4/30/14 -Wednesday: MORE PROTOTYPES...
|
Man, I've been working like a mad man lately, even more so in the past few days, hence the lack of updates.
I had previously mocked up some promotional material, but was never happy with the background image I was using. In fact, it wasn't an image, it was just some black text written on a white background made in Microsoft paint. Then again, it was a prototype. I was looking to just get something from start to finish working, get the music timing down, etc. And that was working fine. Even still, I knew I would need a background at some point, so I hit up Oli to see if she could help me out, since she already has a lot of material for some other stuff I cannot talk about at the moment. And in typical Oli fashion, she came through. Now, what she sent me was in fact a mockup, but hey, it's miles better than what I had before.
Once I was done with that, I moved on to prototyping the credits movie. Now that was interesting. I've already had the music picked out, literally, the instant I heard it. I've always been a fan of doing things all the way when i make games, so a credits movie was always something I knew I needed to do, even with The Coming:
Yes, I know, it was very basic. But again, it was my first time making one, way back in 2005. For my next game, Cry The Beloved, I got a little better at it:
And now, here we are, 8 years later, and I must improve upon this last one. First thing first though... I had to put together everyone that needs to be mentioned. It's very, very important, because the music needs to sync up perfectly, so I need to know how many people to display per slide, shit like that.
The "Special Thanks" section is also very important. Most people wouldn't know it, but when they simply send an email, telling me how much they loved my games, the music, or whatever, that's the kick in the ass I need to work even harder. I guess I'm one of those guys that need a pat on the back or something? *Shrug*. Anyway, the ones who sent me those emails over the past 8 years are definitely getting in the credits section, because emotional support is just as important as actual physical work done on the game.
So yeah, there's work to be done on that front. Not difficult work, just a lot of small minor things. Something I could do while watching some special on the history channel type of difficulty. The plan is to have the entire thing mocked up by end of day tomorrow.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just my daily reminder that BETA 1.11 is out, and ready for testing. Thank you to Jason Melancon, my partner in crime for the past 9 years for reaching out, as well as the other gentleman who emailed me last night.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This hits from Jia Peng Fang keeping rolling in! Enjoy!
4/27/14 -Sunday: NARRATOR VO INTEGRATION...
|
I started today by taking the narrator VO Alexander had sent me a few days ago, and integrated it into the game. This was a litltle easier than normal, as the scene is already voiced. All I had to do was take his large sound file (he tends to do these all in one take), chop it up, do some post processing, and make sure the file name matched the line id. Because of the number of lines, it still took about 30 minutes or so, but much less than the normal VO integration session.
Once it was in, I played the scene a few times to see how it looked. And of course, I made a video of it, so I could show it to him later, because I think it's good when actors get to see their work earlier, rather than later.
The next thing I started work on was packaging up all the narrator lines in the game, along with videos for each sequence, so he could have everything he needed to knock out these last lines. Though, as I was going through things, I realized that there was still a narrator scene I had yet to write. As it was getting close to Game of Thrones time, I decided to put that on the back burner, leaving it for the train ride into work tomorrow.
So the plan is to finish those narrator lines on the train ride into work, and send him everything he needs when I get into the office. Then, on the train ride home, I'll start mocking up the ending credits movie.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just my daily reminder that BETA 1.11 is out, and ready for testing.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I realized I missed some songs from Jia Peng Fang. Enjoy!
4/26/14 -Saturday: SOUND SET WORK... FINISHED???
|
Going according to the plan I set yesterday (I know, right? Following a plan?! Blasphemy!), I started sifting through John's vast amount of VO he's recorded over the past... damn, like 3 years... Anyway, as expected, I found some one liners I could use for his sound set. It was pretty straightforward from there to implement. The only drawback to this was the fact that I had to duplicate the audio files, since each line in the game has a unique ID, which is what the audio file has to be named to be picked up by the system. Of course, in the same conversation file, you can reference existing lines so you don't have the dupes isseus, but it doesn't work across other conversation files. Oh well...
