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Genre: RPG
Platform: PC - Win32 (Win9x and above)
Website: Here.

Been toying with this idea for a while. I started developement on this thing on New Year's. There isn't much available yet, and progress is mainly acheived on weekends because I'm a software engineer and work full-time. I don't FEEL like programming when I get home anymore as much as I would rather just relax and enjoy the rest of my day.

Developped in C++ and using OpenGL as a graphics API. It will eventually make use of DirectX 8.0a for sound and music (DirectSound and DirectMusic), and possibly controls (DirectInput). The game currently only supports 640x480, either windowed or fullscreen, but absolutely no display options have been coded at all at this point and this is fully subject to change. Music will be stored as MIDI, and images (sprites and textures) are stored as a proprietary format of my own. The game engine was designed to resemble Xenogears' (ie, 3D environment with sprites) and the battle engine loosely ressembles FF5/FFT's where characters have a skill tree of their own and can unlock abilities by spending ability points.

The website (possibly not compatible with Firefox; haven't tested it and don't care either, frankly) has a few screenshots and documents, though nothing too definit yet. I'm expecting more interesting stuff by next weekend, though can't make any promises (writing the map loading code would open up a world of possibilities, but a week sounds a little short). Various sprites have already been designed, though due to a lack of use in-game of them currently, I haven't put them up on the website.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I just took a peek at it. Nice intro/storyline.

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When life gives you lemons... SQUIRT THEM IN PEOPLES EYES! Mwahahahahaha! *Squirt* Ow! Hey, that was my job! *Squirt* Knock it off! *Squirt* I want my mommy! Waaah! *runs off*

The moral of this story is *Squirt* Ow! *Squirt* Okay, okay, no morals.

Looks good so far. Keep at it!

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"No matter what happens, I will always be with you... forever." ---- Pocahontas, Pocahontas

"Only those who are already at the top are rewarded without trying."----- Delita Hyral, Final Fantasy Tactics

http://www.ffshrine.org/fft/fft-midi/1-42-back_fire01.mid ---- My favorite FFT battle song

Hehe, it'll look even better by this weekend.

The website's being constantly updated (new screenshots and media have been added tonight, in fact) and there's generally at least a new entry in the developement log every few days.

A demo release of the map engine is expected for sometime this weekend. I hope to fix my camera system (rotations around the Y axis are fine, so are zooms, but the X axis rotations are badly coded and the surface the camera covers ends up being cylindrical instead of dome-shaped), add a skybox (or skysphere, or maybe a simple plane; depends what best suits my intentions), and write the complete music engine (which will be lifted from an older project of mine, teehee.) Should be entertaining for a few minutes at best.

Once I get off my lazy rear and start loading my map format, I'll have some very fun stuff to show off. Technically I could do a 3D remake of Final Fantasy I's maps at that point for the sake of showing off what the engine can do. Hehe.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Wow, makes me wonder why I'm going to college to program when you can make something like that in C++... I hate java.

I'm wasting money... sigh. Keep up the good work!

Question: is it possible to download openGL anywhere or do you have to buy it?

This post has been edited by Racthoh on 11th January 2005 07:27

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This is my world: (Got my second chapter up, 3rd Chapter about 80% complete)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel876/homepage.html

OpenGL's just a set of instructions that tells the graphics card how to draw in 3D. It's really just an alternative to Direct3D, but it's gaining popularity (the Quake engine especially was able to take it and make it render FAST).

They should come free with most graphics card drivers that can support OpenGL rendering (example: nVidia drivers have OpenGL drivers bundled into them).

Edit

I recommend making the site work with Firefox soon. Most of CoN uses Firefox as their main browser now, I think, and if you're going to show it off mainly here...

Tiddles can probably give you numbers and prove me wrong or right. It is totally your prerogative though if you wanna just give us all Firefox lovers the middle finger and say "HAH. USE IE BITCH".

This post has been edited by Zephir on 11th January 2005 07:46

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~Status Report~

* Completed... Dragon's Head
* Completed... Soldiers of the Empire: Disciples (release pending)
* In Progress/Undecided... Of Love and Betrayal
* Planning/Assembly... Where it all Began

@Racthoh:
Actually, I did go to college. I'm out of college and employed as a full-time software engineer. But if you're holding back for college and hoping THEY'LL teach you how to write games, touch luck. You're not there to make and play games, you're there to become productive. This is all stuff you need to learn on your own. You're not wasting money at all, unless you're going to college thinking this is what you're supposed to learn there, that is. If that's the case, go to a game developement college like Full Sail (and bring your own bank )

OpenGL is a graphics API. That is, it's a set of instructions you can use to expand a language, graphically in this case. OpenGL takes care of the low-level routines that, for instance, tell it to send a series of polygons down the graphic card's "draw these things onscreen" buffer. Practically every game on the market either uses OpenGL, Direct3D, or has support for both.

