Triple Triad Possible?

[subin]

this is looking really exciting now, having a fully modular RPG for people to make alternate worlds to and such is a pretty inviting concept.

although i just realised, for the cards.. will the whole deck be available? or will there be a way to win and collect or trade cards and stuff? it's just that, collecting the cards is one of the funnest parts of the game, and i would really like it implemented..

and what filetype would you like our cards to be? i'll try and start work on them tonight.

 

[Sephnroth]

*rubs eyes* gah, 8am here and i still havnt managed to get any sleep - just been one of those nights not code keeping me from my bed this time either.

please make the cards in .png form.

No, you dont get given the full deck, you have to win the cards So far when a new profile is started (theres no profile system yet, im faking it by calling the functions by hand) it gives you 8 random cards of particular levels. it gives you 4 random level 1-4 cards, 2 random level 5 cards, 1 random level 6 and 1 random level 7. Theres alot more cards in the screenshot because i made it randomly generate a ton of cards so i could test the scrolling (which works perfectly )

You will have to go around with the cards you get given at the start beating people to earn more cards and points (points let you specifically buy cards) until your deck is strong enough to fight tougher people to win even better cards etc. I will hand place the level 10 cards on certain npc's and make sure they are tough enough to win.

I will leave a reset npc in which will REMOVE EVERY CARD YOU HAVE EARNED and give you a new random 8 - this is for people who loose alot early on whilst learning how to play so they can get back enough cards to try again.

Thanks to everyone who is contributing It will really make the project that much better with everyone creating media and also makes me as the coder feel pretty damn good that people think its worth contributing too Thanks to all!

 

[onionfrog]

Looks really nice...
Your gonna make me have to get a gp2x...

 

[racoon]

Ok, I will try to make some card(s) again today...
things I still wonder about:

Should the numbers and the symbol get a specific position?

Would it maybe be smarter to make the cards in 90x110 (45x55x2) and scale them down while you play a game (what have we got our hardware scaler for?) so you maybe have a chance to look at your cards with more detail in a kind of "gallery" function or when you win the cards?

hmm magic *cough*... what about a small comment to each card? So curious people got something to read and insiders got something to laugh? This should be displayed in the gallery or win/lose cards-window too. This could certainly add some atmosphere.

Very advanced feature proposal: Display the "big" cards when using TV-OUT ;D...

What do you think about it?

Please open a WIP topic

I will PM you a sample card if I don't find space to upload.

EDIT: Nice idea about that restart feature and the other things you mentioned

EDIT ||: What values are typical for each level? What does an A, and what do the elements mean? If you link me to a page explaining that stuff I'm happy too, I just don't want to add stupid values, cause I don't even know the exact rules.

EDIT |||: I still have a problem with content creation: I do everything as stated in the tutorial but my blue background always "affects" the art image, thus it gets somewhat blue and I don't know a workaround. Using Gimp2. >Thanks

 

[subin]

Should the numbers and the symbol get a specific position?

yup, that's explained in the tutorial sephnroth posted the link to. in fact, having said that.. you could theoretically put them anywhere, as long as they're readable and it looks nice, i guess.

Would it maybe be smarter to make the cards in 90x110 (45x55x2) and scale them down while you play a game (what have we got our hardware scaler for?) so you maybe have a chance to look at your cards with more detail in a kind of "gallery" function or when you win the cards?

that's a very good idea.. i'll make my cards in 90x110 and 45x55, just in case

EDIT ||: What values are typical for each level? What does an A, and what do the elements mean? If you link me to a page explaining that stuff I'm happy too, I just don't want to add stupid values, cause I don't even know the exact rules.

basically, in FF8, each card was a monster/character/object in the game. the stronger the monster, the better the card. so A is a strength of 10 in that direction. and the elements work like this: if the card is fire element, and it is on a fire elemental square, it gets boosted +1 on all sides, for example, and this is true for all the cards if element rule is on. but if it is an elemental and it is on a non-elemental square, it gets -1 on all sides. and if a non-elemental card is on an elemental card, and element rule is being played, it loses 1 on all sides. phew!

as for levels.. i would make a total score for each level, and make sure the 4 numbers add up to this, but vary it a bit. for example, some cards are all-round good, some in up + down, some in left+right, some diagonal, and some random.

 

[racoon]

I still have a problem with content creation: I do everything as stated in the tutorial but my blue background always "affects" the art image, thus it gets somewhat blue and I don't know a workaround. Using Gimp2. >Thanks

EDIT: Solved by selecting the left alpha region so the background image isn't even "behind" the art shown.

 

[subin]

i'm glad you sorted that out.. i have finally completed the list! took an hour or two.. but satisfying. i'm not sure what fans will think, though. in the end i decided to make a mammoth deck, with 10 levels and 13 cards in each. (in fact, that's only 20 cards more than the ff8 one.. but hey, it feels mammmoth.) but yeah, some of the choices are perhaps not what a fan would like, such as general scales from star fox adventures in level 9 (!), but hey, it's difficult to maintain quality.

i'll start work on the cards themselves now, but that should be less difficult than making the list. more time consuming, but less difficult.. and i'll post my first card so you get an idea.