Next up was the sound set for the PC. If I remember correctly, there were 2 genders, 3 races, and 5 options for each one, so that's 30 options. I quickly found one that I liked, created a custom Character file for the PC, pointed it to the right sound set, and I was done... Until I started to test it. Of course, it worked just fine, except for one little thing... "Darkspawn approach!" "For the Grey Wardens!". Yeah... That doesn't fit with Rose of Eternity. I do everything in my power to detach the world from each other, because well, I need people to feel as if they're playing an entirely new game. So the issue at hand is, how do I handle this. The only things I can think of off the top of my head are:
- Checkout the file, remove the offending lines, then check back into the game. I'm not sure if it would be that simple, nor what would happen to a user's game. I guess as long as they don't have this game enabled, they won't see any issues?
- Create my own custom sound set, track down every freaking piece of core VO (presumably by line ID #), get the new line ID's, convert the audio files to the new id standard, then.... Yeah, screw that, too much! :)
I'm not too worried about it, as I'm sure the proper solution will present itself at some point. Let's see, what else... Oh, right, so I still have some VO from Alexander for the role of the narrator. Interestingly enough, someone else was attempting to do the narrator lines, things didn't work out, and I met Alexander through him. A few years later, everything has come full circle, as he is now giving those lines a go. Anyway, I need to integrate them into the game, and see how they sound. If it works out, then I'll need to package up all the narrator lines and send it to him. It's not a lot of lines, though to be fair, I still have a few I need to write first.
So yeah, that'll be my plan for tomorrow...
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that BETA 1.11 is still available. I haven't had any takers yet, but really hoping I could get 5-6 very soon. Here's another look at the readme for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So, switching gears a little bit, as soon as I discovered Jia Peng Fang, someone else popped up in my discovery section a few days later: Jim Chappell. I haven't gone through his entire catalog of work, but the one song Spotify thought I would like, well, they were right, I love it.
I immediately start to think about town music, or just walking through the countryside. Ah, the ways I could incorporate this into my games...
Anyway, enjoy!
4/25/14 -Friday: SOUND SET WORK...
|
Today was all about sound set integration. Alexander sent a large amount of content to me, all in one big file. So first thing I had to do with cut it up and drop the lines into the right categories, like:
- COMBAT ATTACK
- COMBAT NEAR DEATH
- CANNOT DO
- COMBAT CHEER PARTY
Once the audio was separated, I created the dialogue file (seem above), and associated each file with each line. At this point, it was just standard issue VO integration. Just a LOT of integration.
After the integration, I had to create what is called, a Character file. This just points to a sound set dialog file, determines if it should be called in combat, and some other things. Once that file is done, you can set it on the party member, and voila, you've got all sorts of extra dialog being spoken during combat.
Of course, I went into my sandbox area to test it out, to make sure it sound good (not too loud, not too low, not too corny, etc.). So far, things sounded good. I'll do some more testing, and then be done with it. The true test will come when I do my next playthrough of the game, which I'm hoping will be my last one. Yeah, definitely not looking forward to going through the game again until everything is done. I've done it so many times over the past 4 years that even I need a break.
As I was going through things with this one party member, it dawned on me that for the party member that John Erath voices, I could leverage existing VO from him to fill in the gaps with some other categories. For instance, there's the CANNOT DO category that I honestly didn't think of when initially sending him lines months ago. Once I saw the ones from Alexander, I realized how cool and funny they were, and luckily, John's character already has some funny one liners in the game that could just be re-purposed. So, that's something I'll be working on tomorrow.
Then, just when I thought I was done, I had this thought: "What about the PC?" . Obviously, they're not voiced, but there are a bunch of different, existing sound sets for the PC. Obviously, this would be much less work, as all I have to do is create the character file for the PC and associate it to the existing sound set. So I'll play around with the different ones until I come across one I like.
All of this work is exactly the type of end-development polish that I like. It's easy to integrate into the game, and the chance of introducing new bugs is slim to none.
