Messages

[two options]

We can continue on our own but that requires us to probably basically recreate what Joao has already done.

In practice, you have two options.

1. Identify what J hasn't done but needs to do, and then work on that.
2. Do whatever you want to do in order to make a GS game in RPG Maker.

The first is a perfectly good option.  
If you do the second (with no mind to the first), then there are two possible outcomes for option 2.

1. You'll end up working on something J hasn't worked on yet, but would have needed to do eventually.
2. You'll work on the same thing J's working on, and be able to geek out with him about how he's done stuff, and help him do it.

Those outcomes are just as good as the outcomes of the first option, with the added advantage that you'll also pursue the task with greater agency and gusto, since whatever you're working on, it'd be your first choice, rather than some compromise.

I should also point out that J's path is a lonely one -- Otherwise more people would have actually done what he did, rather than just talk about it.  If people specifically choose something to do that's not what J's doing, then we actively reduce the chance of more people like J coming about. And that makes J's path even lonelier.  This is another reason why I support option 2 rather than option 1.

Anyway, the next the step is implement the element engine and the damage calculation.

Why isn't Rolina doing this?

I think 'current' events includes a lot of those tech topics.

"technological resources' covers all the tools and software.

"miscellaneous" for whatever else.

Unless you want something separate for entertainment stuff.  "Are you not entertained?"

I guess the basic question is how you envision the map to look when there's no rotation applied to it at all.  Is it a top down view, or a view from the side, with the z axis coming straight out at the viewer?

I'm not  familiar with these concerns, but I understand how they can be an issue.

If you don't want to post these rips to a sprite database of some kind, then posting them in a thread with a more precise name may help people find them via online search engines.

http://www.spriters-resource.com/

Often sheets say "ripped by..."

I think that'll work, and is what most GMs advise.

Most GMs I've played with have gotten a few games in, and then express the desire to have done things differently.  So I still advise starting with relatively short modules.  It'll let you build your world slowly and organically.

So what do I mean by together?  I mean that we lend our support to his efforts.  I say our full support because ...

Yes, but what is "support?"  To me, it seems like in order to help him, you're going to be able to do what he's already done.  And so far he's done it alone.

I take a strong issue with the poll question, of whether "should we help Joao or continue on our own?"  If we cannot continue on your own, then we won't be able to help joao. To me it's really that simple.

[Don't do it.]

I have experience playing in a game where the GM made custom mechanics -- Don't do it.  From the player's perspective, it's like playing a game where the rules aren't certain anymore, and all the stuff you thought you could do, you can't.  That makes it horrible to play, and very hard for the GM who then finds herself needing to change the rules and rebalance on a weekly basis.

If you're a first time GM, please, please, please just use a module.  Most won't last more than 2-3 sessions, so it's a pretty short commitment, and you can get your feet wet.  *Then* start experimenting a little.

The benefit of using a pre-existing system like DnD or PathFinder is that they've done most of the work for you.  As a GM, you're then in a position of "modding" the game.  Modding the story is easy and inconsequential.  Modding the mechanics is a horrible, horrible idea for most people.

The alternative is to work with your players and get on the same page that y'all are play testing.  In which case what you want to do isn't a long term game, but one-off skirmishes, where you test play aspects of the game.  I think that could be fun for everyone, because not everyone knows what they want to play, or what the style of the table is going to be like, and this gives everyone a chance to try things out.

Then again, DnD v4?  I hear that's a bit simpler and easier to change around, and balancing isn't so much of an issue.  Still, you don't want the GM and players to have different expectations on what's possible, or you're constantly going to be cramping each others' styles.  This is why I'd advise against making changes to the core stuff the games provide you.

Sorry for being a downer.  Also, it's a fantasy that "you can be prepared for everything."  The reason why you want to stick with the core stuff provided by the games is because they explicitly make it easy to make up stuff that makes sense, because the rules are consistent between what the players expect, and what the GM expects.  The more stuff you change or mod, the less easy it'll be to come up with anything.

[together]

I say we tackle this together
...
I say we give him our full support.

Can we clarify what the terms in bolded mean, in this context?  What are the actual actions that people are proposing?

Me?  I likely won't be involve in any way, shape, or form -- I'm working on different stuff.

The only reason I'm speaking up here is because I have concerns on a sociological level, and based off of previous experience.

Is this going to be a repeat of the Atrius Editor, where you all want to use it, but none of you want to work on it?

ninja'd.  Yeah, see previous edit.

But on the subject, I'm not really inspired to suggest poses.  And in fact, what I'd do is print out an entire sprite sheet, and use a different sprite for each instance of the monster, rather than having each monster have the same exact appearance.

Combine a monochrome printing with the colored-film technique, and I think you'll have all the variety you'd need or want, without doing too much printing.

Are you looking for sprites for

> a virtual table top?
> Printed out 2D tokens for a live table top?
> something else?

I'm gonna be making quite a bit of these - you know those flat plastic disc-like tubes that you can find stuff like makeup in?  The idea is to buy a bunch of empty ones of those and have the top side be the standard pose for this guy, and to flip it over to show the "knocked prone" pic any time it's prone.

nevermind, got it.  Can't picture it, but...

