32 replies to this topic

[broken_Link]

Not sure if this is the right board for this, but...

<joke type="facetious" kind="troll face">
I'd like to request a port of this, please:
</joke>

More seriously, I wish there were a Sh*ning Soul II type game for the OpenPandora, I feel like it would be the proverbial killer app, and I'd like to form/join a team to help build it. However, I have no social or leadership skills and am not very good at scheduling or design, and as such, am looking to partner with a producer-type person who has lots of dungeon crawler ideas and creative inspiration and is good at organizing people, but perhaps isn't a coder, and maybe someone who is skilled at making architectural decisions (I tend to be more of a 'duct tape' guy, and while I can get things to work, I am not great at drawing up extensible or maintainable designs), and possibly someone who knows a thing or two about how an game server should be laid out.

What I can help with:

• Code. I have about intermediate skills with C and I have successfully gotten together a framework that could be used to display a 3D dungeon crawler at high frame rates on a Pandora and have successfully compiled and used libnet to get two machines to talk reliably.
• Music. Please have a look at for a sample.
• Playtesting.

On the technical side of things, since I already have this working and am happy with the performance, I'd like to use Allegro 4 for timing, image loading and sound, DUMB for music playback and libnet for networking, along with some GL ES 1.1 startup and drawing code I wrote myself. I was thinking for savegames, SQLite might be a good choice, but I have limited experience with it and am open to suggestions.

Is anyone else out there interested? Shall we start a brainstorm here?

If you're wondering what happened to Emily's Curious Adventure, someone broke into my car recently and stole, among other things, the flash drive with the most recent code before I could back it up, so it's on hold at this point. I may pick it back up later.

[Jebe]

I'm not familiar with that game, but if I understand you correctly you want to setup a project for a top down beat 'em up with quirky dialogue and scenarios. Given I'm not sure how multiplayer would work under the circumstances, I'd suspect such a thing would tend more to the Zelda side of things.

Basically you'll need to design maps, sprites, and code for handling the attacks/movement of the sprites, and figure out the setting and how you're going to make things quirky.

[mjohansson]

Have you ever played Phantasy Star Online on Dreamcast? That was the first thing I thaught of when I looked at the game video, the game in the video just looked boring to me but still in essence PSO is the same, I guess atmosphere and timing goes a long way or something, or just the vista of seeing ahead or something. Anyway, you said you were gonna do 3d graphics, and if PSO would be the main inspiration instead I would defenitly like to be a part, I could do level design, if I could...

What programs do you use for content creation? And what kind of effects do you have in graphics?

[dreamer]

I think there where talks in the community of making a multiplayer RPG more than a year ago .. no idea what happened to that effort though ..

[broken_Link]

@mjohansson - Shining Soul II plays very much like a pocket version of Phantasy Star Online. PSO, or perhaps the dungeon areas of Dark Cloud 2/Dark Chronicle would be a good target to aim at in terms of immersiveness, 'feel' and visual polish. It kind of seems to me like SSII has a bit more in the rare-item hunting department, but PSO definitely has a better combo system. I had some vague notion of going with a 3/4ths overhead camera to reduce the amount of distant geometry we'd have to draw each frame, but that might not actually be needed - someone (me) should hack up a quick demo and investigate just how much stuff can be drawn whilst holding steady at 30 frames a second.

Content creation programs can be whatever the content submitter likes to work in; for simplicity's sake, I had envisioned models being in .MD2 format (widely known, already have working code for this, supported in many free and paid tools), the landscape being a heightfield or something even more simple than that (PSO doesn't seem to allow for bridges or overhangs, and for this style of game, that's not really needed) textures in PCX and/or TGA when an alpha channel is needed (Allegro supports these), sounds in .WAV and music in .S3M, .XM or .IT (DUMB takes care of this, and the playback quality is usually pretty accurate).

