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Messages - unenergizer

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1
Happy to chat through Discord, however I'm to dumb to figure out how to dm someone not on my friends list... :D  If you would like to send me a message through Discord I'm happy to chat there, or I can send you an e-mail if you'd like.

Discord: CptOvaltine

I think your discord name is missing a hashtag and four numbers.

2
Quote
Creating a combat system similar to Chrono Trigger is no easy task. But if you break down each of their systems into smaller pieces of tech, it can be much easily achieved.

My approach to build a similar system is to break up each tech or technique into several smaller parts. Some parts would be, screen flash, shape drawing, character animation, speeds, etc.

Here is a small video of me getting some very very basic things up and running. The video doesn't show a full tech, but a few smaller parts that I am working on currently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=undU3aMmYm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taty-Ei8WA8 (seizure warning)

In the video you will find 4 simple effects.

  • Map black flash
  • Map white flash
  • Basic line draw
  • Basic circle draw

The four examples are heavily used in CT techs. Although they are much more polished in CT. But hey you gotta start somewhere. :)

EDIT: Extended the effects manager to be able to play more than one effect at a time. Added a second YouTube video link. Seizure warning!! I binded the effects to my keyboard and just spammed the crap out of them. :)

3
Everything is looking great! Obviously one of Triggers selling points is the OST.  What kind of music do you have planned for the game?

That's a good question. I have done a lot of research on this particular topic.  Their are several different approaches to bringing music into a game.

Some are..
Let the music in your head inspire the graphics and the game writing
Let the graphics of the game establish a mood and create music to match/enhance the mood

Since I am not a musician it is difficult to think of a piece of music first, then create an atmosphere around it that ties into it.  So I will take the later approach and build environments and then have someone compose music to enhance the mood of the environment.

However, if I had a piece of music first, then I could imagine a setting and create around it.

So it is kinda difficult topic to manage because it is very important.  I have been in touch with a few musicians and prices for original composed music is pretty expensive. On the low side, I have been quoted $500 USD a minute.  Because of these prices, I have to create the environment first, then request composition.

That is where I am currently at, but I am confident that no matter what way music comes into the game, that all of it will be original, and all of it will serve a purpose.  Create and establish a mood, invoke emotion, and suck the player into the experience. That is my goal!

I get what you are saying, and you're not wrong....music is one of the more expensive areas of media, but it's also one of the most important. Often times people won't always remember the soundtrack, but they almost always remember how it makes them feel.  It's a huge part of story telling, and can definitely influence how you feel during important events down to simple ambiance.

What kind of music are you interested in for the project? I'm an orchestral composer if you're interested in that kind of music, it would be interesting to talk about your vision for the project. :)

Send me an email to unenergizer (at) gmail (dot) com

Or.. preferably send me a message on Discord “unenergizer#2872”

4
Everything is looking great! Obviously one of Triggers selling points is the OST.  What kind of music do you have planned for the game?

That's a good question. I have done a lot of research on this particular topic.  Their are several different approaches to bringing music into a game.

Some are..
Let the music in your head inspire the graphics and the game writing
Let the graphics of the game establish a mood and create music to match/enhance the mood

Since I am not a musician it is difficult to think of a piece of music first, then create an atmosphere around it that ties into it.  So I will take the later approach and build environments and then have someone compose music to enhance the mood of the environment.

However, if I had a piece of music first, then I could imagine a setting and create around it.

So it is kinda difficult topic to manage because it is very important.  I have been in touch with a few musicians and prices for original composed music is pretty expensive. On the low side, I have been quoted $500 USD a minute.  Because of these prices, I have to create the environment first, then request composition.

That is where I am currently at, but I am confident that no matter what way music comes into the game, that all of it will be original, and all of it will serve a purpose.  Create and establish a mood, invoke emotion, and suck the player into the experience. That is my goal!

5
:O Nudists!

Looking good. Keep it up.

Nuidists? Where!  :lol:

Chrono Trigger is a master piece and I don't think I can replicate such a complicated and wonderful story. However it would be cool to make something kinda similar right? And since were all adults now, I think we can stomach a bit more mature subject matter. I mean, the "Witcher 3" has some straight up nuidty going on. Ours is more for laughs. :)

Damn that looks great! Your artist is doing a wonderful job and you're doing great with this project!

Thank you! The code has slowed down a little bit as we wait for the artists to get some work done. Once they have landscape and buildings done, we can implement the new graphics into the game and continue to refine how it all comes together.  The new character models are modeled after Chrono and we are looking to get similar, not exact copies, but similar animations in for the tech system.  The art is expensive and takes time to create, but it is well worth the effort and money.

