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*Forgets to check if hot/cold can affect aging... I know the sun can make you look older, though. (Like when people get age spots, for example) But at the same time, the sun provides Vitamin D. ;  And we usually stick stuff in the refrigerator so that they last longer... so that must mean cold slows down aging? :P Actually, I'd be dumb to assume that without more evidence.

Cold slows down the growth of bacteria that decomposes food, it has nothing to do with aging.



I've been taking cold baths for three days now.  It reminds me of Alaska, and trying to sleep at -30 °F in a snow teepee during Arctic survival training.  Lots of fond memories, I think I'll enjoy doing it for the full 30 days.

I think your idea for a game is missing.

Tried entering straight away and not turning up the heat... however, after a few moments I turned purple and started shaking uncontrollably.

Sounds like a great way to get hypothermia.  As much as people say there are health benefits to giving yourself hypothermia for five minutes every day, I'd like to wait until an official scientific study has been done on it.  Also my shower doesn't work right now, so I'd be immersing myself in an icy bath.


EDIT:
*Actually reads the website, and realizes it's about challenging yourself rather than any potential benefits*
Oh, well in that case, it's on.  I don't think the showers at the gym on base are physically capable of anything below boiling magma° half the time so it'll probably just be at home.

It's been a few years, and I can't seem to find my notes on it right now.  Most of that sounds familiar, but I think there might be something off with that explanation, maybe I'm remembering wrong or misunderstanding you, but I think there was more than the number of ones to the offset of the returned character...

Anyway, I know basing the compression of one character based on the previous one is fairly common in text compression, but the whole recursive tree thing had me stumped too when I was working on it.

It doesn't seem like there's really any class specific gear besides the newbie stuff.

For hunter you also have two attack buttons, normal and strong attack with two levels of charge each.  The standard charged attack can be set to one of four types of arrows: Normal, Stun, Sleep and Poison.  I haven't experimented a whole lot, but some enemies seem immune to stun, and poison is kinda weak too.  The strong charged attack is a spray of arrows that basically functions as a cone AoE in front of you.  There's also a special attack that charges up as you hit enemies where you shoot arrows into the air, and everything around you gets hit. I end up mostly sticking with normal attacks which have up to a 5-strike combo if you time the last two button presses right.  The 5th strike being a spray of arrows thats more focused than the charged strong attack.

So far I'm level 14.

Hunter:      Adept
Miner:      Apprentice
Woodcutter:   Apprentice
Angler:      Apprentice
Tailor:      Apprentice
Alchemist:      Fledgling

I'm still working on getting all of the gathering/crafting classes just to learn the skills, I like to play through the job tutorials since they have a nice story and you get to know some of the characters.

Honestly, it seems really pointless to have the jobs separated the way they are.  All of the skills transfer over, and once you've learned them you can use the associated weapon/tool in any other job (aside from a few rare exceptions).  After finishing the tutorial quest for a job the only time I feel like I have to return to it is to rank it up, other than that I can just use any of the skills while in my main combat job (Hunter right now, might try the others later)


It was kind of annoying when I had to do butterfly's requests to activate the next part of the main story, and they were all just touring the town to show me stuff I'd already figured out on my own.  Ignoring what it takes to activate them, the main story quests themselves have been enjoyable so far though.

Well, the New 3DS is scheduled for 2015.


I'm enjoying Fantasy Life so far, it's different.  If you go into it expecting something similar to a traditional RPG game you'll probably be disappointed.  So far it kinda feels like they made a game just out of side quests, gathering, and crafting.  There does seem to be a main story here, but the emphasis is more on living your life in a fantasy game.

What?  I thought it didn't come out until next week for some reason, time to go check the eShop I guess.

[is not]

I'm not sure what you're thinking with the "5 point arc deflector"
It's all part of collision detection, it's just that there are only 5 points on the edge of the circle that are tested against the height map, while the entire circle is used for NPC collisions.


Looking at this diagram again, the player was trying to move up/right to position 1.  The red points on the arc are where the height map will be tested for collision, and if you draw the full circle that the arc is part of you get the collision radius for NPCs.  If a collision occurs between the environment or NPCs at position 1, the game tries again position 2.  If a collision occurs at position 2, position 3 is tested and so on.


Now for your questions:

Is the height map used for determining whether a given position a map is valid? I.e. if you run straight into a cliff is it the fact that the height map can't deflect you that causes you to not be able to move into the cliff? Or does a separate layer determine this?