It FULLY depends on what you're programming with, but OpenGL is a very platform-independant and standard graphical API. Any computer should be able to support it. Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 comes with support preinstalled for the libraries, though you may have to download them somewhere if you use an other compiler like Dev C++.

@Zephir:
If my ATI RAGE 128 can support OpenGL, I think anything made in the past 5 years can. ;P

Although I'm not giving Firefox users the finger, contrary to your statement this is not my primary source of game pimpage Firefox support is really just being added on a whim as I go along (XSLT, so I'm just working with one main file as opposed to a bunch of HTML files, more or less). It isn't being made into a priority, though the support will be there in due time.

Edit: Java, btw, is an ok developement platform. You'll NEVER acheive results as good as, say, C++, but it's a VERY good way to learn. Java uses a syntax first introduced by C and reused in other languages such as PHP, Python, C and C++ (obviously), and Java. It's also a pretty easy to learn language (kinda like a dumbed-down C++ that doesn't deal with pointers, memory allocation, and various other things) and platform independant (stay platform independant in C/C++ is kinda rough at times; if you use DirectX, for instance, you can forget about being platform independant.) Your college is doing the right thing teaching java; just be thankful it's not COBOL. I still have nightmares about them thinking they could get away with it when the entire class could write at least C console mode programs without a hitch...


This post has been edited by Silverlance on 11th January 2005 15:54

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Yeah Silverlance, sadly one of my teachers told me if I had any hopes of making games for a living I would have to shell out more cash and get into the graphics program. Nonetheless, no one will crush my dreams of one day making a great game, be it with a professional software creation tool, or with something as simple as RPGMaker2000.

Ohh thats what openGL is... guess I should stick with programming and leave the graphics to the professionals. Sigh. Haha, COBOL... THANK GOD! Well, I'm only first year, so I guess I'll see where it takes me.

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This is my world: (Got my second chapter up, 3rd Chapter about 80% complete)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel876/homepage.html

If you want to write a game, you'll NEED to use a graphic API. Otherwise there's very little you'll actually be able to do. Unless, that is, you're writing a MUD. Roughly everything I've done so far involves OpenGL one way or an other (rendering the map, moving the camera, rendering fog, moving the character...).

If game developement interests you, don't look for a job in that domaine. Seriously. Working as a game programmer is neither what you think it's like nor worth it. Your salary will be low. Carmac is a 1 in a 1,000,000 programmer; unless you can come up with some faster algorithm for calculating the square root of a 4x4 matrix multiplication, you have no hope of ever having a chance at getting a salary any better than the one I'm currently being paid. The difference is that I'm fresh out of college and had no prior work experience in this domaine; come a dozen years and I'll be making quite a bit more.

Nor will you actually MAKE the game. Heaven forbid! That is NOT your job: you're a programmer, animator, artist; but heck, ideas are not part of your job. You won't write the game's storyline (there's no such job; management handles this for the most part). You won't give clever ideas (if only unimportant stuff; 'hey, I just realized we could add anisitropic filtering to the indoor maps with a little more work'). You do what you're told.

So be an independant developper.

Edit: For the record, I work as an office developper. Not a game programmer. Hence the little bit about salaries. 'Course, if you just want to write game-oriented code and don't give a wet snap about the developpement process, then by all means.


This post has been edited by Silverlance on 12th January 2005 13:34

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I read everything about Endless Saga on your site... who's the main chracter going to be? The girl? And are you going to make this a free game you can play on your computer, or are you going to sell it or something and make people pay?

Either way I'd play it. It sounds great.

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Quote

Wow! I feel like a koala bear just crapped a rainbow in my mind!

-Captian of Sealab, Adultswim.

Quote (Terra&BB @ 12th January 2005 19:25)

And are you going to make this a free game you can play on your computer, or are you going to sell it or something and make people pay?

I think that if you make people pay you shoud let us CoN members play for free
I'm your friend, right? You won't charge me, right? ...right? LET ME PLAY YOUR EFFIN' GAME OR I'LL STAB YOU WITH A RUSTY PLASTIC SPOON 'TILL YOU STOP BLEEDING!!!

*huff* *huff*
Um... I got a little carried away there. *Police carry me away*

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When life gives you lemons... SQUIRT THEM IN PEOPLES EYES! Mwahahahahaha! *Squirt* Ow! Hey, that was my job! *Squirt* Knock it off! *Squirt* I want my mommy! Waaah! *runs off*

The moral of this story is *Squirt* Ow! *Squirt* Okay, okay, no morals.

