don't really have anything going except a little bit on the forums. I'm still getting used to the setup and will try to flesh it out as soon as possible.

[Sage Orator]

...thanks, doesn't look as great to me up close....

I have no idea how to operate anything on sourceforge.
I guess I'll learn

Anyway I got the battle axe done. It's better than the hand ax IMO.

Battle Axe:

[bananaman]

Next Stages of the Game.

We have almost finished enough planning that we can start getting indepth coding done. In order to start we have to determine a couple of things. The first being the system for storing weapon data. I was thinking about putting all the different stats for the weapons into one big string. It would take the least amount of memory to store the data, b/c a string uses 1 byte per character whereas a list uses 9 bytes per storage area. The string would not use more than 4 bytes on any storage area and the extra bytes used to turn the different parts back into integers would by no means exceed the use of a list. I was also thinking about omitting the names of the weapons. If we had a unique picture for each you don’t really need the names, they can just be in the readme or something. If you think this works say I’m awesome otherwise give your suggestions.
The second thing needed to be done is finalize the numbers for the different sprites. This easiest way to arrange them is walkable first, activity sprites next (like town or store entrances), then non-walkable last. This gets rid of having to have a list in the walking around program. Here is an idea at an order, but I want feedback as to if we should add any sprites and what they should be, then I will give them all a final number and we can finish up the sprites and arrange them in the pictures. Then we can use spritestudio to make all the maps. Grass1, Grass2, Sand, Path (horizontal, vertical, 4 turns, 4 path splits), dirt floor, wood floor, (end of walkable), town entrance, estate entrance, castle entrance, shop door1, shop door2, shop counter, (end of activity), bushes, trees, buildings, walls, portcullis, mountains, hills, sea/water, barrel, table, bed.
Even before we have finished drawing the sprites we could start coding, but not before the data storage or sprite order has been determined. So let’s quickly finish that up and I will make up a whole bunch of small coding jobs to be done.

Attached is my spreadsheet of all the weapons, I hope you have excel. If you don’t I could probably email them to you specifically in a formatted way so you could still see it, I just don’t want to post them all here and take up soo much space.

Also there is a mock screenshot of the store. As you can see the weapons will be in pictures on the right, speech on the bottom and the stats of the weapon on the left.

Also is a screenshot of one of the layers of my sprites for the walls, you can kinda get a picture of what they look like from this.

I have finished a drawing of what the overworld map will be like, once we get all the sprites determined I will make out a grid for this and we can start making up the cities.

[Super Speler]

I really want to be involved in this project but have the problem of getting a huge ammount of homework (between my classes I have 100 textbook pages, 2 essay's and a test to prepare for, all due on monday), so I can't dedicate a definite amount of time so here is what I would like to do. If those people who are writing code need help writing short peices of code or optimizing and you see me on the IRC please tell me, I would love to help, every moment I am available to code I am there.

Thanks.

[alexrudd]

For the weapons, how high are the stats going? If you limit them to, say, 0-5, you could use some sneaky string manipulation to store multiple values in one character Using numbers and letters would give you 36 characters, or enough possibilities for 2 stats with 6 options each.
Char Stat 1 Stat 2
...A......0.......0
...B......1.......0
...C......2.......0
[alphabet here]
...9......5.......5

It would give you 50% savings, although you would need to have plenty of weapons to make it worthwhile. If you limited the weapons to certain combinations (eg. 1-9-1-1 isn't possible), you could potentially store more stats.

[Sage Orator]

I like the string idea, though I'm not sure what C, D , or I are, it seems to be a solid idea. It would beat out even a compressed list and the expr/sub. Also, the isolated tens in E and F can be changed into nines that could save bytes, not effect gamplay much, and make things more simple with everything being single digit. Also you could probably divide everything in I by ten and just use 10expr(...

I'm perfectly fine with not using weapon names. With my pictures, which of course will be as detailed as my abilities allow, and a simple mention in the readme it should be perfectly fine.

Excel is fine, at least for me, and thanks for it.

It looks really good. I've got the preliminary daggers done and will post it very soon. BTW when I get done with all the weapons (not even armor, seige, sheilds, etc.) how should I send you the stuff? As lists, matrices, a pic, etc.?


I can certainly understand about the school work. I have the toughest workload of any person in my grade which is why these weapons sprites are coming out slower than they probably would be otherwise.

[bananaman]

@Alexrudd: Cool idea, I understand what you're going at and some of the stats could be compressed together like that. Some of them go up to higher numbers like 25 or the prices, but I will use that for some.

@Sage Orator: I totally understand your homework load, if it wasn't for my study hall I would have about 2 hours of homework a day plus projects. I go to a classical high school where they pile on the homework. Don't let your grade suffer b/c of the project. Do well in school and put it first. Any work you do will be highly appreciated, but don't try too much.

[elfprince13]

I recommend that instead of xLib we use a custom Asm engine with the sprites compiled in, this will allow us to store the map as a string instead of a matrix. I could make that my personal end of the project. we would then be able to access one sprite for every token on the calculator. next, store all information/stats as strings and then have one massive string with every token on the calculator which combined with inString() will allow us to get the numerical value of the token in the string.

[bananaman]

That sounds incredible. It would cut down a ton of memory usage, b/c matrixes are very costly in space. I don't know enough ASM to be of any use, but if I read correctly that's what you would do. I don't know if you want to start now or wait till nearer the end of the project. I guess it's all your choice when you want to do it. It isn't entirely necessary right now, b/c the amount of code to be changed to implement it would be minimal.

[Sage Orator]

Nah, don't worry about me. I'm not even allowed to touch my calcs until I have my homework done. Only class that I'm even remotely concerned about is English.

The custom asm would be great...

[elfprince13]

[Fallen Ghost]

So it will turn an ASM program?? Seems that matrices and sprites will be ASM... What will be needed in BASIC?