Speaking of VO...
I heard back from the actor I had reached out to a few days ago. She said she was interested in giving the role a shot, so when she gets back to her studio, she'll send over some lines for me to check out. Very, very interested in that.
Finally...
Now that I'm doing all this work on prototyping videos, it's time to get out of prototype mode and in to, um, finished mode? lol. I've reached out to Oli to discuss some things regarding particular fonts for captions to use, as well as, more importantly, backgrounds to use when displaying said captions. It'll be a back and forth for a while until we lock some things down, but it should make the videos look dramatically better.
Whew, okay, that's it for today. Back to work...
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This piece from Jia Peng Fang is really important. It's the song I discussed weeks ago, where I woke up and it was on, and I immediately knew that I had to use it in this game, and I even knew exactly where. So enjoy this, and expect to hear it again when you play my game!
4/23/14 -Wednesday: BUSY, BUSY DAY...
|
Yep, it's happening again... You can tell that whenever I'm posting like crazy, I'm putting in ovetime for this project. I'm in the zone at the moment, something that comes every few months. Time to capitalize!
I started the day off by sending the VO requirements to the actor I talked about yesterday. Lucky for me, I already had the details written in another email I sent out last year when I was approaching someone else for the role. So I just had to C&P it, then spend my time introducing myself, talking about this project, my goals for the future, all that goos stuff.
Next, I had some smaller emails to Oli and John. Now those are veterans, let me tell you. John's been with this project since late 2011, and Oli, well damn, since 2005! Hell, this very website you read is due to her. It always gives me faith in humanity when I meet people like them :)
After that, I spent the rest of my time in Camtasia Studio prototyping yet another video. This is the longest video I've ever created, and it has elements from all over the place. Again, I've known what I wanted to do for at least year, possibly even longer, once I discovered the music that will play during it. But now was the time to take all the ideas that had been percolating in my head, and just implement the damn thing! I was pretty pleased with the final result, though I'm sure other things will change. But it's huge, because now all the videos I said I wanted to do have been prototyped.
As I was getting ready to sleep, I was going through Alexander's VO folder looking for something, and noticed that some lines I've been asking for from him were in there. I mean, shit, he made them for me a year ago. It's terribly embarassing that I wouldn't remember that, but at least they're there. They're very minor lines, so I haven't harassed him like a mad man, but the fact that they've been sitting in his folder all this time just shows how crazy this project has been.
Tomorrow, I'm going to integrate said lines, then integrate the sound set lines I was supposed to do today, before I got caught up in video prototyping.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jia Peng Fang is gift that just keeps giving! Enjoy!
4/22/14 -Tuesday: MORE TO GAME DEVELOPMENT THAN... GAME DEVELOPMENT...
|
Today was a pretty interesting day. I did a lot of stuff with the game, probably more than I've done in quite a while, and in the end, I never even touched the toolset. Just more proof that there is more to game development than... game development...
I started the day off by going through what seemed to be over 100 demo reels for female actors at the Voice Acting Club. Well, I was doing it in between doing real world work (yep, unfortunately, I have real world bills to pay, hence the real world job). At first, I was pretty excited to see so many options, thinking I would definitely find a bunch of people. Then reality set in... I guess I didn't understand the community so well, as it seems as if most of the people doing voices are for cartoons, anime, shit like that. As you can imagine, with the type of game Rose of Eternity is, there's no room in this game for that. Interestingly enough, I did find exactly one person who piqued my interest:
aselich [demo] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y7QcdtfvEo
Not only was she the only person that had the type of voice I'm looking for in her reel, it turns out she is, at the very least, aware of Dragon Age. I guess they had a content a while back, where people were supposed to send in videos of them doing VO or something. I admit I didn't have time to look at all the details, but the point of the story is that she did one. Hopefully, this gives me an in when it comes to requesting her help. Tomorrow, I'll package up some stuff for her and pray to God that she accepts my offer. Damn if I need some good female actors!