Yes, the height map is what is used to detect collisions against the map.  If the difference in height in the direction the player wants to move is too great then deflection will occur, if deflection is not possible the player is unable to move.

Is every height map tile an 8x8 tile with a given value? You said greater than 8 less than 12 results in a collision, does that mean for every relevant height map tile the following is true: "It is an 8x8 tile with a value of either 9 or -13?"

Height map tiles are 16x16.  The values of these tiles have a range of -1024 to 1016 (-128 to 127 multiplied by 8, they can only be a multiple of 8).  Golden Sun's engine calculates movement in 3 dimensions, you can literally think that the ground has differing height to it instead of just being a 2D collision map.  That is what the height map is.


Here's where things get fun.  For tiles above 0 the black tiles show how the height map data is actually stored, while the pink tiles show how it appears in game.  Now, if this were any normal RPG you could imagine left/right as the x-axis, and up/down as the y-axis.  As the player walked up the stairs their Y position would increase since they're moving up on the screen as well.  That is not how Golden Sun works, in Golden Sun as you walk up those stairs your position on the y-axis remains the same.  According to your X, and Y coordinates you're now standing on the black tiles.  This is where the z-axis, and the height map come in.  Visually the Z-axis overlaps the Y-axis, but it exists as it's own dimension in the game's code.  When I say that a collision occurs at 8 pixels higher, or 12 pixels lower these pixels are visually represented on the y-axis in-game, but by z-axis in code.

Can you go into more detail on the shapes you mentioned for each tile? And how they relate to the different height values? I'm think these shapes are right-angle triangles?

Looking at the above picture, the stairs are a great example.  They have a sloped shape to them, so they transition from one height value on one side to a different height value on the other side.  If you look at the diagonal edge of the cliff it also has a special shape, the 16x16 tile is split into two triangles at different heights.

I can't find my notes on the different shapes right now, but as I recall they varied quite a bit.  They say how the 16x16 tiles are split, or sloped.  Some are split into triangles, some into rectangles, e.t.c.  A single height map tile can have up to three different height values depending on the shape. 

[greater than]

I know pretty much exactly how it works.

The collision data for maps is a height map, the game calculates coordinates in 3 dimensions.  Each value is a word (4 bytes) in size and contains a shape value, and 1 to 3 height values depending on shape.  There are separate values for special/event tiles.

As the player moves there are 5 points on an arc in the directions he's moving that are checked against the environment's height map.  These points are at a distance depending on the player's sprite's collision diameter (normally 16px, so the arc has an 8px radius from the player's actual X, Y coordinates) at the angles 0°, 22.5°, -22.5°, 45°, and -45° relative to the direction the player wants to move.  If the height of any of the 5 locations on this arc checked is greater than 8px higher, or greater than 12px lower a collision occurs.  After the environment is checked the game checks for collisions with NPCs, this collision check is a simple distance check using the collision radius of the player and NPC's sprites.  If the distance between the player and an NPC is less than the sum of their sprite's collision radius's a collision occurs.  If a collision occurs with the environment or an NPC the game will attempt to move the player +22.5°, -22.5°, +45°, and -45° degrees, in that order, relative to the direction the player originally wanted to move until a direction is found where no collision occurs.  If a collision with an NPC occurs at directions +22.5°, or -22.5° relative to where the player wanted to move the checks at +45° and -45° are skipped to prevent the player from sliding around NPCs they might want to interact with.  If a collision occurs in every direction checked the player cannot move.


So when checking for collisions agains the environment imagine an arc with 5 points in front of the player.  Position the player where they should move to and these 5 points are (by default) 8 pixels from their center at 0°, -22.5°, +22.5°, -45°, and +45° relative to the direction they moved.  If no collision with the environment is detected, the game then checks for collisions with NPCs from this location.


If a collision occurs where the player was supposed to move, the process is repeated at locations 2 through 5 in order (angles -22.5°, +22.5°, -45° then +45° relative to the player's desired direction) until a collision-free location is found.



Like I said collisions with NPCs are based on distance from the NPC.  The sprite data in the Golden Sun includes a value for collision diameter, most character sprites have a collision diameter of 16 pixels (including the player).  You have to add their collision radii (Radiuses?) together to get the distance between them that a collision will occur at, so for most characters this will be a distance of 16 pixels (16/2 + 16/2 = 8 + 8 = 16).  If the player encountered a larger character with a collision diameter of 32 pixels the distance a collision would occur at changes to 24 pixels (16/2 + 32/2 = 8 + 16 = 24)  Collisions with NPCs are checked from the same locations as arcs for environments checks are immediately after an environment collision check, and again if an NPC collision occurs at position 2 or 3 then positions 4 and 5 will be skipped.  Rephrased, the player will not be slid into positions 4 or 5 around an NPC they might want to interact with.



