As above, I need something to do, Verge related. I was programming for a guy I dissapeared, or something, and I'm getting really bored. I can do most things; just not chars, I loath doing them.
So whatever, just ask!

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TheGerf, not just any gerf.

Sounds good. A couple questions though, what kind of maps do you need? Like, what settings, sizes, resolution, etc.

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TheGerf, not just any gerf.

This post has nothing to do with anything.

Sorry about that.

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'Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.' -F. Scott Fitzgerald

first off, Welcome to Verge!

I sympathize with everything youre saying. I'm an artist, can't program worth a lick. when I first showed up ( a couple years ago, and a couple handles ago ) I was having the same problems. Whille everyone here is more than willing to help you along; if you don't have some sort of programming background, you might be toast :0( at least thats how it was in my case.

there is good news though, many of these
uber-programers need some serious help in the art department. you can allways hire yourself out and put your project on the back burner.

Speaking of people that are looking to hire, Invicticide, and I would KILL for an original soundtrack, not to mention the fact that Invicticide may finish programing the games basics and run out of things to do other than scripting by the end of next month. In that case, there will allways be more art to do, you could help with that, seing as how you claim photoshop ( the program we use ) ... or Invicticide could show you the ropes once he's not so busy.

In any event, if you're interested, We'd like to see what your cappable of.

keep in touch.

-Auroraborealisis

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Behind an apparent aesthetic repugnance for politics sometimes lurks a vulgar conservative sensibility. ...The intellectual, just like any fool, is subject to the influence of his environment, his education and his interests. His inteligence does not op

Im interested to see what this game is. Id love to help out in any way I can, though I will be spending most of my free time trying to develop my lil diddy. ^_- What am I capable of? Hrmmm.. http://www.geocities.com/sheolwulf
there are some char sketches and a screenshot...maybe some other stuff floating around who knows. I was gonna wait a month or two before uploading the page but what the hey Ill just open it up now. the drawings are rather simplistic, its the first time Ive ever tried to draw in an animeish style. Im hoping to use the faces as mug shots to the text boxes in my game. the screenshot is of my adventures in MapEd. hehe.

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(this entire message body is a joke, the title was not)

THESE ARE THE RULES

1) I AM ME. I AM IN CHARGE. KNEEL WHEN I AM PRESENT

2) NEVER EVER FORGET RULE #1

3) RULE #2 IS VERY IMPORTANT

4) GIVE ME ALL YOUR LUNCH MONEY!!

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'Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.' -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hehe... I used all caps in the title to catch your attention. It worked, didn't it :)

This is invicticide; auroraborealisis was talking about me in his post. I took a look-see at your page, and I have a few comments.

That little MapEd screenshot... what the HELL are you complaining about!? "The tiles look poopy..." For the love of all that's good and righteous, if I could draw that well in MapEd's POS tile editor, I'd be working for Square! Quite nice.

I'm quite impressed with your artistic abilities, needless to say.

Also, I like what little of your story I am able to infer from the stuff on your page. It's not cliche. I hate cliche. Therefore, I like your game.

In short, I'm eager to see Sheolwulf (game _and_ character!) in their full glory ASAP.

(Yes, my posts tend to be a little long-winded. I _am_ getting to the point...)

And now, for my PROPOSITION:

(see?)

You mention that, as far as scripting goes, you'd like semi-transparent (i.e. translucent) text boxes complete with mug shot (i.e. speech portrait). I have already coded such a window in our game. Speech portrait is 120x120 (can be resized quite easily), box is translucent in any color you damn well choose (that's in hicolor, BTW) with a beautiful shaded border (also of any color you damn well choose.) It has an opening/closing animation, automatic text wrapping (so you can pass your "speech" as one long string rather than trying to break it up to fit line by line) and you can resize, reposition, and re-layout the darn thing by changing a few #defines in the VC code! Very versatile.

As part of this "text box extravaganza" (damn, I sound like I'm bragging... I'm _not_... honestly!) is what I call my "box system" which contains all the base functions for creating such boxes. You can make windows of any size, at any position, in any color, translucent or not, containing text (auto-wrapped or standard, left aligned, centered, or right-aligned, with uniform spacing) and images (translucent or not, masked or not, clipped to the box size or not) with or without opening/closing animations, and they can even slide around the screen for nifty animated menu effects!

(Whew, that was _really_ long winded... sorry :)

I'm willing to package all this up, write a little readme explaining how it works and what does what, and hand you over a copy for Sheolwulf in return for something for our game.

Here's what I'm thinking:

That original score thing is, of course, at the top of our list. It's kind of a big commitment, of course.

Maps? Or tiles, for that matter? Our plan was to build our maps (640x480xhicolor) as a bunch of "objects" in Photoshop (like pillars, tables, etc.) and import each object into the VSP, so it's all pretty. Maybe you'd be interested in building some nice objects, or even whole maps?

We also need battle effects. I'm talking spells mostly, but also the little shimmers when you use items on people, and stuff like that.

It's up to you if you want to do anything like that.

Speaking of battle systems, our game also has a very complex battle system which is almost the exact opposite of your intended style, so short of a few windows (or maybe a custom animation script thingy) I probably won't have much time to help you in that department. Sorry :(

(Whew, that was a _really_ long post!)

Get back to me and let me know what you think!

That is all.