Plans:
Collect additional art assets to get some basic maps up and running.
Create professions to put non-combat content in the game.
Create a few basic single player tech moves. (no team based techs yet)
Create a private demo that will let you play to a max character and professions level of 20.
Collect bug reports and fix those over and over.
Rinse and repeat.
Then once you guys and my community and a few close friends in the industry say it has enough polish, then we attempt to do a Kickstarter. However, Kickstarter ONLY when their is a stable playable game, this way, people know that their money is being used wisely! Our team doesn't want to be on one of those "Kickstarter Fails/Scams" youtube videos :O
We want to instill complete confidence in our community of friends and gamers!

Anyhow, if anyone has questions, please ask :)

6
Here is an update on the graphics.





You can find the progress pictures here: https://forgestorm.com/game_images/game_art/

Currently the artist is working on interior art which should be finished in the next day or two. Today I signed the next contract to get him to work on exterior tiles. Once that is completed we will sign another contract to start on medieval building artwork.

The main plan is to get a small demo up of the new graphics and allow people to get in the game and run around. Test out features, find bugs, etc. I told him our target date to get something up and running for a limited week test was in mid October.

The combat/tech systems are not yet implemented because that is the hardest thing to make. Due to the way party sizes are, for each additional character in a party, a huge set of techs have to be designed.  If you take the techs that exist now in CT, they are for a party of 3 players. If the game added more players to a party the number of unique techs to create goes up.  For us wanting to make a party of at least 5 people, it creates a huge number of techs to design.  Ideally... we come up with a way to do some kind of automated system that will design a tech based on party size and player class. This is not easy to design and is the biggest challenge. So if anyone has ideas I'm all ears :)

Alright guys I'm signing off for now. Will be back in a few weeks to drop some more news. Check out the image and the link to see the images. Post your feedback and I will get to it asap!

Cheers!

EDIT: All artwork is Copyright (C) Robert Andrew Brown 2019. (that's me)

7
Alright guys, its been awhile since I have posted here. Want to give all of you an update.

Today I just signed a contract with a pixel artist to begin work on improving the graphics and getting us something a lot closer in detail to Chrono Trigger and FF 3. Not only that I am in contact with some musicians to create/compose original music for the game.  Once I have the new graphics for the world and new character graphics, I will being building the world and hopefully get to the tech system soon. It has taken several months to figure out how to make that system work on multiplayer and to keep it challenging and engaging, but I think I found a sweet spot in functionality to make it all work out.

I will update you guys again soon when their is something cool to show off.

8
@everyone GAME UPDATE:

We are looking to have our first open alpha test to all players on Friday, May 31st!

There will be a limited number of content. The aim of this test is to find and patch bugs. The server and client may crash. We are counting on you guys to help us find issues so we can fix them!  We look forward to playing with all of you on our first game!

Alpha testers will get their names put in the credits of the game and will receive an Alpha Badge on their profiles.  These badges will only be given out one time!

If you want to talk about this or have any questions, please post them in the #general-chat section on our discord server! :smiley:

https://discord.gg/xQRDZYe

p.s. The main focus of this test is to make sure our networking code is stable and all of our game systems are functional for a variety of people on different connections.
p.s.s. The alpha test will not have party techs yet.  Once our combat system has been tested, we will add the party combat system.

9
I do often actually think about how SSL works--you can blame that on the prof who taught my Networks course some twenty years ago, who went over it in detail. In the end, SSL is good for encrypting information in transit but poor at proving identity (because that part relies on the honesty and competence of certificate authorities, and many of them aren't either of those things, really), and trying to make it do both was not smart. We're all stuck with the fallout now, though.
I understand where you are coming from and I agree that cert creator could be at fault. With the client/server program we actually create the cert dynamically and each user gets a new on per login.  We had initially used ISAAC to do the encryption but found that Java directly supported a SSL implementation that is recommended. I still believe it is worth doing additional research to keep peoples accounts safe. Since the game is mobile friendly it would be ideal to have the current best battle tested encryption in the game.  So that if this was to ever get big we could all be playing at a game con or something somewhere and know our details wont get stolen. Life goals :)

You don't appear to be doing a bad job. Security is always a tightrope walk between user convenience and keeping the bad guys out. I'm not a security analyst, and I'm not familiar with your specific forum software, so I have no business telling you how high off the ground to put your tightrope, or whether the rope itself should be hemp or nylon.  ;)
I'm not a security analyst either but I do want the best hemp rope we can find, maaaaannn. lol

Might also be worth looking at how the original effects were implemented if you haven't already (should be Mode 7 graphics for the more complex ones, and that's simpler than any flavour of OpenGL--you have more patience than I do if you're going to be dealing with that directly).

