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Showing posts from January, 2016

Currently resuming active development, going to have to change up my engine conversion strategy

When I designed my new game engine, I used the old one as a base and tried to keep as many essentials in place while fixing any screwups and bolting new features onto the hub so it could serve as a drop in replacement scripting wise. Or such was the idea. In practice, the drop-in worked, but with horribly messed up game engine timing issues, and it hit me as to why: RPG Maker's events are synced to any code designated to be active when first loaded, and since I changed up a lot of existing settings when the events expected different timings according to the scripts they used, this led to choppy framerates everywhere, so I'm gradually importing the new engine settings while fixing goofs as I go along. I also have another issue: The new portraits in place of faces works fine, but results in some text misalignment in text boxes, currently looking into ways to compensate for this. This has also forced me to disable any pixel movement in place of stock movement until the t

In the process of changing some final scripting, made a few more critical changes

Before I decided to focus entirely on graphics, I ran my codebase through a final sweep for bugs, and sure enough, a few slipped past my earlier tests, forcing me to toss out some scripts and look for suitable replacements. I also had to make some final changes to my new portraits. Sarah, Mara, and Lora are mostly the same as before, but since each covers a color (Mara - Red, Sarah - Blue, Lora - Yellow), I decided to alter Roto to have green armor and have some greenish hair, both to keep the color schema and to match his mother, who has green hair. I'm still making some final adjustments to account for these last minute issues and changes, then I'll focus on doing more work on the actual game and importing some new graphics. I'd also like to give Archeia my sincere gratitude for answering some last minute questions concerning permission to alter the work she allowed my limited re-edit permission for, and I'd also like to give her some free advertising to show my

Discovered I'm going to have redo a LOT of special effects in my game

I've been testing out various functions in my game and have come to the conclusion that some scripts I was using need replaced due to incompatibility, being inefficient, or just a nightmare to configure and set up. And that includes any fancy graphical effects, which I deliberately waited until I got everything else working to focus on. Fortunately, this is not all bad. I have replacements lined up that should be much more efficient, and some have much simpler code as well, meaning it will run much faster even on toaster level PCs. This does mean when I resume development I'm going to have to redo every fancy graphical effect event or scripted area from square one, which will be very, very tedious.

Got the scripting pretty much done, now to handle the graphics for my game

I finally managed to make sure basically all of my scripting works save a few remaining scripts (these I need to stress test for certain edge case issues, don't expect any though), so now I'm lining up the graphic side of things, and it's grueling and tedious. * Since I own RPG Maker MV, I planned on backporting some of it's graphics into Vx Ace (easy enough, just reduce the size of most of them by 25% and apply a little sharpening where needed to preserve graphical fidelity) since frankly, MV might be horribly unstable (so much so I have axed any attempt to port to it until they give the engine some stability overhauls), but it does have some pretty graphics. I also own (and thus have license to use the graphics of) RPG Maker XP, and I planned to port some XP style stuff into my game. The tedious part is getting all this crap organized (I literally have GIGABYTES of graphical crap to sort, and I only planned to use a small portion of it) * I'm going to have to

Almost done overhauling my game engine

I'm almost done overhauling my new game engine, and I have made a few more core changes. * To eliminate some incompatibility issues with certain scripts and to make open sourcing easier, I have done away with using the Effectus performancr script and am instead using TheoAlien's Insane Anti-Lag. * My SDK version will only release with scripts and all graphics required to run them so it can be picked up, forked, and modified by any interested party. My actual game version will remain encrypted to protect licensed art assets, though closed betas will remain available when appropriate and where possible I will release developer versions of my game, pursuant to the EULA for RM VX Ace. * I will resume active development on my game once I confirm my new engine works well with my current game.

More game engine updates

I've gotten quite a bit of my game engine implemented now, and while it's about 70% complete, I'm currently working on some other aspects my old one did not address in detail. Movement. The RPG Maker engine is a 2D affair in which movement is handled on an X/Y plane, and while diagonal movement is supported (using both stock game sprites and 8 directional sprites), the game renders this in an X/Y fashion, meaning it can present issues when working with events, as these ordinarily do not take anything other than the stock 4 cardinal directions (up, down, left, right) into account, and then only on a 32 x 32 pixel range on a X/Y grid. This means I am currently attempting to make sure events work well when approached from all eight directions and that this results in no graphical weirdness with overlays and other effects. Another thing I'm working on is attempting to make sure there is rudimentary mouse support. The engine comes with basic gamepad support, but mous

Brianna Wu has been censoring proof they never passed college and have no degrees

While there have been tons of questions about whether Brianna Wu has the skill to program and release a game, I'm going to be generous. The Unreal Engine does not require you have a college degree to try it out or develop on it. Nor does RPG Maker, my engine of choice. However, Brianna Wu has claimed to go to college on more than one occasion and have graduated with degrees in more than one subject. Recently, it has been discovered this is naught but a lie and that all of Wu's claims to this can be disproven by the colleges themselves. However, let's back up for a second. In my previous post , which I found out Wu was desperate to censor any mention of, I merely repeated information already in the public domain, which was enough to get Wu to want to censor it. However, since evidence has recently come out based on college records based on the institutions Wu has claimed to have gone to (this information is free for the public to request access to and thus not ille

It seems Brianna Wu is desperate to censor any mention of their former identity off the Internet

