Gigas-engine 0.7.0


i am tempted to support video formats properly, but it'd require alot of work and i dont really think many people have the tech to make their own FMV scenes - so for now in-game cutscenes and images should be enough, whenever im unsure if i should add a feature or not i just think back to the SNES days where the RPGs didnt have any FMV but in my oppinion were so much better than most of the current stuff.
 
nah, all like 8 of us that frequent this section of the boards are more grown up
however, we do have a noob problem potential....
o well, tell them patience and laugh at them, what more can we do
all hail Pirotic
and the Holy Penguin ( i read the linux interview )

~Octavious
 
Hopefully I would, but probably only as a slideshow; I know people who will hopefully be able to do nice manga-esque individual scenes for me when the time comes; I don't know anyone who could animate them though...

Incidentally, would it be possible with the current method of showing images/videos to dump one onto a layer and have actions going on around it? Could be usful for subtle effects (water and such). Or would the best way to do that be to have a lot of repeating "effects" objects?
 
nah FMV's would be far to difficult to make and would take up an unecessary ammount of space so put them right on the bottom of your list of things to do....
 
Tobriand posted on May 24 2004 at 05:58 AM said:
Hopefully I would, but probably only as a slideshow; I know people who will hopefully be able to do nice manga-esque individual scenes for me when the time comes; I don't know anyone who could animate them though...

Incidentally, would it be possible with the current method of showing images/videos to dump one onto a layer and have actions going on around it? Could be usful for subtle effects (water and such). Or would the best way to do that be to have a lot of repeating "effects" objects?
thats what tile effects are for :p the problem with tile effects atm is that its very hard to make an animation which is, say 8x8 tiles wide. im planning on making creating tile effects alot easier tho in future versions.

i tend to make a crude editor first so i can tick it off the list, then add functionality once everythings done in crude form. no point having a fantastic entity editor when you can't even make maps etc ;)
 
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perhaps an animated background layer(which is added before tiles are dropped, and can be set so that it scrolls at varying speeds) could be added (so that the sky can be visible on some scenes), or there can be holes in the ground which skylight shines through...

like the parallax thingy on rpgmaker2k
 
thats exactly what the screen effects feature does, lets you set an animation which can also be scrolled (parralax) - for clouds, rain etc.

rain is on the demo if i remember correctly, but the screen animation editor wasn't done in the previous version so people couldn't make their own.
 
well, come to think of it, the FMV as a video wouldnt be needed, but definatley as many pics and as a set routines in game happening, both would be awesome
also, I wish we had a prog that took files and let us move them on the 32 without a PC
and as always, sound and text support please
for the text, could you have button mode AND chatboard mode?
for those with no board yet....

o well, you have put out proboly the most promising gp32 program ever

~Octavious

edit
also, add more entities on one map, not enough for a dungeon siege like game, or diablo
 
Hiya!

text support is currently being coded (now that cutscenes are done), so far its just a virtual keyboard which will appear whenever you may need to enter text.

i'd love to add chatboard support to, but i'd need donations to get one at the moment as the company i freelance for isnt doing so well and are doing more work in-house (meaning im flat broke)

as for having more entitys, its currently 100 entitys per map, its pretty easy to up the number as its just a constant (ie MAX ENTITYS = 100) at the moment the constants are:

100 entitys per map
50 hotspots per map
100 events per cutscene
1920 tiles per tile set
20 different attacks
20 tile animations (globally)

i'll double it eventually, i'd need to rewrite the SMC loading routines tho so it'll still support the old amounts (keeping saves compatable) - i set it as rather low to begin with as i didnt have a clue how much RAM everything would take up, so when its all coded i can use up whats left, but i can prob double it all ;)

just bare in mind the GP32 isnt as powerfull as a computer, and the more stuff you add to a map the slower it'll run in theory. having said that 0.7.0 runs twice as fast as the previous versions.. but still, its always better to have more smaller maps than one epic map.
 
finally decided how conversations are going to work on a technical level, i wanted it so you could have limitless conversations without it taking up any RAM, so how it works is like this... (let me know what you think)

you can create as many 'conversations' as you want and each one is stored in its own file on the SMC, each conversation has 10 variations, and with each variation you specify a trigger, and what value that trigger must be to make it use that variation.

so, a quick example

i make a trigger which is called "Is Switch Pulled?" and set it to zero by default.

i make a hotspot which flicks a switch, and in the hotspot settings i make it change that trigger we just mentioned to "1" when the hotspot is activated

then i make a conversation, where the default line is "you have to pull the trigger", and add a variation to is so that if "is switch pulled = 1" it says "weldone you found the trigger"

then you simply select the entity you want to say it, and set its "talking" value to the conversation number of the conversation you just made.

:) volla, it all works.

also when you select the trigger for a conversation possibility one of the options will be "default", if you have more than one possiblity as "default" it'll pick one of them at random when you talk to them, which allows them to say something different each time.

what do u guys recon?
 
u can also specify a "conversation" to display at any time in the cutscenes, so the cutscene text can change depending on the conditions too.. which should be fun.

trying to decide if i should give entitys a hard-coded name each, of if they should just enter the name they want in the conversation,

on one hand, u wouldn't have to keep writing the name if it just displayed the name of the entity ur talking to like "NAME:" before each line of text...

but then again sometimes it has like "????:" in square games until you know what their name is,

would you guys prefere it if it automatically entered the entitys name before what he was saying based on a NAME value in the entity settings, or would you rather just write the names in the conversations themselves?
 
Pirotic posted on May 24 2004 at 05:18 PM said:
u can also specify a "conversation" to display at any time in the cutscenes, so the cutscene text can change depending on the conditions too.. which should be fun.

trying to decide if i should give entitys a hard-coded name each, of if they should just enter the name they want in the conversation,

on one hand, u wouldn't have to keep writing the name if it just displayed the name of the entity ur talking to like "NAME:" before each line of text...

but then again sometimes it has like "????:" in square games until you know what their name is,

would you guys prefere it if it automatically entered the entitys name before what he was saying based on a NAME value in the entity settings, or would you rather just write the names in the conversations themselves?
the name value sounds nice, but would it be possible to have a feature in which there is just a text box with txt in it (like not coming from anyone, voice over or something)

if you know what I mean :p
 
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uhuh, you can do text coming from nowhere.. what i was sorta asking is,

if an entity is saying something, should it automatically put that entitys name before what he says (eg "Bob: Hello"), or would you rather it just showed what you wrote - in which case you would always write his name in the conversation to begin with...
 
are you going to do any zelda type puzzles. IE: push these blocks into an arrow formation in 3 moves. ect?
 
pushing objects is on the todo list somewhere, at the moment u can walk thru the other entitys but i'll add entity collision and pushing sooner or later.

puzzles are pretty important :)
 
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