--Invicticide

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The Poopy Mod shows promise for a first mod. I can't figure out how tracking programs work. Confusing, ad infinitum. While it's not quite up to game standards yet, I think that practice you mentioned would definitely do a lot. Whether you want to do music is, of course, still entirely up to you.

Now about that hicolor stuff... no doubt every Verger reading this message will rip off this little trick, but I guess I don't care since it's a free community.

You start with Verge v2.6. Make sure USER.CFG contains the line "hicolor" and does NOT contain the line "window." (Windowed Verge games bug the hell out of me.) Really, all this does is allow you to blit hicolor images through VC code on top of all your map layers, and to use the VC drawing functions (rectangles and lines and such) in hicolor mode. CHRs and VSPs are still in the Verge palette.

Here's where the trick comes in: for starters, d/l tsb's v2+i from http://www.verge-rpg.com/~tsb (or look for the link in his post a little further down the list... he just told me about all this.)

You'll need the program chrmak16.exe to make hicolor CHRs. Make sure you check the included bob.mak since it shows how the hicolor CHR makefiles are a little different from standard Verge ones.

Once you've constructed your hicolor CHR's makefile appropriately, run chrmak16 on it in the normal fashion and SHAZAM! You have a hicolor CHR. (Of course, no CHR editor I've ever seen handles hicolor, so you have to draw and animate in Photoshop or some such thing. Ask auroraborealisis for some PS animating tips :)

Hicolor VSPs are a touch more complicated. Since MapEd for v2.6 will only accept Verge-palette VSPs, you actually need two versions of each tileset: a MapEd version in 256 colors and a game version in hicolor. This is accomplished by the following:

Draw your tileset in an external paint program like PS. (Personally, I'd draw individual map objects as seperate images, apply filters and yadda yadda to make 'em pretty, then copy/paste everything into one giant tileset.) When your tileset image is done, make sure it's hicolor, then run v2+i's bmp2vsp.exe on that image. You'll get a file like tileset.v16 indicating a 16-bit (hicolor) VSP.

Then, take a COPY of your image (so you don't erase your old color data) and apply the Verge palette. Don't care if it looks like shit, the tile indexes are all that matters :) Import the new, Verge-paletted image through MapEd and build away. (I think you have to specify the .v16 file in the map properties' VSP line, tho. Haven't tried this yet :)

Theoretically, your map will access the .v16 through the engine and the .vsp through MapEd. Slick, eh? Thanks to tsb for all this! (Everyone put 'em up for tsb, he does more work than the rest of us combined :)

Now, as far as menus and crap go, I am well into the scripting of a menu system for our game. It's kinda unique, therefore if you ripped it your game would look a _lot_ like ours. But, like my text box, it's easy to modify. You can move stuff around, resize, reposition, etc. by changing a few #defines. Plus, all the update functions are _really_ simple, so you can even rescript some stuff without too much trouble. I plan on releasing a beta tech demo (yeah, that means, like, 6 versions _before_ any game should properly be released :) when the menu and battle systems are done, but I could send you a pre-beta with only the menu system if you want to see it sooner. Hope to have that much done in another week or two.

And most of that other scripting stuff you mentioned is integral to our menu system, so it comes with the territory :)

Now, about _our_ game (since you wanted to know). I don't want to spill a lot because we're hoping to impress a few people around here, and it just wouldn't do to ruin the surprise. Of course, if you become a major part of our team, all life's little secrets will be revealed to you...

The basic premise is this: an ancient society discovered a way to link this world to the cosmos, and unlocked the secrets of the universe. With their power, they instituted a "pax romana" of sorts (if you don't know what that is, ask your history teacher :) During their explorations of the cosmos they discovered six "planes" linked to this world which provided its lifeblood. For some reason these planes were hidden from their cosmological scrying abilities. They organized expeditions to explore the planes, and all hell broke loose... (I skipped a lot right there. There's some good surprises in those three little dots :) Needless to say, this ancient society vanished overnight, leaving behind the ruined skeletons of their once-magnificent cities.

Nearly 5000 years later, a world war awakens the hidden powers of the ancient society and opens a rift in space/time through which the full awareness of the universe is exposed. The witnesses, petty mortals that they are, are unable to comprehend such vast knowledge, and go insane. One man, for reasons unknown (_we_ know them, of course!) survives this revelation, and is imbued with power unlike any mortal has ever seen. He discovers the impending end of the universe, an apocalypse, is fast approaching... in fact, in just a few short years, everything will cease to exist. This man takes action to stop the apocalypse, but along the way he finds his actions tainted by his power. And there are other side effects to his infinite knowledge...

When two young men, a free-spirited farm boy and a reality-hardened orphan, are run out of their rural hometown by hostile oppression (there's some really good stuff hidden in there :) they seek refuge in the autonomous city-state Maeda, which is the center of international trade and the most prosperous city in the world. The autonomy provides the boys political protection against those that ran them out of their hometown, but there are other problems brewing in Maeda: secret agents infiltrating the most powerful government in the world, moving into position for what may be the largest and most devastating political coup in history.

That's a "quick" overview of the beginnings of our story. We've been developing ideas for the last two years. What do you think?

BTW, I'm thinking that you should post your reply as a new message at the top of this board, since this thread might be lost soon and looking for our correspondence in this mess of posts and replies is kinda annoying. Just title it something like "Invicticide--look here" or something creative.

That is all.

--Invicticide

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