 

[Sephnroth]

well done you guys and thanks subin for helping him out - i have been asleep /all day/ (its now 7pm x_X) but then again i didnt finally fall asleep until like 11am :/

about the cards - its generally safest bet to make a bigger card then scale it down. you can use any frame and put the numbers anywhere you like - just make sure a deck is consistant so it doesnt confuse people I *may* still change the size of the cards, theres a few more pixels i can fit in or i can even try and resize the board a little more perhaps, but im not sure. either way if that happens I will be more than happy to resize the decks for you to save you the trouble (a few seconds with a photoshop batch job will do the trick) or whatever.

Now, i need to hunt breakfast, find a shirt, stick my head in a bucket of cold water and generally just try to wake up will start work on tt again later

 

[subin]

well done you guys and thanks subin for helping him out - i have been asleep /all day/ (its now 7pm x_X) but then again i didnt finally fall asleep until like 11am :/

​

hahaha, you crazy person. well, i'll just make the cards in native ff8 resolution, because i don't know how to scale images en masse with GIMP and it seems easier for you to do it.

EDIT: decided to use double resolution, as it's easier than ff8. and i also did my first card!! it's of the character "manly frog", an enemy from EarthBound, the seminal RPG of the SNES. dunno why he's water elemental.. he's a frog, i guess.

 

[racoon]

Because I intent to make a World of Warcraft Deck I just sorted out the necessary elemental icons and found the font so I have custom numbers... I will look into the borders tomorrow, then I will start finding good screenshots and artwork ;D

 

[Sephnroth]

nicework guys

incidently, i cant remember if i said this or not, but name your cards xxx.png start with 001.png and working up.

store them in a Blue and Red folder

so you might have a directory like

MyDeck

and inside would be a folder named Blue and a folder named Red. the first card in both of them would be 001.png, the blue one for player one obviously in the Blue folder and the red one in the Red folder. just make sure the blue and red cards match

NOTE: in the end they are just pictures! The blue and red cards dont have to be identical! in triple triad advance alot of the decks have a picture of a character on the blue card and on the red card have the same character but a different picture of them. Sometimes i think this gets a bit confusing, but its worth noting that if you wish you can get up to trickery like that

When added to the game your cards would keep the same directory structure (which is why i specified it) and the .deck file would go in the root.

Thanks for doing this guys, its really motivating to see 3rd party interest like this

 

[Sephnroth]

okay little update

after pratting about on ragnarok with WoE (if you dont know, nvm ) i got to bug fixing. rules now display correctly and i connected the pre-game loader (where you select cards) to the actual triad game. fixed a few small bugs with npc cards and whatnot and er.. well i think the engine core is now finished x_X

Crazy really, i've barely spent a week on this so far. But it seems, looking at it right now, all thats left to do is add the rest of the rules into triad and put in loaders for the things i've had hardcoded whilst testing (ie, get it to scan a directory for decks and load them manually instead of me saying LoadDeck(blah) and the engine will be done and just awaits content.

but hehe, you know how it is, everything looks so close but then you realise something is missing and to get it you need to do xxx which requires you do yyy etc But from current viewpoint everything is looking pretty good. I think i'll compile it for gp2x now and give it a test on the actual unit (i compiled for gp2x a few times before to make sure it was compiling okay, but never actually tested it on there before..)

will give you more updates later

 

[Sephnroth]

heh, said theres always unexpected problems didnt i!

running it on the gp2x two things are instantly apprant. the first thing, the tile engine is slowwwwwwwwwwwww. Which is very odd because its a very very simple renderer and doesnt do anything fancy (not even ordering, it assumes things are ordered already) and that makes me scratch my chin a bit. Highly likely that my SDL libs are not the hardware accelerated ones, will check that out later.

However its "ok" when overclocked to 266. So the next problem and more important right now the npc's have disapeared.

Oh. Joy.

Using gfoots exceptionally sexy usb->serial gadget interface i was able to debug it though and as i suspected the CDataFile class (a common class for handling ini files) cannot find the npc data ini - at first i suspected my path system but no, thats fine, my map files and whatnot load fine so i guess it has something to do with std::fstream which the ini class uses. gonna go debug some more now. This is going to be an all nighter again isnt it?

