Finally - The first Dragonrise Demo

Switching to XP solved a lot of crashes and other problems in my case. I did not experience any crash in XP with a proper hardware. I think it was worth the money.

Frank

I don't see a reason to wreck my system. It's perfectly configured an running fine.
I also have doubts whether this problem is a win98 issue, I've read about this error message before, and the user with the problem had win xp.

Another idea just came to my mind. In my BIOS settings I've reserved 64 MB Ram for the video card, maybe that is causing problems.

Sorry, I did not intend to turn this thread into a win98 vs. win xp discussion.

Hi Frank_G!

First of all: You have to pick up a weapon, otherwise there will be no weapon ring!
The first one lies beside you and the others are on the table at the wooden stairs.

But as I see, you figured out how to fight them well!

The NPC thing:
I'm short of models. You have to look for moedls having the shape "NPC" read from the top to the bottom.
The first one is outside the fisher's house northeast from the starting point.
(he'll tell you where to go next)

Night already was menitoned, I'll fix...


This morning I found out some little bugs:
Empty pointer when wealding a shield and switching to the bow. (silly me, was a stupit mistake)
Empty pointer when wering bow or claw and entering the status menu. (didn't watched closely after the last changes)
And the background in satus and skill menus is totally black but should only be darkened, I hadn't set back the alpha to 50% after the splashscreen.

yep the server seems to be back, downloading now.

Not sure if it is of interest, if not, pleaseignore this post:

I perhaps have found the reason for the message above.
The terrain demo posted somewhere here in showcase also shows this error message. I took a look into the files (it is not resourced) and saw it's using a terrain with shader applied. Not sure if the shader is a problem, as everything ello released is running, but it might have to do with the terran.

The campground demo presented a while ago, features terrain without shader and ran without any problem.

Too bad that I can't see the nexus/video memory values of the demos, it might help to get an idea what is wrong with my (and some other) system(s). Maybe it indeed is a driver issue, I don't know, but I doubt that the demos mentioned are using more than 64MB video memory..

I'm using a terrain shader as well....

I had to set the Level's Nexus to 400, don't ask me why but otherwise publish crashed. I guess it is because publish doesn't watch for script settings where I set max. entites to 2.000.

The Nexus is at 400?

This explains why it doesn't run on my system. I don't know what takes so much memory with my setup, but even after closing firewall and antivir still over 100 MB are in use... so I end up with about 400MB free ram, which doesn't seem to be enough.

I also had a problem with max entities exceeded. The limit is increased with increasing nexus, but it can also be raised manually: max_entities (I guess this it what you tried first?)

Haven't tried publishing, as I always use resource, but maybe this indeed is an engine problem.

The problem is, that there are many entites in the map (espacially trees and gras).
With max_enities = 2000 there is no problem in runtime, but as said before, publish doesn't look at the script and just sees, that there are much more entitys in the map as the nexus would allow and crashes WED.

Maybe 400 was a bit to much, I just doubled it as I recognized it was the problem (don't ask me, why I came to the stupid idea this was the problem) and then it worked.

But newertheless I have the similar RAM sizes as you got... really strange.

I'll try with a bit lower nexus in the next version, so I hope that'll fix it...

Fantastic
just one thing if the girl could run more fast it would be cool.
But your game is great, clean graphics and textures with good colors ,
great gameplay etc...

keep it up

Thanks TheExpert!

But I got a very important question to all who tested the game!

I was told, that one had big trouble with the 'Sleeping Winds Inn'.
Often the screen would get just black when entering it, staying for a night or just walking down the stairs!

I have no idea what the problem could be and it seems only one has this problem recognized for now.

When you where at the Inn or could test it to see if it is so I'd be glad to know!

(But I hope this is a exeption fault...)

Really nice demo for now
might wanna make a map or at least an easier Menu :S i got lost in it for hours.

just want to point you on 1 thing. The animations look cool, really but...

When I picked up the bow.... I noticed then she isn't giving me a strong feeling.
It's like the bow is made of plastic and the arrow is made of feathers :S

Give the animation more strength like she has problems stretching the rope with the arrow, and might want to give her a pose like this:
I'd like that would give her more power

Oh, and you might want her to Run instead of walk, it makes the enemy feel dumb if i wander circles around him without being hit

-Jeroen

-Jeroen

Thanks SoftArts!

