xdaniel

Hm, looks like it fails while trying to load an actor definition... If you haven't done so, try extracting all files to a fresh folder, making sure the folder structure is the same as in the archive, and try it again. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure, I'd need to do some thinking and hunting for this.Edit, yeah, I got the same exception using the Beta 6 EXE file and Beta 5's XML folder. I'll implement some better error handling in this case for the next build.

SceneNavi v1.0 Beta 6 released and available via the update function, changelog as above. Feedback would be greatly appreciated! (Alternatively, click here to go to the update page...)

Out goes the scrollbar, in comes... another PictureBox-based slider. Also changed the marker thingy to a triangle, to make it clearer. Edit, compiled the changelog for Beta 6, which might see release later today (Sunday) barring any unforeseen circumstances: Finally added Scene Metadata tab, so far contains a few sound-related settings (daytime BGM, nighttime SFX, reverb); more settings to come Actor definition format changed; actor number now part of definition, definition can be set as default for certain actor types unless overridden by specific definition Changes to transition actor handling; added drop-down lists for rooms to transition actor editing, renamed some options for clarity Actor definitions now also support the properties "DisplayModel", "PickModel" and "FrontOffset", which are currently used mainly with transition actors (documentation forthcoming) Added mouse-based selection of rooms in static objects mode; only works when collision rendering is disabled; selects collision polygons as usual when enabled Added mouse-based selection of room model triangles and vertices; allows editing of vertex colors and alpha Fixes to Ucode interpreter to not reset certain parameters on display list calls (DL, BRANCH_Z); fixes missing textures on ex. Death Mountain Added texture loading macro workaround to Ucode interpreter, now also tries to load textures on SetCombine command; fixes a few missing textures, ex. walls in Water Temple's first room Fixes to texture loading macro implementation, potentially did not correctly apply palettes to CI-type textures; fixes incorrect textures on certain custom maps Fixed offset detection error with polygon type definitions on some custom maps; now correctly loads polygon types Removed some unnecessary OpenGL function calls; gives notable FPS increase in many cases, such as certain temples Added more fallbacks for lower-end hardware, added detection of Intel graphics hardware to disable combiner emulation regardless of the hardware's reported capabilities Fixed room display list caching; now no longer re-renders rooms on every scene change, even if a room has been cached before with the same settings (i.e. textures en-/disabled) Some refactoring to the program's internal data storage (i.e. which scene header is active and what it contains, which room header is active, etc) A few object picking bugfixes; ex. some erratic behavior when selecting things via middle-click More status messages, ex. for ROM loading and saving Rearranged Options menu

Rolled my own color (and alpha) picker, although the regular Windows one is still accessible by double-clicking the preview panel:

Select a room, select a room model triangle, then double-click a vertex to access the color picker dialog. Change the color there, the rendering refreshes and shows the changed color. Save the ROM as normal to, uh, save the changes to ROM Might replace the standard Windows ColorDialog with something custom, to also allow changing of the Alpha value. It's also a bit hacky internally - writing changes to the local copy of the room data for rendering AND to the ROM data itself - but it works so I'm not gonna worry about it much.

Anna Yano - Shape My Story (Stella Jogakuin Koutou-ka C³-bu OP) (...the chorus in particular just has something that's caught my ear since the first time I heard the TV size version)

With real life starting to move again for me, I haven't had much time for SceneNavi over the last week, and what time I did find for programming I spent on my Zelda-ish engine thingy. That said, at least the bugs that Arcaith encountered I managed to fix a few hours ago; more improvements and additions - vertex color editing as mentioned above, more collision and scene metadata stuff, etc. - will come at a somewhat slower pace for now.

Groupees' "Let's Build a Doujin Bundle!" with 10 doujin games and a soundtrack; just over 4 days left at http://groupees.com/doujin

Hrm, mainly directed at Blinx, but let's see... Change isn't always good, although I gotta say your Zelda idea is nice. I don't even think a death would be needed, just a generally "darker" world or themes, as you said. More like TP, MM or even LA (because, dream or not and on purpose or not, you're actively working towards the "destruction" of the island and everyone on it, which the ending underscores quite well), less like SS or WW. Also - even though that's a general problem of gaming nowadays and it's been in Zelda in some capacity since at least the aformentioned LA - less hand-holding would be nice. The other thing, about Nintendo pulling a Sega. I do not want them to cease being a platform holder, but - as long as they keep going the way they've been going since the Wii, and it sure looks that way, just without the success - I wouldn't be very sad either... or as long as it's only about consoles anyway, I do NOT want them to leave the handheld space. I don't know if that opinion is solely based on habit, nostalgia or whatever, it might very well be, but there's one thing I do strongly believe here: If Nintendo would cease having their own handheld, and they and all other developers would move to ex. the Vita, many less well-known games would just get lost in the shuffle, in the glut of releases this one platform would receive, and just stop being made. Take JRPGs or whatever else - the ones that are bound to sell are those in big franchises, or those that turn out to be surprise hits. Everything else would move minuscule units and fade to obscurity, even moreso than when split between two different platforms. I very much think we'd have to say good-bye to niche titles like ex. Etrian Odyssey (hurry up and end already, August! <.<)