The level format will have to be custom-written, but I kind of imagine storing the world in mostly squarish chunks, so it wouldn't really be that far removed from a generic tilemap/quadmap format (with extra layers for placing light sources, chests, monster spawns, triggers, looping ambient noises, etc). I sort of have a vague idea of how to do this from previous games.

@dreamer - I remember hearing rumblings about it, but it seems like it never got out of the cocktail-napkin-sketch phase.

@all - Before everyone gets super-excited, I'd like to point out that we're probably looking at a _minimum_ of six months of combined serious effort before we have anything that looks remotely like a game, and another twelve months before we have something the community can truly be proud of. (I hope this doesn't scare potential contributors off - it's just that it takes paid devs working 40-60 hour weeks about eighteen to twenty-four months to make something like this, and most of us really only have nights and weekends.)

I am not afraid of the amount of work or time frame myself, although, as I say, it would be great if there were some kind of project lead/line producer type at the reins who a) knows how to keep people motivated, b ) understands scheduling and c) knows how not to get distracted by shiny things every four meters (I fail miserably on all three counts).

Anyway, I am hoping to set up a public SVN repo and get started; I'll post again when I have done this.

[edgex004]

I've always wanted to see something like this developed out of the Arena minigame in PandoraPanic! Was it Dragons_Slayer who produced that one? Maybe DS would be able to give you some pointers/direction.

[broken_Link]

Publicly visible repo opened at https://www.assembla...ion/nodes/trunk .

[DarkCheetah]

I played the shining soul games on the GBA they were great. In fact I've been trying to get through SSII on my Pandora for awhile but it gets hard in the later stages by yourself.

[broken_Link]

Hi all, just to let you know I didn't die or give up on this, I'm pleased to report trunk builds now. (Sure, it does bugger-all but draw the sky and some text, but at least it's a real project now.) I'm currently working away on the beginnings of a map editor, there may be more stuff to report later tonight or tomorrow.

Anyone who has ideas, even if you think they're too farfetched or too difficult to implement, is cordially invited to comment in this thread and start brainstorming and/or check out trunk, laugh at my horrible code, and help make this project succeed...

[Blue Protoman]

Perhaps down the line I could do some writing for this? Also, all cutscenes should be not only skippable (though not by accident), but rewatchable. There should also be an option to start the game without any sort of long-ass intro or tutorial. I could probably write some dialogue/narration in such a way as to make it not as awkward as it could be.

Oh, and why not make this feature the Pandora community? We could even use everyone's likenesses as the basis for their representations in-game.

[broken_Link]

Perhaps down the line I could do some writing for this?

Sure.

Also, all cutscenes should be not only skippable (though not by accident), but rewatchable. There should also be an option to start the game without any sort of long-ass intro or tutorial. I could probably write some dialogue/narration in such a way as to make it not as awkward as it could be.

Very yes. General Gobovich's speech near the end of the first part of SSII is a good example of why the user should be allowed to skip things if they desire.

Oh, and why not make this feature the Pandora community? We could even use everyone's likenesses as the basis for their representations in-game.

If people will give permission, I think that's an awesome idea.

As writer, your first task is figuring out how this would work.

[Blue Protoman]

I could whip something up. Most likely, it'll just be represented as a small town or something. And, where possible, people's usernames would sound like real names. So "edgex004" would just be "Edgex", or "Jourdy288" would just be "Jourdy". Though honestly for such a thing I'd prefer real names be used. I'd definitely write my own in. Tell me what you need, and how you need it, and I'll see if I can squeeze it in among my scholarship applications.

[broken_Link]

A small town where the NPCs are all various people from the Pandora community is good; in fact, the more I think about it, the better it sounds.

I had some vague idea of it being something like a spacecraft crash-landed on a planet with seven small continents, each with a unique biome (and monsters to match), and in order to repair the ship and get back to the homeworld, some mcguffins from each of the islands are needed. Presumably, the wreck has been there long enough for something of a small town to grow up around it, created and populated by the survivors. I'm not sure if this makes any sense or not, although one can see how you could wrap a game around this (I am horrible at coming up with stories).