I'm sorry, but I defnately do not want to have a minimap.
I never expected that so many people would have problems with the menu, I didn't even invent it, but maybe the 'Secret of Mana - Generation' is too long ago....

It's that simple:
Up-Down Arrows lead through it:
-> Status-ring
-> Potion-ring
-> Ability-ring
-> Weapon-ring
-> Spell-ring

The Icon 'Armor' in the Status-ring leads to a 'sub-ring-system':
-> Body-armor
-> Arm-armor
-> head-armor

If 'Esc' was the button to enter and 'Enter' the button to activate, nobody would have pushed 'Esc' again to activate a weapon or menu icon for sure!

Maybe you're right with the archery animation... (I think I know that picture ^^) I put it onto my ToDo-List!

The actual List:
- Attack-speed (there'll be an NPC setting the status values up to see the speed at the end of the game (I got some swords in real life, only because in diablo you can attack in lightspeed it doesn't mean reality is like it).
- Shaded Terrain (already done)
- Map borders (still no idea)
- Animation blending (maybe the last thing to do if I've got the time to do it)
- Camera zoom-out while running (already done)
- Brighter nights (switchable with F9)
- Sea Hunger die animation (already made more recognizable)
- Better Splashscreen (I'll have to be creative)
- Armor evaluation with up/ down arrows (already done)
- Weapon attack power and evaluation with up/ down arrows (already done)
- Framerate can be shown by pressing F11, combined with the FPS under 25 warning (FPS-Control) (already done)
- Little collision bugs (not for the player, but should be done)
- Archery animation (we'll see what my time says)
- First Dragon (I got a bunch of ideas for that, it must get great, maybe with a teleport to a battle arena)


Now some screens of a few done things:
The weapon's attack shown, and marked with arrows if it's better or worse.


Dark nights switchable:

Terrain shading and camera zoom when running.

@SoftArts

I got my 2 new archery animations now and they look much better, but that can't be shown on a screenie.

Yesterday I implemented a new weapon, the first one of the blunts, a morning star:


I put in a new texture for the dirt paths, as you can see here with the nice charging effects:

Wow, that charge effect looks cool. Maybe if you would make it a litle bit brighter... but that is just my taste

When I ran it the screen turns bright white after a few seconds so i cant really play it, i hear the music and could see a little but don't worry its probably my crapy video cards fault

- Bryguy

@Ambassador

Thanks but you first should see it in movement because the effect goes very fast. (you can see it in the demo when you got one weapon on level 1:00 or above, or you just hold down the use button with no equipped weapon)

@Bryguy

Maybe you are right.. I have nothing like white sprites or stuff (yet).

ok to keep you up to date here the latest state of development of my brand new Ice-Spell (still lot of work to do with it):


(The crystal more or less 'explodes' to that size cutting the enemy from inside)

Yeah, its definetly my video card, im gonna try it on a different computer later.

First, awesome job! This is really impressive!

Unfortunately on my PIV 3ghz, 1GB Ram, gForce FX5200(128MB), Windows XP system, it opens to where you can see the character on the screen then quite immediately. Pretty weird.

On another (lesser) system of mine it works fine. I have a newer version of DirectX on the system that's not working, that's the only thing I can think of that might cause it to quit out right away like that. Any ideas?

@DCorwin

Thanks alot!

Due to shader usage your system has to have DirectX 9 installed.
On my Labtop (PIV 3 GHz, 512 MD DDR-RAM, Radeon 9700 Mobility and WindowsXP) it works great.

I still have some cool ideas for that spell but I had no time left yesterday to put 'em in.

I did have DX9, but after reinstalling all seems to be fine!

By the way, did you use any physics for the driftwood and boxes that the character can bump into in the water?

I codet my own little physics for them.

The educated physician will notice a little physical mistake.
But I don't care since it looks good an no one recognized it for now.

To keep you up to date again.

Now I got an alternative skin for the 'wooden armor' (ok not much wood in teh skin I know... ).
The stars at the right upper corner show the current Mana, similar to the hearts.

I finally made a system I had in my mind for a long time now...

As you can see on the screen, there are 2 'side-leg-shields'.
I'm now able to put several armor parts to several body parts depending on the current choosen armor. Soon I'll add the reflection effects I once showed with the shields.