Right around the time I was finishing up my search, I received a Skype call from Alexander Baxter, who voices a bunch of people in the game, and who I'm hoping will be able to voice the last male role. We chatted for a while, and I found out that when he was in the recording booth, he sort of just knocked out a bunch of lines for me. Some were for some promotional materal, some were just normal dialogue, and some were something I've been hoping to get into the game for a while: custom soundsets. Those are the things party members say in combat, triggered by events such as killing an enemy, needing to be healed, etc. John Erath did these a few months ago, and they've fit into the game pretty nicely, but it's seemed a little weird to not hear anything from other party members. So I'm really looking forward to integrating them into the game.
But the main thing I spent the rest of my time on was creating a video, using the fresh VO from Alxeander. You can see my work in progress the screenshot of the day. The software I'm using, Camtasia Studio, is pretty simple to use, yet has so much untapped functionality in it. For me, it's quite simple. I need:
- one audiio track for the music
- one audio track for the VO
- one video track for all the different clips used
The easiest part is the music and VO. I've already brainstormed these videos for months, if not years. Hell, the music that inspired each one is the music that plays. With regards to the VO, I just let the actors hear the music, tell them more or less what I want, and let them do their thing. No better feeling in the world than just passing off stuff like this to them, and have them come back with awesome work later. They own their characters so much, they don't need me to write the dialog anymore.
The most difficult part, or at least, the most time consuming part, is the collection of all the video clips. I've essentially spent the better part of a wekk just loading up different scenes in the game, running them with FRAPS running in the background to capture the video, rinse, repeat. I've built up a large archive of videos like this, so when I'm creating these movies, I just need to sift through the collection and pick what works best. Then, I create the movie, put it up on dropbox, and send it to all appropriate parties.
At the moment, all of these movies in are the prototype phase. Once everything is locked down, then I'll add in the polishing, and created the super high quality, HD versions of them.
It's actually been quite some time since I've made promotional material like this... 9 years to be exact. I had a trailer for The Coming, which was fun to create, but never did get around to making one for Cry The Beloved. I think with Cry, I knew I had the fanbase already, so I didn't see the need for it. For Family & Country, things are much different, so I've got to kick the marketing into high gear.
Tomorrow, I've got a bunch of emails to send out to folks, and then, I'll turn my attention towards integrating the sound set lines that Alexander did for me.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This next song from Jia Peng Fang starts out "okay", then gets kicked into 5th gear. Enjoy!
4/21/14 -Monday: LOOKING FOR SOME KIND SOULS FOR BETA TESTING...
|
I mentioned it briefly towards the end of yesterday's update, but I just wanted to highlight it here in case anyone missed it. BETA 1.11 is uploaded and ready to go. I had about 5-6 people testing ALPHA 1.4, and I'm holding out on asking them to test this latest version, mostly because I'd like to give them a break, plus I'd like to get some new faces in. The core game hasn't changed much since the ALPHA, it's just had one hell of a shiny polish applied to it over the past 4 months.While I wait for people to join up and send me reports (hopefully, much less this time around!), I'll need to spend a little time after work tomorrow just putting together the definitive list of things I have left to do.
There's one bug that definitely needs to get fixed, but wasn't needed for BETA 1.11, so I'll have to get to it at some point, most likely when I'm working on other bugs in the next few days/weeks. I'm still awaiting some VO from some folks, and I still need a female actor or 2 for some key roles, one of which being the Keeper of the Rose. Yeah, pretty important. I sort of left things open, assuming someone would naturally fall into my lap, as had happened with most of the other actors I've worked with. Alas, this has not happened, so I may have to get a little more proactive and search out people.
There's always the Voice Acting Club, which has an index for female actors. It'll take some time, but I'll have to sift through everything they have there and see if there's anything I like. If not, I'll have to go ahead and make a more general post asking for help. As I've said many times, I've been blessed enough to not have to go this route, but it looks like I'll have to. Plus, the folks on here seem very eager to get any time of work, so it's sort of win-win for everone.