I think you can de-/serialize from and to binary data using the BinaryFormatter class, but working with XML in SharpOcarina, SceneNavi and co. made me like it a lot. It's rather easy to use for data storage in .NET, to customize the formatting of the XML document, etc. Also, on another subject, I had started writing some classes for handling levels, layers and cells for maps yesterday, and a short while ago today finished redoing the camera code to 1) allow centering on and following an entity and 2) adhere to level boundaries and stop moving if the followed entity gets too close to them. Those map-related classes can also be de-/serialized from/to XML. I'll think about and look into entity-to-level collision next, I guess... Edit, come to think of it, some actual comparison shots would be nice, right? Level boundaries enabled, then disabled; also note how the "wall" layer is slightly transparent:

Kicked out and rewrote a lot of my entity code over the last two or so days, it's more sensical and less hacky now, entities can be serialized and deserialized to/from XML too (example below). Haven't yet remade the HUD, life, magic, rupee, basic enemy, etc. Entity movement in particular is much less hacky than it was before. Player entity as it stands right now in-game: Player entity XML - still missing a lot of player-specific stuff, tho - as exported from, and can be used by, the engine:

Dumping N64 ROMs? Come on, that requires literally just an N64, a GameShark, a parallel port cable and an old PC, nothing difficult to come by. SNES, GB or whatever is a different story, but N64 games are among the easiest to rip.

About Mega Man games, how much are Mega Man 1 and 5 in the US? Over here, their PAL versions are ridiculously expensive; they're both at least 80€ each, I think, and that's cart-only, let alone complete. And MM6 was never even released here originally, so there's only the US version to be had... for several hundred Euro. And that things get rarer with prices going up - or never coming down in the first place - is true. My WonderSwan comes to mind here, might've mentioned that before. I bought it - a blue violet SwanCrystal, then new from Lik-Sang - about 10 years ago, when Bandai was phasing out the platform, for the normal price of ca. 70€ or so. That price has never really gone down - a quick check of eBay Germany shows the cheapest to be a loose one from France, for 50€ plus shipping. The next one is also loose, and is 90€ plus shipping from Japan. Granted, it has a cart-only copy of an Inuyasha game with it, but that's more for a loose system than what I paid for my new, boxed one back then!

heavy: Yep, that's DuckTales, although I believe the sequel is the rarer one? This first one was 5€ at a flea market or something. Mega Man 2 I just mentioned because its box happened to be next to the Famiclone when I took the photo, it's a normal PAL version too, so nothing rare here either. What is rare is Mega Man: Wily Wars, the one in the center behind the Mega Drive 2 + Mega CD 2 combo, and it's as far as I can tell not a reproduction either. And some of my Japanese games I just happened to come across for cheaper than a PAL or NTSC-U version, such as Super Mario 64. That one was... less than 10€ on eBay back when, I think, while the PAL version still goes for 15€-20€. I sadly don't understand much Japanese - enough for some basic sentences, menus in game, things like that, but I'd be completely lost if I had to hold a conversation.

Here's my mess... The left: the "Family Game" Famiclone, A/V SCART switcher and JVC A/V receiver and amplifier (also featuring Mega Man 2) The right: the Wii, Saturn, PS2 and assorted accessories, Saturn games, manga and DVDs The... center and top right: the Sony Trinitron CRT TV and Super Famicom Further to the right: messy and not even completely filled shelves of games and a few manga (GA <3) Another shelf/cabinet with Mega Drive (original Wily Wars and Mega CD 2 <3) and Game Boy stuff, more manga, magazines, artbooks, player's guides, etc. The big controller drawer, also featuring more games - GB/GBA and WonderSwan, plus the Swan itself - and accessories (photo is upside down for some reason) The big drawer of other things, with duplicate or other-region consoles (or dead ones; damn you, 32X), as well as other bigger stuff, like my Game Gear's carrying case with its contents (this photo, too, is upside down) The two boxes of SNES/SFC and N64 goodies, both loose cartridges and boxed games, and my ZIP drive's parallel port cable for linking my GameShark to the ol' ThinkPad Missing stuff, the rest of the room's quite messy, it's late and I'm tired.