It's kind of confusing, I know, and I've been deprived of sleep for over 20 hours now so I probably didn't word it as well as I could have.  Let me know if you have any questions.


EDIT:

I made a mistake in the above explanation, the game also attempts deflection at +67.5 and -67.5 degrees as well.

Hmm... I've found three places so far where they're filling up areas in memory.  They aren't overflowing any of it, once the game reaches capacity it just stops trying to add new ones.

020322EC - 020342EC =  Player, and NPC data area
03001300 - 03002100 = Data for how sprites are displayed
03002100 - 03002700 = Data for how sprites are loaded


Since they're in the NPC memory area, each new one that's created has code associated with it that gets run.  This is probably where the slow-down is really coming from since the game engine doesn't try to draw sprites that are outside of the view (Some towns have too many NPCs to fit all of them in video memory at one time as it is).  True some memory is still allocated for each NPC's sprites so it can keep track of stuff like animations, and scaling.  I wouldn't expect the processing for their sprites while offscreen to be as heavy as handling collision detection, and whatever other code the tornadoes have associated with them though.

As for the graphical glitches in the menu, they're a bit of a mystery to me at the moment.  It would be easy enough to say that it's because the game engine's location for handling how sprites are displayed is already too full, and certainly enough that IS why Jenna is the only character that appears on your screenshot.  However, the face portrait is a different type of graphic, it isn't handled in the same location as other sprites.  I'm not even sure where it is handled, so it's possible that location is being filled to capacity as well, but again it's a different type of graphic so it's curious that it would be.  The fact that face portraits are displayed on the status screen, where no item/psynergy icons (Which are a similar graphic type to the portraits) are displayed seems to support the idea that this glitch fills their area in memory as well though...

I'll still be around, I don't intend to leave entirely.  I'm just giving up my position to someone more able to do the job.

@Priorities have shifted: Do you still plan to have another website for the Forgotten Dreams project? (Or has that priority shifted as well?)

I'm honestly not sure how far I'll be able to go with that.  As always game creation is my dream job in life, but it seems the road I've actually taken has sapped away my time for doing it.  I've barely made any progress at all on Forgotten Dreams because I've had more important things going on for quite a while (Amazing how being in the military does that to you).  But where there's a will there's a way, don't think I'll give up my dream so easily.

Hello everyone still here at Golden Sun Hacking Community.

I'm amazed that there are still so many active members here, I'm glad to see the small community I founded almost six years ago is still going strong despite all of the hardships it has faced.  I have a ton of very fond memories of working with the members here at unlocking the secrets of the Golden Sun games, and making an editor so we could hack them together.  Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, I haven't been nearly as active here as I once was.  Over the years since I founded this community I've had many changes in my life, and my priorities have shifted.  Now that this moment has come I realize that I still love this community as much as I did the day I created it, but it's time I let it go.  I don't have the time I used to have to dedicate to administrating these forums any more, and it's in the best interest of the community.  I officially announce that I am stepping down as the Administrator of Golden Sun Hacking Community.

Overlord Kain is being promoted to the main admin of GSHC.  I didn't choose him just because he's been serving the community as our Global Moderator for the past two and a half years.  I honestly believe he is the best person for the job, and have faith that the community will continue to flourish with him taking care of it.

Kinda behind on this, sorry for being absent.

Luna_blade is now a member of the Luna clan.
Majora is now a member of Venus.

Ah, welcome.  It has been a while since I've updated the affiliates, I'll take care of it.

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I have the video of the Kraden battle, but the website where I found the sprites doesn't exist any more.

The drawbridge in the original Golden Sun was Kolima Bridge.  You couldn't pass it until after you beat Tret since the man operating it had turned into a tree.  Speaking of people turning into trees, there was this part in ALTTP.

It's Flint, the first Venus Djinni you meet in Golden Sun.  He says that if you keep saying "no" when he asks you to let him come with you.

I don't know, they're often referred to as "file shredders" though.  I would expect a good one to require root access so it can actually work with the storage space on the lowest level without being filtered through the operating system.

Essentially, yes.  The entry in the file list for the file is erased, but the data is still there.  Even if you overwrite it, the physical medium still has some risidual charge left over that can be pieced back together with the right equipment.  It takes several rewrites of that sector before the risidual charge becomes useless for advanced data recovery techniques.