I have been reading the book and doing a lot of research.

Here is an example of an effect in chrono trigger. To get the spinning background layer to move across the star and not be visible outside of the star, I believe they used a buffer depth test.  I have been able to reproduce the effect, minus the spinning star.

Here is both CT and my buffer depth test examples. The CT example is playing at 1/2 game speed.

Video: https://youtu.be/dYDfY-kPAaw?t=707
NOTE: Make sure to play video at 1080p to see the bg layer swapping happening correctly at full fps. Otherwise it will look really bad.

Notice how in the CT example the background over the star does not effect any other sprite or any other background layer. In my example, we do the same thing, but instead we are running a background over two shapes.  This particular effect will allow us to reproduce many examples within CT.  :)

As I discover and learn new techniques, I will continue to post side by side comparisons of the technique. Their may be little to no polish in these examples. I will save all polish for when it is actually needed in the dev cycle.

Also if anyone has additional info on how CT effects are achieved, let me know :) Any help in this region could possible point me in the right direction. However good help or not, each effect will be reproduced and will be given our own flare. No direct CT copies will be found.

10
Currently registration is closed on the website while I figure out the best way to prevent bot signups. Forum spam is annoying, as you all already know. It needs to be hard for computers and easy for humans to register. No system is perfect, but the more bots we block the better!

It's been a while since I needed to secure anything of this sort, but consider the strategies bots typically use:

1. Playing back an old copy of the sign-up form filled out by some human: just place a timestamp in the form and refuse anything too old to block this. Extra credit if you use the timestamp to hash other parts of the form to make it difficult to tamper with. Humans never see it.

2. Filling out every single field in the sign-up form: include a field hidden by CSS or javascript that isn't supposed to be filled out (mark it clearly for people using screen readers or whatever who might still be able to "see" it). Bonus points if the honeypot field is named something tantalizing like "password" in the page source and the actual password field's name is a timestamp-salted hash of "Spekkio" or something. Humans never see this, either (unless they're using very unusual browser configurations).

3. Tailored bots that were carefully set up by a human to manipulate your specific form: This is where the captchas come in, and sophisticated bots used to only appear if it was worth someone's time to set them up, which means your site is already popular. Of course, using a generic sign-up form from a common web application makes it possible there's already a tailored bot out there.

Unfortunately, captchas are human-visible, and they're universally considered a horrible nuisance. How much of a nuisance which kind is going to be depends on the site's audience. In my case, I have to want what's on a site pretty badly to activate image loading or allow third-party Javascript, but most people don't even notice those things, and I'm not your audience anyway (I prefer single player only).

4. Not-a-bots: there isn't much you can do to guard against signups by people in a third-world tech sweatshop. You end up in a three-legged race involving blacklists if your site is significant enough to attract these. :(

I think we're still another ten years or so from having AI bots sophisticated enough to emulate humans well enough to fill out an unknown form accurately without guidance, thank the Entity.

Excluding IP address blocks and certain User-Agent strings can help curtail bots, but risks excluding some legitimate sign-ups. You could flag sign-ups matching those lists for observation/manual intervention, I guess.

The website also uses SSL to make sure your connection is safe and secure.

The game login protocol also uses SSL to make sure that when you login to the game, your information can not be read by others on the network.  This is useful for say your somewhere like in a hotel playing the game, your credentials can not be easily stolen/deciphered.

Careful, there. SSL is not a silver bullet, even with additional protocols layered on top to mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks. (Having it is certainly better than not having it, though.)

As far as the signup form goes, you are correct pretty much as basic change in the underlying syntax of the page would/could break most automated signup bots designed for the XenForo forum software. And if someone wants its bad enough, they can modify their code to continue the automated registration. If one man can build it, another man can tear it down.

As far as encryption their is no silver bullet. But we do have something close. For instance this website has a SSL cert that defines how you connect to it. You probably don't think much about it when you sign into this forum. Most people even have their browser automatically input their password upon page visit.  This is where 2-factor authentication comes in. XenForo offers this and we plan on implementing this system into our login protocol on the game.  To be fair though, it would be very rare for your user credentials to be sniffed out via SSL.