Hi

Again a new character Skin.
Depending on the armor there are a couple of items fixed around her and some have a better skin style depending on how strong the armor is.

The new clothing looks much better. You did a very good painting job.

Agree! Like hat cloths very much!

BTW: "Inetlligence"(sic!).

@ PHeMoX
You're right, I haven't spent time on 'breast shading' yet, I'll fix that!

@ Pappenheimer
Ops I never recognized that leetle mistake... I think I should fix that...

Thanks MindChamber!

It's quite simple how I did that.
Activate Transparency and Overlay, set alpha to 100 and call a short shader function to recreate the Z-Buffer with ZWriteEnable.

I gotta say this again. This is a really awesome game ShoreVietam!! Every thing about it is great!! It has a really good RPG feel to it and you have put in alot of work to get it like this. You definately have the skills to climb high in the gaming world!! Do you plan to work further with this game? Or start a new game all together? Either way great work dude!!

Thanks alot AccessPhenomenon!

At the moment I'm on to create the next level, which is the dark forest.
There even has to be the beginning of the story.

I have a quite big story concept in mind, maybe you like to see the worldmap, but it is written in german...



1. Is where the demolevel is, the game starts at 22. goes over 21. to where the demo starts.

There is still an old wizzards tower missing in the north-east of the first level, but it will be quests for later..

I startet to translate everything into german, since this is my tounge language it'll be easier for me to give the dialoges a more medieval touch.

But I had only few time the last weeks, I have to be very long at the university and learn for the finals ect....

Bad Tono, hast du vergessen das zu übersetzen oder ist das eine Badeanstalt? Die unvergesslichste Map die ich kenne war die von BloodOmen-Legacy Of Kain. Irgendwie war die genial (die Idee von dem Puppenspieler fand ich besonders gut).

Das ist eine Badestadt, kein englisches 'bad'.

Erinenrt mich doch wieder an den Pfarrer der den Metaler mit seinem Fan-T-Shirt sah und meinte 'Oh dieses Bad Religion moechte ich auch mal besuchen.'!

I thought it was time for a few new screens, and here they come:

When opening the status menu there is now a 50% chance that she'll appear as close as she does on the screen.
And she can now open/ close her eyes (however that is called in english.. ).


When speaking to other people the camera now zooms in a bit, when getting/ picking up items they fly into the screen and 'show that they are now yours' like the bottle here does.


I finally started making the skills which still are unuseable in the demo, this one is called 'Water Breath' and regenerates 20 - 40% of the characters health within 10 seconds, depending on the 'Water Elemental Skill'.


While the effect of the regeneration keeps healing the lost hit points, the player flashes in a blue color, the same thing now appears when the player has been poisoned, but then in green color.


This skill cures all status changements like poison or confusion and is called something like 'cleaning'.


Spookey! All around the castle of the dead soldiers randomly tombstones appear and disappear!


The new level 'Dark Forest' is under construction! This is an early state of the trees there.


Deep in the Dark Forest is the goblin fortress (or something like that) and they must have cut lots of trees for that!


Beside the screens I fixed some bugs I recognized and did some other performance stuff that can't be seen on screen.
So I hope you like what you saw and we'll see when I'll be able to show new stuff.

WOW, looks like very nice effects to me
keep going!

RJD

This morning I made a little function I was planing for a long time now.
The player can now be striked away by getting a critical hit, I only have to copy the little code extension to the enemy function and give them animations as well and everyone can do that.
I think I'll code it so that big enemys can't be affected in that way by smaller ones...

I just took my Scanner back from my father to finally again be able to scan my drawings.

So here's some Dragonrise Concept Art made by myself, enjoy:
(The first two and the last one are/ will be used for the game, the rest were ideas for the main character before I had the last one)

IS the game progressing ?

nice concepts! want to see them in 3D!

I haven't been in the forums here for a while, I even had a little coding break, but many things have been done since then.

This can take a while, I loaded many screenshots on my space

As you wanted to see it in 3D, here's my try on Pueraene, I'm not as satisfied with it as with the picture itself.


I changed the Ice-Spell effect slightly.


Three days ago I codet my Quest-Logbook, heres the inventory symbol for it.


And that's how it looks like.






Based on the same system I made the Item-Bag.