Heh, and that's why I have nothing but respect for anyone doing something like this, more or less, from scratch; it's much easier to do in a language like C# and using ex. XNA/MonoGame. Also, bit of an update. Graphical changes with some custom graphics, added some basic code for magic power and rupees, expanded the HUD to include said magic and rupees, got a basic chasing enemy going (chases Link, damages for half a heart on collision) and added post-damage invincibility and recoil-on-hit to Link, although the latter still feels off. Also more debug button thingies to modify life, magic and rupees.

The least you'll be able to, vertex selection-wise, will be selecting one of the three from a drop-down list or somesuch. I'd rather get mouse-based vertex selection working in the way you've described, but that'll be the fallback depending on how it works out. As for messed up textures, in what way are they messed up? Completely incorrect or no textures being loaded? Any way you could upload a patch or the scene/room files for such a broken map, so that I can take a closer look? Edit, Antidote, billboards, or rather vertices being rendered in OpenGL's points mode.

My good old random junk thread... Got inspired by Antidote working on a Zelda-like engine - not by his code, just the fact that he's working on one - so I started working on my own, in C# using MonoGame. Dunno why exactly, but it's been named "Kokoro", Japanese for "heart" or "mind". Guess because it might have the potential to become the "heart" of a game someday? Well, if this goes anywhere, which it probably won't... Regardless, there's an animated ALttP Link running around, who can pick up hearts and potions that restore health, there's a heart display with half- and quarter-hearts, there's graphics from ALttP with a few edits, and there's some sound I found online that were ripped from the game, including the customary DING DING DING DING LOW ON HEALTH warning. Anyway, a quick screenshot and some debug printout stuff below.

WIP, triangle selection works so far. Not sure about automatic selection of the nearest vertex; also not sure when this'll be ready. Note that I won't add editing of vertex positions, just colors and alpha - that would be too much work otherwise, which I honestly don't want to do.

Yep, it's looking quite nice and (from that glimpse into the project's files on the screenshot) well-organized. Wouldn't mind hearing more about the design, too, like... how your entities interact, ex. how the Octorok "knows" Link and chases him or somesuch? I don't really know about a lot of what goes into making a game or game engine, from AI to collision detection to who knows what Also, if I may say this: You're indirectly at fault that I stayed up through the night, as you kinda inspired me to try and create a game engine of sorts (yet) again. Which'll probably go nowhere as can be guess from the above. Got as far as an animated ALttP Link running around, tho via C# + MonoGame, but for now I'm too tired to keep going...

Posting phone desktop from phone: PC-side edit: Source, and I should look into getting that clock/weather widget more visible with my backgrounds... Edit a week later: Changed to a different clock/weather widget, looks much nicer I think and still lets the background shine through well: https://twitter.com/xdanieldzd/status/365452636293586945/photo/1 Edit another three days later: Changed my phone display's DPI, which makes everything smaller (...and glitches some apps, so this might be temporary...) but thus creates more on-screen space. Also got a different icon set for my launcher, and did some more tweaks here and there.

Bought an actual, physical copy of Borderlands for PC. Ended up downloading and installing a cracked version because of SecuROM. ...oh how I miss the days where you just installed your game, it only checked if the original CD was in the drive, and to remove that check you just downloaded a simple No-CD patch...

"Starting today, existing projects that do not have any downloads and all new projects will not have the ability to create downloads. Existing projects with downloads will see no visible changes until January 14, 2014 and will no longer have the ability to create new downloads starting on January 15, 2014. All existing downloads in these projects will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future." z64 Google Code has ONE download, a ppf patch, everything else is in the sources, which will stay unchanged. vg64tools has multiple downloads, but, again, they will still be accessible. Yes, backing all that stuff up would be a good idea, but it's not gonna disappear overnight, even on January 15th.

Google Code itself is not going anywhere; the download functionality, such as for binaries or source archives, will be deprecated. Plus, while creating new downloads indeed won't be possible anymore for anyone starting January 2014, existing downloads are said to continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future. Source code hosting via version control like SVN apparently won't be affected at all. This is a bit of a problem if you want to keep providing new builds for projects hosted there, but it's not like they'll shut down everything, that every piece of source code and every binary will be lost come January.

Use just the video ID, without the "watch?v=": Comments about the game... I might post later. Tired and don't feel like putting my thoughts together