If you have any ideas on how to improve, I am all ears.  8)

Also I hope all of you are ready!



Tonight I have begun breaking down the mechanics needed to create a combat system that gives similar features to ChronoTrigger while also adhering to our client/server spec!

I have a lot I need to do and think about in terms of how it should all work. But I am confident that I can get a system up and running this weekend to get the first pass of real combat done. After we have a single player combat system up and running with a few different types of attacks we will begin to implement player party techs :)

Cheers!

P.S. I bought an OpenGL ES programming book so I can implement shader programs into our game that would produce effects exactly like Chrono Trigger ones. I need to learn things like vertex shaders, using the depth buffers, and other things to really make the combat look close.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/OpenGL-ES-2-0-Programming-Guide/dp/0321502795

11
This is coming along pretty quickly and nicely!

Yes sir! Were trying to get it done :)

Today we have completed the login protocol. When you sign up at the ForgeStorm website, you will use this same username/password combo to login to the game.

Currently registration is closed on the website while I figure out the best way to prevent bot signups. Forum spam is annoying, as you all already know. It needs to be hard for computers and easy for humans to register. No system is perfect, but the more bots we block the better!



Also, the website uses BCrpyt to hash/salt your passwords. Plain passwords are never stored in the database. The website also uses SSL to make sure your connection is safe and secure.

The game login protocol also uses SSL to make sure that when you login to the game, your information can not be read by others on the network.  This is useful for say your somewhere like in a hotel playing the game, your credentials can not be easily stolen/deciphered.

Now that this works, I will begin saving information about your user account to the database. These things will include your bag items, equipped items, logout locations, money saved, faction reputation, and other things!

The website also needs a bit of work as it is using a plain old template with no additional styling. But I guess one thing at a time? lol

https://forgestorm.com/

So here is a bit of extra info for those who like technical details. I was asked why someone has to use the forum to signup to play the game, so I will cover this answer here for you guys too.

We use the XenForo forum software for our community forum. This software already has powerful tools such as the registration system, password reset system, usergroup permission system (or user ranks), friend system, and much more. By using this software as a base for our user system, it saves us tons and tons of time creating these things ourselves. This brings pros and cons.

Pros:
We don't have to make extra support systems (registration, password reset, etc)
Because other people code it, its like we have extra programmers on the team!
The people who make the software have much more experience in this area in terms of security with web development

Cons:
If a flaw or exploit is discovered with their software, it means we are vulnerable too :'(

However in terms of exploits, we will keep an active paid subscription to their software to make sure we maintain the latest and greatest in terms of feature sets and security patches. The best thing todo in terms of keeping player progress and user data safe is to make sure we do automated backups of the database. When the game goes into beta we will begin testing out a system that will create backups. This way if the database is ever compromised, little to no player progress will be lost.

Hope that explains it well enough! :)

If you have questions/comments/concerns please let me know!

Your friend,
unenergizer

12
Alright got factions implemented into the game. In the gif below it shows an example. When you kill a factions friends, they can become hostile towards you.

Killing a npc can lower your reputation with his faction and raise your reputation with his enemy factions. Notice how when one NPC dies, his faction friends turn hostile towards you (indicated by a red name) and his faction enemies turn friendly towards you (as indicated by their names turning green).



So this is done and works well. A lot of design needs to go into this such as faction types, how many reputation points you gain/lose when attacking NPC's etc.  For now the base system is sufficient.

Next up we will get MySQL database up and running to save player progress. After this is done, we will begin doing combat related code. This would include making armor stats work, giving player entities classes and races, and then the good stuff. Chrono Trigger like combat! <- That is what I am most excited for!!!!

13
Alright I wanted to get this done a lot earlier, but the framework is now setup for NPC shops!



A long with this a lot of tiny features were added and tons of bugs fixed.

When we get some more of the features built and some combat spells/effects going I will be reaching out to you guys to give you the ability to access and try it out. Expect bugs and some ugly user interfaces, but when the art direction is established everything visual will be cleaned up and polished.

Cheers guys!

14
Okay we've been hard at work on the game! Everyday I get something done.

Since I don't have any awesome combat to show yet, how about a cool code visualization?

The following video shows the process of building a mmo game. Watch the little guy fly around and zap dots. Every time this happens code is being written, edited, or deleted. It shows about 5 months of work!

Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lKLCAjl0Oc

15
Trading now works! Took about 5 days  :o



Next up: NPC shops! I plan on being able to finish this one today!

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