Wow. For people who read the whole site, you guys sure missed the blatantly obvious FAQ which answers any questions about the cost of the game.

The game is divided into three chapters. Although the girl (Lyris) is one of the two "main" characters of the game, she's only really there in the first chapter. The cast of playable characters over all three chapters is quite large, about as much as Chrono Cross. However, the length of the game (and the fact that each chapter "only" has ~20 playable characters, some carrying over across multiple chapters) means characters will get FAR more developement than CC's.

On the subject of playing it, I have plans for a demo of the map engine sometime late this weekend. What will be implanted by then is currently unknown, though I hope to get the map loader code up and running by then, as well as maybe put up a sprite and have it walk around. As well as some tweakable options, such as being able to cycle between the three camera types the game will use (fixed, chase, and mouse-driven), playing around with the fog and lighting effects, and with a bit of luck, I'll have some music playing too.

Nothing too fancy, but hey, after about 2 weeks of work it's not like there's much to be expected.

Edit: Once I get something more solid up and running, I plan on having some nice and oldschool map (possible FF1's Temple of Fiends) setup as a demo map. Oldschoolers, rejoice! That's very unlikely for this release, but who knows. Maybe I'll enter INSANE PROGRAMMER MODE OMFG GIVE ME MORE COFFEE!!!! friday/saturday night and after a series of crazy breakthroughs end up polishing off enough code to pull it off. It happened before.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 13th January 2005 01:14

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote (Silverlance @ 12th January 2005 20:11)

Wow. For people who read the whole site, you guys sure missed the blatantly obvious FAQ which answers any questions about the cost of the game.

Well, see, I never visited the "whole site". I've really only read the story section, so... yeah. I'm too lazy to visit the FAQs. Someone else will yell at me, and I'll eventually learn what is "blatantly obvious" soon enough.

... or I won't, and look like an idiot

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When life gives you lemons... SQUIRT THEM IN PEOPLES EYES! Mwahahahahaha! *Squirt* Ow! Hey, that was my job! *Squirt* Knock it off! *Squirt* I want my mommy! Waaah! *runs off*

The moral of this story is *Squirt* Ow! *Squirt* Okay, okay, no morals.

"If that's the case, go to a game developement college like Full Sail (and bring your own bank)"

Just a warning about Full Sail. They have a supposed high percentage of graduates who get jobs that they brag about, but do NOT be fooled by it. It's not any easier to get a job by going there, because everyone wants experience. I know two graduates from the game design program who are still looking for jobs.

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I had an old signature. Now I've changed it.

Oopsie. That was me and my I-accidentally-on-purpose-missed-the-FAQ-link-ness.

Free. Yayness. I wish I was a beta tester but I'm glad one of the main chacraters is a girl, I'm tired of all main game characters being guys with cool hairdos and big swords and bad language. And so many muscles that the ground beneath them sinks. Yeah.

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Quote

Wow! I feel like a koala bear just crapped a rainbow in my mind!

-Captian of Sealab, Adultswim.

Personally, I would advise anyone interested in programming against going into game developement professionally. It's not a fun life and it's not worth it. Just because it involves games, it's DEFINITELY no child's play. You can make a pretty terrific salary and have better challenges just working as an office developper (I speak from experience) and you'll have FAR less trouble getting a job, too. Technically I haven't completed college (missing two courses) but I'm working full-time as a programmer and making quite a nice bit of cash. I only have about a year of actual work experience, and it's all from this job. Would I have taken game dev as a career, I'd still be jobless.

On the subject of betatesters, positions are open, though it's not something I'd give to anyone. For one thing, I'm expecting someone who'd betatest for me to give me effecient results; just playing the game is worthless. It's also hardly something I'd even consider offering to a complete stranger because I don't want a buggy copy of the game leaking and being distributed (for many obvious reasons). Some programming experience wouldn't hurt so I could have reports written in a language I can more readily make sense of (ie "the map crashed" is worthless; "The map loaded properly but the log showed a pretty messed up map name; you probably have a buffer overflow somewhere" would tell me exactly what the problem is without hours of bug-hunting.)

And on the subject of the main character not being some spikey-haired male protagonist with a sword, hey, believe me, that's nothing. It gets even more fun.