I made this new attack-animation and the 16 to 9 screen format which saves CPU-Power since the black parts are really not rendered.


I started coding more a-normal effects, here you can see 'Sleep', it is ended after it's duration times out or you are hit by a weapon.


The next one is 'Paralysis' which is not ended before the duration times out or you are healed by a spell (works with sleep as well).


I made an 'attribute damage' as well, a varyable amount of points of every of the 6 status values can be lowered (or raised) for a choosen time or until you heal yourself.


Yesterday I developed the elemental system for the spells. Every spell has it's own element (elemental combinations coming) and everyone can have resistances or weaknesses against spells. With resistance you can get less damage or even absorb damage, with weakness you can get high to very high additional damage.
With absorbtion for example you can not only heal an fire elemental, you even can make it stronger since you put more of its own power into it.
Everything is now shown with different value colors:
Player gets physical damage: red
Enemy gets physical damage: white
Someone gets healed: green
Elemental damage is done:
Fire: orange
Water: blue
Gaja: violett
Earth: brown
Metal: light blue-green
Lighting (elemental combination): yellow
and more to follow....


Now some pics of new weapons I made, the swords have the reflection code added I once showed.















Torches are equipped with flares now which looks a thousand times better.


Butterflys for more atmosphere.


This is what I'm working on at the moment, the main building of the castle of Alcelen where the main character lives. I try to stick as close as possible to the old building style of the amazones mixed with a bit own design to make it look more 'cool'. This is where the game really will start, but much more about that will be shown by the next demo, not much more words on it from me now.


So, now you are up to date with Dragonrise. There is much more, but I don't want to bore you with complex system intern stuff!

I hope you like it and that you have some critics where I can make it better and maybe even how!

I really like the castle of Alcelen.

That's very impressive.
Yu caccomplish so many thigns in such a short time. I wonder how you do this

cool looking weaponary want to play this when it finishes

As I said, I'm working on the main building of the castle at the moment.
This is how far I got today, some rooms in the lowest layer are not finished and there is no decoration placed for now, but I wanted to make an overview.

looks nice keep it up, wanna see more screens!

At the moment I'm more or less 'jumping' between my projects because I had a lot of ideas for all of the three.

Today I finished something and wanted you to ask, what you expect that it is.
I don't wanna give any specific hints to find out if it looks like my intention was according to your impressions about it.



- 2099 Polys, 256x256 skin -

hmm the hat makes it look a bit magical...
but the rest seems to be more knight-like
or some arena-fighter(the mask)
could also be kinda hangman =P

The skin is pretty good especially when it's so smll and it looks so good. I like the feel of that character. A bit magical, maybe a which? would be nice if we saw some side and more 3d shots... but good work man!

First of all, thanks to both of you for your quessing-replys.

I must admit it looks a bit magical because of the 'hat'.
It wasn't easy to make the texture, but it's intendet as a big iron-like helmet.
(it won't be seen so close ingame, as you can see on the last screens with the ISO-view)

As wished I made two new screens from a very horizontal angle, a side- and backview:

looks great! bit pixelated though, but i think it's because of the resolution.. or that that eym very tired..

Pixelated, sure, but IG you'll never be so clos!

Today I made an ingame dialog combined with an comsole-game-styled charactername input system.
The design is quite simple, maybe you got some ideas to improve it:

hi!
maybe you could delete the characters-bmap and just use "inkey"? that would give some space for more, e.g. starter skills or some differences in the future skills of the Character, like wizard/knight ect...

good luck
Sinthoras

btw, sent you a PM about the demo

An inkey was to simple in my opinion.

Stuff like Skills ans Klass-Type decided only by some buttons and klicks is too trivial for me, but the next demo will show what I mean.

Here you are only asked for your name ingame.

(I haven't recieved any PM)

Nice one! but still, inkey functions are more player-friendly ^^ (my opinion). I quess you can click and/or write straight the name there.. or?

I'm really waiting for more screenshots and information! though I havn't got that far (and not goin for sometime) in my project

Looking good cant wait to see the full completed version

i just realize now that you posted a demo of it o_O is there still a link for the demo? the one on the first page is broken :<

that guys arms look abit to small and straight, unless its just the angle? keep up the good work though

I'm working on the next demo, I'd like to have it finished at the beginning of december (one year past the beginning) but I doubt that'll be possible.