Tell me what you need, and how you need it,

For now, ideas about how the world should look, and ideas about combat (other people are free to brainstorm this too!); these will drive, to some degree, what features I focus on implementing.

and I'll see if I can squeeze it in among my scholarship applications.

I was joking when I said it was your task (unless you want it, in which case you're free to take it on). I don't want to be the boss/lead/whatever of the project, although it looks like this is largely unavoidable at this point, so please don't take anything I say as anything more than a suggestion. Also, as I said above, it may be months before we get a playable build, and until that happens, you don't have to settle on a story or worry about how the dialogue reads, etc. so please don't let this interfere with real-life tasks.

That said, if this ends up not being a train-wreck, an early-but-polished build might make a nice portfolio piece for you to wave in front of admissions officer or scholarship types...

[Blue Protoman]

I doubt we'll get that far that quickly.

What I had in mind last night was maybe two main towns, governed by fictional representations of Craig and ED, respectively; Newfort, ran by Mr. Rothwell, and Ingold, ran by Mr. Mrozek. The inhabitants each feel differently about what I may refer to in-game as the secretive "Pandora Project" (which may or may not mirror what it is in real life), which the two towns are working on together. Newfort is generally pessimistic, whilst Ingold is much more optimistic. Surrounding areas may refer to other open handheld communities, or even mainstream gaming, in some way. I feel that there should be some considerable fleshing-out of the world, if not the main characters. I'm not sure if this should be a modern or fantasy setting (like Earthbound vs. Dragon Quest). I need to weigh the nuances of the two together.

[broken_Link]

As of this morning (GMT-8), trunk now builds a cheesy little model viewer. It won't build out-of-box on the Pandora, due to a (stupid on my part) missing variable. I've got it corrected on the machine; I'll check it in as soon as I get home. I hope to have the first portion of the map editor done sometime in the next 48 hours, too.

[broken_Link]

It always takes longer to do something than I think it does (whoops).

Still no editor, still nothing worth putting into a .pnd yet, but as of right now, this is (some of) what I hope to achieve.

(not in trunk yet)

Attached Files

•  progress.jpg   72.62K   56 downloads

[bosbeetle]

If there would be a community RPG please make it a 'spagetthi western', that could be so cool.

[milkshake]

It always takes longer to do something than I think it does (whoops).

Still no editor, still nothing worth putting into a .pnd yet, but as of right now, this is (some of) what I hope to achieve.

(not in trunk yet)

looks good so far

[broken_Link]

Hi all,

I haven't yet been seized by project ADD and given up yet. Here's what trunk's got at the moment:


Note that this screenshot is from my desktop - on-device framerates are averaging about 39/sec, which has me a little worried. If anyone could have a look at what I'm doing and suggest some ways to increase performance...?

Also, I really hate the way the distance fog looks (plus fog + alphatest + SGX = ). What is a more professional-looking way of hiding the pop-in point, any ideas?

Attached Files

•  progress2.jpg   59.74K   55 downloads

[sebt3]

GL_LIGHTING, GL_ALPHA_TEST, GL_BLEND, GL_FOG ... have to be enabled only the the quad _requiering_ them.

Just using GL_ALPHA_TEST only on the right objects nearly doubled the fps in AAAA.
Also make sure to not glEnable something already enabled

You use VBO, yet I dont see textures in VBO. That's probably what will benefit the most from vbo.
Also using higher than 16bits texture format will work but is not optimal as the display is 16bits anyway. You probably should have a look at RGBA4444/RGB565 texture format (well compressed format would be even better ;P)

Your code dont seems to be a CPU hog, but just make sure that the SGX is indeed the bottleneck (if your game use less than 50% CPU, it is indeed waiting after the rendering, or just bench the rendering/blit time.


PS : I just had quick look at your code, so I might have missed many things