As for progress, I've started writing some map-loading code last night and got as far as the information that tells it how to apply fog to a map. Unfortunately it was 2:30 am and y'know, I work during the day. I'm starting to think I'll be able to load maps by the time I make my little demo release, and thus have some cool map to show off as a demo. In modern internet english: lol d00d ill have a l33t demo k?? (asl??) :-)

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I think I'm gonna push back the demo an other week.

I doubt it'll have much of an impact on things (as if anyone was eagerly checking this thread every hour to see when a demo of some incomplete map engine would be released ), and frankly, I've had far less time to work on stuff this weekend.

I can load maps from files properly now. I completely changed the way some stuff was stored, and now face a different problem involving how textures are loaded because of the new map format. On top of that, I'm still looking forward to fixing some things with the lighting effects (right now, maps don't allow for stuff like torches or streetlights). So a bit of work remains to be done before I can pull this off as I want it to be.

On the plus side, unless next week proves to be a very trying week for me and time is short, I should be able to have a demo map of, say, the Temple of Fiends. In 3D. Woot. And then Square's lawyers will shut me down.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

I think everyone is well aware that making games is no child's play. Even if I spent my whole life making a game with low pay, long nights, whatever... just the fact to say "yes, I contributed to the making of that game". It would give me a reason to anxiously await the credits as opposed to sitting through the credits to see if something special happens at the end. Even if it was some insignificant mini game I would be satisfied.

I will never lose hope!

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This is my world: (Got my second chapter up, 3rd Chapter about 80% complete)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel876/homepage.html

Well, actually, the "making" bit is easy. Anyone can come up with ideas, but implanting them is an other matter entirely. An idea is worthless until put to use (which is why there's no such thing as a job where you "create" games and give ideas; even script writer is hardly a job in industrial game developement).

It's also pretty easy to program a game. The hard part's putting together the individual bits and pieces that make the game run. AND finding the time to do it when you have a full-time job.

It's pretty fun though, because it's challenging. You sound like you're interested in making a game so why not have a look at SDL? VERY easy to use 2D library that's PERFECT for getting into 2D game developement. On top of that, it interfaces with OpenGL very easily, so it's easy to move on (for the record, that's not what ES uses; I'm doing straight Win32, but the end result would be the same.) www.gamedev.net is a very good place to go to, too. Lots of tutorials, articles, and VERY helpful people on the message boards. Flipcode's an ok place to go to too, though I don't know the URL off hand (I don't go there much ).

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

That site might take some time to look over. I'll have to take my time, like you said it's challenging, so I wouldn't want to make any mistakes.

Thanks a bunch (oh, and good luck with your project )

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This is my world: (Got my second chapter up, 3rd Chapter about 80% complete)
http://www3.sympatico.ca/daniel876/homepage.html

Looks interesting. Like something I'd play because a certain velius battle is driving me off the hook. Just to take a break from it all . Seriously though, It looks cool, and I'd definately be willing to play it when its finished.

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If you've been mod-o-fied,
It's an illusion, and you're in-between.
Don't you be tarot-fied,
It's just alot of nothing, so what can it mean?
~Frank Zappa

Sins exist only for people who are on the Way or approaching the Way

Quote (Racthoh @ 17th January 2005 15:40)

That site might take some time to look over. I'll have to take my time, like you said it's challenging, so I wouldn't want to make any mistakes.

If by "some time" you mean "a year or two", then yeah.

My advice is to start by picking a language and getting a compiler. If you do any kind of software piracy, stop right now. This is generally viewed as a crime worse than rape or murder by most programmers and, frankly, not a very smart move if you plan on making a living selling software. Get DevC++ if you want to write C/C++ code (it's freeware), or shell out a bit of cash and pick up Visual Studio 6 (or one of the .NET variants, though I'm biased against .NET as a whole and can't recommand it, honestly). With MSVS6, you'll have VB as well, which is much easier to get into (so long as you don't intend to stay there; VB is NOT for serious game developement) and invaluable to write tools to aid in making your games (map editors and the likes come to mind).

You can easily find a link to the SDL libraries on GameDev, and a bit of poking about will turn up a fair amount of tutorials for it. Excellent starting point. DO NOT MAKE AN MMORPG! Dead serious. You WILL NOT succeed, no matter how determined you think you are. You'll fail and look stupid. EVERYONE does. Start by something small (my first C++ game was a simple space-invaders clone with multiple ships and weapons; took a few weeks to write). I'm gonna stress this again; every beginner developper comes around, says they have an awesome idea for an MMORPG, and proceed to realize they've bitten off WAY more than they could ever chew with a team, much less on their own and with no experience.