 

[subin]

haha, well, you keep working on it.. i better rename a couple files and such.

and as for different pictures for red and blue.. i dunno, it could be quite fun, but if i do i'll do it for like, level 9 + 10 or something, to show they're special. otherwise it would double the workload, and for a lot of characters look a bit rubbish (like the manly fish there )

 

[Sephnroth]

subin, um, i hope you havnt done too many cards just yet because i have to point something out ^^;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

I just looked harder at the fish man card and noticed its background is number 3 from the tutorial. Thats one of TTA's custom hand-made backgrounds and we arnt allowed to use those :/ I was pretty sure i said when i first linked to the site but sorry, i should of noticed sooner! My bad, really sorry if you did alot of cards using those backgrounds :x

you can use backgrounds 1 and 2 from their tutorial as those are ff8 ones. Or you can use your own custom background image of your own design (just need to make it once and can use for rest of your cards )

But ya sorry, i have spoken to the TTA guys before i even started this and one of the things they expressly asked me not to do was use their custom media :/ I suppose its not me using it and i cant help what fans submit.. but yeah I have to point it out.

 

[racoon]

OK, if we name the cards like *.png ... is it important that the cards 001 -> 011 are level one or is it possible to do that independently? I don't know if I asked before but what is a reasonable overall number for, say, a level 1? It would be cool to have these numbers so the cards are well balanced. Is it also important that a deck has got the same overall value combiing all cards in each direction? Say 500 south, 500 east.... ?

 

[subin]

you can use backgrounds 1 and 2 from their tutorial as those are ff8 ones. Or you can use your own custom background image of your own design (just need to make it once and can use for rest of your cards )

​

ah crap. well, at least i only made the manly fish. i'll make my own background i guess, as i doubt the ff8 boring background would really look very good. it sucks that we can't use that background though, because it's really nice..

edit: racoon, just make sure your deck is balanced. so don't have too many cards good in vertical attack, not too many corner cards, etc etc. i don't think it matters about the amount of cards in each level really, as long as you tell sephnroth when you give him your deck. and as for reasonable levels.. well, level 1 is crap, and the highest amount of total points would be 40, that is, A A A A, but in ff8 it would be more like A 9 8 7 or something for an amazing amazing card.

 

[racoon]

you can use backgrounds 1 and 2 from their tutorial as those are ff8 ones. Or you can use your own custom background image of your own design (just need to make it once and can use for rest of your cards )

​

ah crap. well, at least i only made the manly fish. i'll make my own background i guess, as i doubt the ff8 boring background would really look very good. it sucks that we can't use that background though, because it's really nice..

edit: racoon, just make sure your deck is balanced. so don't have too many cards good in vertical attack, not too many corner cards, etc etc. i don't think it matters about the amount of cards in each level really, as long as you tell sephnroth when you give him your deck. and as for reasonable levels.. well, level 1 is crap, and the highest amount of total points would be 40, that is, A A A A, but in ff8 it would be more like A 9 8 7 or something for an amazing amazing card.

​

I already got what you meant on the last page with being balanced and so on... I only wanted to balance as well as possible, still waiting for sephnroths opinion about this overall value as well as my suggestion regarding the comments.
Edit: Also created suitable WoW borders, I only need to pick the actual artwork, all misc art is done .

 

[Sephnroth]

Hey guys!

@racoon:

now im not too sure what the official formula is for balanced cards. the best advice i can give you is to use common sense, obviously no cards should have 4 A values but 4 1's is too low even for a level 1 card. I dont know what the total value of cards in the deck should be, i dont think there is a cap If you are truely concerned about balance you can make your cards take the exact same values as the FF8 ones but with different pictures. That would work fine! Or use your own values if you like

about card levels being in order.. hmm. I see no reason why they should be. If you want ME to generate the .deck data file for you then yes, please keep them in some sort of order so you can simply tell me "first 11 are level 1, next 14 are level 2 etc" because if the cards are out of order you will have to list each card and their level and you may as well make the .deck yourself in that case Feel free to ask any more questions if you have any or arnt clear on any of my answers.

@subin:

sorry about the fish man but im glad it was the only one you made, was worried I might be asking you to change 110 cards or something Their background is a nice one, but im sure you can make one just as nice In the future when im not so preoccupied with the engine i will probably make a set of images for stuff like this as well.

Okay, update:

Thanks to Squidge I fixed the bug with the npc not appearing. It was windows fault in the end, i used explorer to make a directory called NPC but in reality it was called "npc" instead of "NPC" - command prompt and windows explorer both displayed it in caps, stupid thing.

Just had a chat with the npc on my gp2x and played a game of triad, all worked A nice surprise was the TTF fonts im using turned out to be clearer on the gp2x than on the pc, i thought they would be worse! i was half expecting to need to change to using bitmap fonts, glad i dont as it makes it easier for me this way.

Theres a small issue with the distance calculation im using for npc collision/range checking which seems to be normal on windows but reallllllly small on the gp and the whole thing needs to be speeded up lots, but this is looking hopful.

 

[subin]

well, i managed to make a background, using a metal slug screenshot it's actually pretty fly, and will look badass with ganondorf or captain falcon or someone cool looking like that.

so here is another card i made, yoshi's egg, which, is stronger on the top and bottom than on the sides, just like a real egg! pick one up and try to break it by squeezing it on the top and bottom and you'll see what i mean.