Brianna Wu is now on a rabid quest to censor all information about being born John Walker Flynt off the internet, as documented here: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/13/the-wacky-world-of-wu-the-tortured-history-of-gamergates-self-styled-feminist-martyr/ In this article, Wu's past is revealed for what it really is, including the fact Wu was born John Walker Flynt. Wu is now desperately trying to remove this information from the internet, apparently unaware of a little thing called the Streisand Effect, which means the more you try to censor, the more people will spread it. You can see Wu's terror of this information getting out here: https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/688139264907849730 https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/687845245481009152 Wu is trying to go to the top of places like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Youtube, and even here to silence this information, even though the only thing Wu really wants to censor is already public information. I&

Dear Anti-GamerGate, I am #NotYourBullet. (originally written by TRANSYE WEST)

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Brianna Wu or an agent of Wu took down the work of another transgender person who supported GamerGate to suppress information that was against Medium's rules. Basically, proving John Flynt = Brianna Wu. Since I've had it with Wu's lies and I won't stand for Wu silencing a trans person while claiming to be cisgender and riding that lie literally to the bank, below is a reproduced in full version of the original as my personal fuck you to Wu for trying to censor the truth: https://archive.is/n10P3 (original Medium article that coward Flynt had censored) ------- I’m a Male-to-Female transgender and like many others, I’m a GamerGate Supporter. I believe that freedom of speech is paramount and I would trade my right to transition and to legally change my gender in order to uphold this right which every single person should be entitled to. I believe that people should be allowed to insult me and that I should be allowed to insult them without the fear of the

Have introduced Lighting effects into my new game engine

One of the things I really wanted to add to my game engine was lighting effects, but the old one forced me to toss this out when it slowed the framerate to a crawl, and now, I know why. I was using a script that used looping events to make things like fireplaces and lamps glow, and it was really slow because events that are autorunning or parallel processes eat up a lot of processor power, since RPG Maker VX Ace ordinarily does not use the GPU at all and is almost entirely processor dependent by default. The new script I'm using uses pure scripted events via a DirectX DLL hook, offloading the heavy lifting to the GPU, which means even low level PCs with integrated chipsets are unlikely to see any noticable slowdown since even though integrated graphics are much weaker than actual cards, they still can do most of the rendering without robbing too many processor cycles from the CPU. The script is also much lighter and efficient and avoids processor killing event conditions, so I

Mined a few ideas from Dragon Quest Heroes for my game

For those not aware, Dragon Quest Heroes is what happens when Dragon Quest and Dynasty Warriors have a baby, and while it's a hack and slash/action RPG hybrid, I was inspired by it's ability to upgrade skills and have been working on implementing a "Job Point" like system into the game, so early game skills can still be made more useful in mid to late game. However, I ran into hassles with this. First, while Yanfly's JP Manager provided a nice framework and KreadEx provided a nice system for this to work, the problem was putting a JP counter out for the player to refer to to see how points they accumulated. Dragon Quest VI and VII had a similar system but had no counter, and since that always annoyed me, I decided to add one for the sake of making the player's life easier. The issue is that even though I found a script to make it show up in the player menu, it wasn't visible. Items in menus are assigned their locations on an X/Y (horizontal/vertical)

More sanity checks and new features for my new game engine

Another update on my game engine: adding a lot of sanity checks so certain effects I had to toss in earlier builds will work right, like fog effects (you have to use tags prevent them from showing up on maps they shouldn't and I'm making sure they don't conflict other scripts that add overlay effects). However, I'm having a bit of an issue with implementing overlays. Overlays refer to textures placed (or superimposed) over other textures, and since RPG Maker VX Ace lacks this feature like RPG Maker XP, I having to make do with Tsukihime's overlay scripting to use a sub map with the overlays be superimposed over the primary map to achieve the same effect. Example: A bridge suspended over a ravine you can both walk over and under, which you cannot do normally in VX Ace without implementing an overlay as described above. Unfortunately, the transitions are very jerky and the graphics do not update in a timely manner, so they work but it looks quite ugly, and I w

Nate Spidgewood:Salty and crazy as ever

It seems Nate refuses to shut the fuck up and leave me alone, as shown in his latest unsolicited email: ------ STOP CALLING ME A "FAGGOT" ON YOU FRIGGIN' TROLL BLOG, YOU BUTTLICKING ENCYCLOPEDIA DRAMTICA BELIEVER AND SUPPORTER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! I'M JUST PISSED THAT I LOST MY TV TROPES ACCOUNT BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING NAZI WIKIPEDIA ADMINS WHO TOOK OVER THE SITE AFTER I JOINED AND THEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT NEGATIVITY AND ONLY CARE ABOUT NOTABILITY AND THE FUCKING NAMESPACE SPAM PLAGUE THEY'VE BEEN CRAMMING THE SITE WITH BECAUSE THEY THINK IT MAKES THEM MONEY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THEY'RE NOTHING BUT FUCKING GREEDY CORRUPT BASTARDS WHO DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT FANS AND MEDIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE REASON I JOINED TV TROPES IN THE

Finally figured out a few technical hurdles on my new engine that were driving me crazy, technical deets on what I mean

One of the things I tried to add awhile back and gave up on was Enemy HP Bars as visual aids in battle scenes, but due to various weirdness like the MP bar disappearing in the player menu, bleeding display bars, and other bizarre graphical artifacts, I gave up. I'm using Ventwig's HP bar script, Neo Gauge Ultimate Ace by Pacman, and the script that hates them both, the Ace Core Engine by Yanfly. Given my usual practice of putting core scripts towards the top of my list of scripts, I couldn't figure out what the issue was until I examined the code, and the problem was that Neo Gauge and the HP Bar script depend on bitmap drawing defaults that the core script by Yanfly invalidates with it own, and since I need the Core script intact for some of its functions, commenting out or removing code was not an option, since Yanfly's other scripts rely on it's calls for their specific functions. Then it hit me: Why not put the Core script below Ventwig and Pacman's sc