By now, you'll be almost a year older. You'll be very at ease with pointers (which probably sounded completely useless to you roughly 8-9 months ago but are now invaluble). You'll know a couple of Win32 functions off-hand, including how to create a message pump or the basics behind creating a window. You'll stop thinking assembly is going to magically make your program faster. You'll start knowing your limits, and you'll have a more solid understanding of your language of choice. At this point, you should move on to OpenGL and/or DirectX. Possibly both; even if you use OpenGL as a graphics API, DirectX offers very powerful input handling and sound/music functions. And netplay, too.

Give it anywhere between 3 and 5 months and you'll feel quite at ease with whatever API you've picked. By now you should have a few games under your belt. It's time for your first "real" game.

I've been programming since age 12 (I'm 20), if that puts things in perspective. Though I only managed to buy MSVS6 around age 15 or so, so technically I have 8 years of experience, but "only" 5 or so with C/C++. It may sound like a long time, but trust me, the years do fly by once you get into this sort of thing.

You'll also be required to grow a beard during your teenage years, to drink coffee (or at least caffeinated beverages), to cease having a social life and slinking off into social inadeptness (I cannot stress how important this is!), and sleep only 5-6 hours a night at most. Less on weekends. Mumbling to yourself about frustum culling while on the bus helps, too.

Thanks for the encouragement, everyone. I'm really looking forward to releasing something playable, and I've definitely set my sights on reproducing the Temple of Fiends (complete with its music!) as the first demo for my map engine. Should be fun.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Well, sadly I didn't get the progress I was hoping to get done this weekend. I blame a killer headache, a bad hangover, and a suddent idea for better resource management.

The downside to the above is that I'm gonna have to work on more stuff before I can get that demo out. The upshot of it is that not only am I going to circumvent a bug with my texture loader (I'm using my own image format, so the conversion is a little trying at times), but it will also be faster and more powerful, as well as allow me to store everything in a single file.

I also blame FFTA, in which I started a new game roughly a week ago. I finished it sunday around noon, right before my headache started, so now that I don't have any distractions other than my job, progress should be good once again.

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"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."

Quote

...so now that I don't have any distractions other than my job, progress should be good once again.

(: Happiness. Once again, can't wait 'till it's finished... and yes, I am here to ask a question that you probably already answered but I didn't see... how much space do you think the game should take up when downloaded? My computer doesn't have very much memory or RAM, and I'd really like not to have to delete The Sims to play Endless Saga when you release it.

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Quote

Wow! I feel like a koala bear just crapped a rainbow in my mind!

-Captian of Sealab, Adultswim.

For some reason I can't see the site. It keeps displaying errors and the screen's blank. I wonder what went wrong. From what I hear it looks great, though. I'll see again if I can see the site again.

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Yunalesca: "Hope is...comforting. It allows us to accept fate, however tragic it might be. "

Yunalesca: "Poor creature. You would throw away hope. Well... I will free you before you can drown in your sorrow. It is better for you to die in hope than to live in despair. Let me be your liberator. "

Quote (Terra&BB @ 10th April 2005 14:04)

how much space do you think the game should take up when downloaded? My computer doesn't have very much memory or RAM, and I'd really like not to have to delete The Sims to play Endless Saga when you release it.

Wow. Wasn't expecting to see replies to this thread.

I can't give an accurate predication, but I'd say it would take between 40 and 60 megs of HD space. RAM, I'm afraid I don't know. Undoubtably it would run on any computer, though.

Quote

For some reason I can't see the site. It keeps displaying errors and the screen's blank. I wonder what went wrong.

Most likely Firefox's shady support for XSLT. The developement site does not support firefox, and never will, I'm afraid to say (though once releases are made, an effort will most likely be made in that direction). Call it a conflict of interest; I won't go into reasons.

There hasn't been an update in a while since I got lazy; a little later I took a quick break to deal with some IRL issues (lack of spare time being one of the key reasons for this; just needed to hammer out some problems and work some spare time back into my schedual). And now, I'm on a brand new computer and still reinstalling things; Visual C++ was actually on my list of stuff to reinstall this weekend but my grandfather's going through his last moments and my mother had to take a plane across Canada to go see him; a little reschedualling will be necessary.

Ironic that the thread would die down, then get a post the day I was planning to reinstall MSVC and resume developement. Most progress has been on sprites in the meantime, and negotiating a deal with an acquaintance who might be able to host it for me (40+ megs is rather hard to distribute, though the first couple of releases before all scenario and graphic data is done should just be a few megs... But even then, 50 people grabbing a 5 meg file generates a quarter gig of bandwidth right there.)

--------------------

"Judge not a man by his thoughts and words, but by
the quality and quantity of liquor in his possession
and the likelyhood of him sharing."