Besides all of that, there's still seemingly never ending work I have to do on promotional materials. I made a bunch of placeholder ones right before the new year, so I think it's time to revisit them. Of course, many of them need VO, so it's this crazy vicious cycle of shit that needs to get done, which all seems to depend on each other.
Ah, the things one must do to release a game these days. I will specifically be on the lookout for an audio producer and promotional producer for my next game, that's for sure!
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It should be pointed out that with the help of Jia Peng Fang, I've been able to brainstorm a very key part of the story of the game. The 5-6 songs I have starred on Spotify sort of represent the start to finish of the sequence, and it's crazy how it just sort of works out perfectly. Sometimes, I wonder what will happen if I never find new music. Will my brainstorming cease? :)
Anyway, enjoy!
4/20/14 -Sunday: 15 YEARS OF ROSE OF ETERNITY!
|
Wow, so this one almost slipped past me! I was writing yesterday's update, looked at the date, and was like, "Holy shit, we've reached the 15th year!". And what a crazy decade and a half it has been...
I still remember when the "game", if you want to call it that back then was more of an "idea". More specifically, it was just a bunch of notes written down on random pieces of loose leaf paper, which would eventually become the Rose of Eternity Bible. It goes deeper than that, however...
I was going through some tough times in life a few months after the creation of this world, and the only thing that kept me sane was brainstorming ideas, and adding them to the bible. I could be having one of the worst days possible, but as long as I had some paper and something to write with, I could block it out and get down to business. So you see, this game, this world, was more of a savior to me than people realize.
5 years after the inception of things, in April of 2004, I would start the work of bringing all of those notes to life, in what would become my first game, Rose of Eternity - The Coming, made using the Aurora Toolset from BioWare's Neverwinter Nights series. That in itself was quite the adventure. While I had played and loved the Baldur Gate's series, I did not like the OC for Neverwinter Nights. In fact, I had bought the game upon release in 2002, realized you could only have one "henchman", and quickly returned it. This wasn't "Baldur's Gate in 3D, as I had imagined it". That was also the last time I ever bought a game without doing my due diligence, in terms of reading up on things and such.
Once I started work, however, I was in my own world. I didn't play other modules. And as I already said, I never played the main game itself. I just looked at the engine as a means to an end, and did what I wanted, not really thinking about how people would view the game. I quickly found out I was committing the worsr cardinal syns of NWN module development, worst of all, giving the player a predefined character. I had no idea how attached people got to their own characters, or how they brought them from module to module. I was in my own bubble, and just developed the game that I thought people would like.
Upon release on July 6th, 2005, I of course got many comments from people who were constantly looking at the game as if it was supposed to be a certain style they were used to (which frustrated me to no end). Eventually, the people who enjoyed the game for what it was started to quickly outgrow the others, and I knew I had something on my hands. Work started on the next game a mere 4 days later. I had momemtum, I had the drive, and unknown to me at the time, I had lots of time, time I wouldn't have years later once I started a family...
In between all of this, I had the honor of being nominated by the Independent Games Festival for best NWN module. This meant a trip to the Games Developer Conference, where I was able to show off my game to people in the IGF section of the show floor. I was also invited to the Developer's Choice Awards, where I actually won the award. In this video, you can see a small clip of me talking to an interested fan, as well as receiving the award. I was pretty shy back then, so my acceptance speed was terrible. But, it's still a nice memory:
Anyway, 15 months later, on October 12th, 2006, Rose of Eternity - Cry The Beloved was released. While my first game was really all about testing the waters, and learning the ins and outs of the toolset, this next game took things up a level in every conceivable way. I knew what I was doing, and I knew how to do it well. I got rid of the things people hated about the first game, and ratched up everything that people loved. I pretty much just blacked out for 15 months and went nuts. A reviewer named tybae summed it up perfectly in a review he wrote on October 22nd, 2006: "Is this a "how much custom content can I fit into one module" attempt? ;P"
Even though it's pretty old, I still look at this game as my magnum opus. Everything just clicked. I was 26 years old, not married, still living at home, and in general, not dealing with many stressful things (besides game development, that is!). It was the perfect environment for me to work. I'm also very proud of it's overall ranking at NWVault , sitting at #2 for many years.