If they're plastic disks, then why not use colored film to add the colors?  I'm not sure how much cheaper it'll be, or if it'll *actually* be more versatile, but if you like the hand-craft aspect of making these, then that'd be something cool to try out.

How often are characters knocked prone in your games?  I haven't seen it happen to monsters very often.

As an aside, my group accidentally found out that beer bottle caps work *excellently* for representing enemies, and even distinguishing player characters from the bad guys (since miniatures all tend to look the same, and you can't always tell good guy from bad guy).  Combine bottle caps with twisted paper clips and flat print outs of monster sprites, and I think you'll have fairly cheap, versatile, and effective tokens.

Sweet.

Where do you think's ultimately a good home for them?  I imagine you want to share them with the world, and perhaps get credited when people use your stuff.

[Golden Sun engine]

Hello,
I had some ideas for the history, but nothing concrete.
For a while I'm just trying to approximate the engine, this I want to keep as close as possible.
As you saw, a lot of things need to be improved, polished.
All the help is welcomed. Here is my skype: jjppof

That's great!  While I know all of you probably want to tell different stories, you all want to approximate the Golden Sun engine.  Accomplishing that will be a great help to the community.

Do you have ideas on how you can share snippets of code?  Drop Box and Git Hub might be too complicated, but the great thing about these forums are that you can upload small files as part of posts.

So I guess it's joao's decision.  Does he want help?  Is he willing to share his work, and to teach it?

I'm not sure I see the point of the poll.

I think you guys are doing the same things...

It's like playing a video game, and sharing information. The more your friends make progress, they more they can help you out, but they can't play the game on your behalf.  And in the end I know each of you are going to want to do their own things, even if you share code and resources.

Well, considering we use the Golden Sun Editor, wouldn't the Golden Sun Editing Community give off the same general impression?

How many of us actually use the editor?

[Describing 3D space]

I'm redoing some code that I use to do pseudo3D graphics, and I could really use some help defining the conventions.  There are different ways of doing it, but I'm trying to decide what's the best way for a Dark Dawn or Disgaea style world.

Describing 3D space

I'm using the basic x,y,z dimensions, but which is which?  Talking to mechanical engineering types, I know for them 'z' is up, but in early math classes, typically 'y' is up, and 'z' is 'depth.'  And of course if you're doing a 2d game, then there's just x and y.

Here's the default thing I'm going with for now.  Notice that now positive y is up, and negative y is down.  This is different than what I was doing before, where I was using the coordinate system that was inherent to love2d, where position 0,0 was in the upper left corner of the window.  It occurred to me that while I, as the programmer, might trying to be consistent with the love2d coordinate system, a user working on just maps or whatever might find that counter intuitive.  And so was I, once I was getting into coding 3D collision detection.

         +y  
           | -z
           |/  
   -x- - o - - +x
         / |
       +z |
          -y
(my current set up)

And it's not like no one else has taken this specific approach before
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/wdm/3D+Coordinate+System
http://resumbrae.com/ub/dms424_s03/03/p01.html
http://what-when-how.com/xna-game-studio-4-0-programmingdeveloping-for-windows-phone-7-and-xbox-360/3d-math-basics-xna-game-studio-4-0-programming-part-1/

Hey, do any of you remember the 'right hand rule' from math class?

(image from the XNA Game Studio link)

Rotation

I only need to include rotation about the y axis, and about the x axis.  And I've decided to have the units be pi-radians, since a rotation of 2pi radians is easier to consider than 360 degrees.  Though this did take some getting used to for me.

But I'm having a hard time considering which direction of rotation should be positive, and which should be negative.

1)  How do you envision the axis looking when rx = 0 and ry = 0?
2)  How do you envision the axis looking when rx = 0.5 pi, and ry = 0 pi?
3) How do you envision the axis looking when rx = 0, and ry = 0.5 pi?

What do you guys think about this version?


zoom
zoom = 0.5 means that the axis will appear half as big.
zoom = 1 means the axis will appear at it's standard size.

camera
The camera coordinates essentially change the point on the axis where it is drawn on screen, and about which it rotates.
By default this is set to x,y,z = 0,0,0.

We know that the golden sun event can hyper-evolve life.  Maybe once upon a time everyone was a light-adept, and many generations their connection to 'the force' diminished.

Then again, it seems that the energies were conscientiously split up.  So maybe adepts are descendants of ancients who stayed behind specifically to guard the light houses?  And when they did that, they split their power up on purpose?

Then again, we only have elemental djin, so does that suggest that the energies don't naturally want to be unified?

Then again, is Mud water, or is it earth?  Is Steam fire, water, or air?  Maybe the djinn themselves aren't actually mono-elemental at all.

Working on lore is tough, but I know we recently go people who are interested in this stuff, so...

It sounds like an operating system.  "Golden Sun: Open Sky" sounds like a future.

Well if you're not *already* using Game Maker, then I think RPG Maker is the way to go.  Using RPG Maker is pretty easy and fun, and it's what we need in the short term anyway.

Then again, if you haven't bought RPG Maker yet, you can use Game Maker for free... Dude, I really have no idea for which is the better choice.  I say just do whatever you want, so you can at least give advise to people who come after you.