So here we are, almost 8 years after the release of that last game, and I'm on the cusp of the release of Rose of Eternity - Family & Country. It's been a long journey, there have been many road blocks along the way, but hey, I'm still here. Even though the development of this latest game has not gone as smooth as the development of my previous games, I'll still see it to its end. And, of course, if you know me well enough, or have been coming to this blog long enough, you know I already have more stuff waiting in the wings. One way or another, this series will continue, that I can assure you.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BETA 1.11 RELEASED
It took a while to upload to my online storage site, but the build is now up there and ready for download. You can checkout the Readme for all pertinent details. If you would like to be involved in the BETA, send an email to gamecoder@optonline.net, and make sure to add "Rose of Eternity" in the subject line so it gets filtered properly.
5-6 people would be great!
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's another great track from Jia Peng Fang. Enjoy!
4/19/14 -Saturday: PREPPING FOR RELEASE OF BETA 1.1...
|
So, my quick run through the game was both good and bad. The good was that things continue to stay stable, and I was able to verify a ton of bug fixes I've made over the past few months. The bad? One game breaking bug at the end while the epilogues play (though extremely easy to fix), and some other minor things.
With regards to the game breaking bug, it was due to something I was testing earlier. When parachute testing, I usually have to make some small modifications to some scripts to make sure certain events happen/don't happen. In this case, I was testing one of the various epilogue cutscenes, and I made a change so that when it was over, the game would end, instead of going through each subsequent scene. What kills me is that I'm usually very good about immediately reverting these changes once I'm done. In this case, I did not, hence the bug.
Of the other bugs, I only left one for another release. My thinking was, I just want to get this release out. At the same time, I did not want to go through the game another time. I need a break from that... So, I made the decision to only fix things I knew were low risk, things I felt confident wouldn't break the game.
Once that was done, I went through the very annoying process of packaging everything up, getting it on my desktop, and just verifying that at least the game starts, which it did! From there, I started the upload process to my online storage site. As I write this, the upload is still going on. In the meantime, I have a readme to update, as well as some other housekeeping things.
Finally... If you would like to be a part of the BETA, please shoot me an email at gamecoder@optonline.net, and include "Rose of Eternity" in the subject line so it gets filtered properly.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's another song from Jia Peng Fang, which, as you can imagine, has inspired all sorts of brainstorming sessions. I just can't believe that year after year, I continue to keep discovering such great music... Enjoy!
4/15/14 -Tuesday: ANOTHER MAJOR BUG KNOCKED OUT...
|
For the past few years or so, I've had this bug where upon reaching the proper levels, a party member wouldn't receive their custom abilities that are dependent on their level, like Last Resorts. Unlike abilities in Dragon Age Origins, not all are ones you can select from the various abilitiy trees. In Rose of Eternity, there are some unique to party members, and they're received at certain levels (or sometimes, at certain points in the game).
Because of this, I had to script in some logic into the game to catch "On Player Level Up" events, check the new level, and if it's the right one, give out the appropriate ability. Sounds easy, right? Haha...
Every once in a while, while playing through the game, I've noticed that the ability was not received. Early on, I mistakenly believed that something was wrong with the "On Player Level Up" event. What, I didn't know. So I started catching "Player Heartbeat" events (basically, catch the event every x seconds). For every heartbeat event caught, I would make sure the player had the right abilities according to their level. This seemed to work for the longest time.
Well, during my last playthrough, once I reached a certain level, to my dismay, I did not receive the ability. After cursing for a few minutes, I just logged the bug, and continued with my testing. I didn't have the stomach to deal with it yet again....
...Until a few days ago, that is... So , I was in the middle of putting together a sort of hacky solution, because I'm at the point in development that I just need to get things working. As I'm going through it, a light bulb goes off in my head! "What if the heartbeat event isn't being fired?! But how to test it?" Lucky for me, I save very often during tests, so I can go back and check things out. What was I going to check? Well, besides making sure party members have the right abilities, I also use the heartbeat event to determine when to play idle dialogue. You know, the type of stuff where a party member notices you've been standing in the same spot for x seconds. So the plan was simple. Load up the earliest save in the game to see if I got the idle dialogue (which I did). Then, load up later saves, and see if no idle dialog played. As I expected, with the later save, I didn't get said dialog. I was on to something!
The question was, why in the hell would it stop firing? I knew that when the game was initialized, I enabled events that the party should listen to:
/**
* This function will set the core script for party members,
* as well as the events it should handle.
*/
void HandlePlayerScripts(object oPlayer, resource rScript)
{
SetEventScript(oPlayer, rScript);
int[] arEvents;
arEvents[0] = EVENT_TYPE_DAMAGED;
arEvents[1] = EVENT_TYPE_DEATH;
arEvents[2] = EVENT_TYPE_SPAWN;
arEvents[3] = EVENT_TYPE_HEARTBEAT2;
arEvents[4] = EVENT_TYPE_ATTACK_IMPACT;
arEvents[5] = EVENT_TYPE_CHAIN;
int nSize = GetArraySize(arEvents);
int index;
for (index = 0; index < nSize; index++)
EnablevEvent(oPlayer, TRUE, arEvents[index]);
}
As I was sitting looking at this script, something dawned on me: Not only am I enabling events, I'm also setting the core scripts on each party member. By default, every party member should be using the core script, player_core.nss. I have my own custom roe_player_core.nss, and each party member has their own version of the script that events get sent to before being passed down the list. So, maybe the event was being sent, but the core script wasn't receiving it, because it wasn't set on the right party member? But why would it work in the beginning of the game, and not the end?
Then, it all came together. When a party member dies, when they're added back to the party, their core script is re-set. When this particular party member was dying, I wasn't properly identifying them, so instead of their custom core script being set, it was defaulting to roe_player_core.nss, and that in turn made it so that the would not receive events properly!
So after years of intermittent issues, I have finally solved it!
Tomorrow, I will package up the game, load it on my desktop, and do a speed run through the game (skipping all cutscenes, dialog, etc.), and just confirm that all the bugs I fixed over the past few weeks are really fixed.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A couple of times a year, I'll discover a new artist, whether through iHeartRadio, or Spotify. A few weeks ago, I discovered someone named Jia Peng Fang. The particular song was called, Lovers, and I immediately began a brainstorming session. Within a few days, I had a part of the story, which has been left vague for the longest time, pretty well mapped out. Because of this, I think they deserve to have their music featured. Enjoy!
4/12/14 -Saturday: LACK OF UPDATES NOT DOES EQUAL LACK OF DEVELOPMENT :)
|
STATE OF THE UNION
So let's get the obvious out of the way: I have not been posting nearly as much as I used to. I just want to clarify for folks (if anyone is still reading this) that it doesn't mean development is not on going. Since my internal BETA test last month, which yielded a bunch of tasks, I've been slowly working my way through them. Luckily for me, there is just one bug I need to fix, and I'll feel confident sending out the game to folks for testing. The next (and hopefully final) round of testing should be quick. Likewise, the turn around time to fix things (should they be reported) should be quick.
There are still some other loose ends that need to be tied up, which consist of VO and other things I cannot discuss (but don't affect the actual game build). I'm less worried about dropping in VO into the game at later points, because it's easy enough to test, and isolated enough that bugs won't be introduced.
I still refuse to state when the game will be done, because I've learned that lesson. All I can say is that I've never started work on something that never saw the light of day.
Till tomorrow...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's another version of Edgar & Sabin's theme. Enjoy!
|