I increased the guys arm width a few times a bit, I'll look for it when I finish him.

Today I made a new NPC for the further creation of the story.
She's an Amazon Gurad of Alcelen, I think the face and hair could get some improvements:




2892 Faces - 256x256 Skin

she stands a bit too straight i think o_O like she's made of stone ^^'

It's the baseframe.
All bones reset at the moment.

hair: smaller strands and more contrast and maybe some faked shine

face: the eyes should be a bit more in the middle of the face they are nearly at the side

oh and propotions seems to be of a bit. the hands should be as big as the face cause normally you can fill out your face with your hand

quite good =) but the hips are a lil to wide in my opinion

@xcelos

Yes, maybe you are right, I'll try it, thanks!

@Bilbo

That was a try, should be caused by the trousers, but it's not clear.. I should make it normal again, right?

to be honest its up to u seen as its your character. it all depends on the look you were trying to get

I was planning a new kind of level system for the last days.

This evening I started and finished the system for a testlevel.
To apply it to my game there some further work has to be done.

The central idea is to split each level up into 12x12 (144) sectors with 1024x1024 quants side length.
Most of the entities (there are only few exeptions) are defined as part of one of those sectors depending on their position.
Thus all the entities filenames, position, angles, IDs and skin-numbers have to be saved in an external file so that I can get everything back when I want it.

The camera is now in the center of 9 sectors, each time the camera passes the border of one sector and comes into another one, a function checks which entities have to be removed because they are no longer in one of the 9 sectors surrounding the camera. After that, the function looks for the sector which came new into the 9-er block around the camera an loads all the entities in them from the data stored in the file.
(the algorythm has ~90 lines of code and 6 while-loops in each other)

This has a few nice advanteages:
- level load times drastically increase because only ~6% of the entities have to be loaded and all the traces to put the entities on the ground are not needed anymore, since the end-position is written into the data-file.
- Framerate increases well (around 10 FPS in my demo level expected) because only 6% of the entity amount is there
- If I want to change the names of entities now, I do not have to replace all the entities in the level anymore, I just have to go into the Data file and say "Replace With" to have all the entities exchanged.

There is one disadvantage:
- Going from one sector to another causes a short entity creation time.

Thus I even could use my data-file as a text-based level editor now.


Maybe a little screen to show how it works from my testlevel.
The red 3x3 square is where I came from (the centre is attached to that very thin sword standing on the diagonally crossed fields and not to the camera yet) and the yellow 3x3 quare is where I went to.

Each of the white/black squares is one sector (I can change it very easy, all is made with defines).

The transparent objects were created or removed, depending on if the sector felt out of the 3x3 square or came into it, the non-transparent ones stayed.

That's how the file looks like internally, after each sector name, a list of entities is written, depending on how many entities in the sector are:

Sektor0
MEHLSA00.MDL,-224 224 14 90 0 0 1 55
Sektor1
Sektor2
MEHLSA00.MDL,-96 224 14 0 0 0 1 55
Sektor3

Im using similar method but for my game, but my game is a multiplayer so its a bit more complicated...

Well I could use it for MP, too.
I can easy make exeptions in the system for each model that must not be removed (other players for example).

I realized that still a lot of people try to download the Dragonrise Demo even months after I took it from my space (72 requests this month).

So I decided to put the version from May online again:

Dragonrise.exe - Demo from Mai (25 MB I think)

ahh thanks a lot finally i can try it!

For technical reasons I'll rewrite the ring-menu within the next day(s).

At the beginning some people didn't like the menu or had big problems to control it.

If you got ideas or "wishes" that could improve it, please let me know and I may build them in.

Thanks in advance,
ShoreVietam

'cus... it's pretty cool.

Are you working on dragonrise all alone?

Thanks but it has some little bugs (they don't affect the usability, but I want to improve it technically).

However, since I already rewrite it, I can put changes into it. Thus the oppinion of those who critisised it is quite important to me.
Maybe they can describe it more specific.

And yes I'm working alone.
Blitzblaster was so kind and made a Dragonrise-BGM song for me which I really like.

After finishing the new Ring-Menu this weekend I continued working at other stuff.

One of those things I like to share. I extended the HLSL Terrain Shader with the ability to use the alpha-channel of the mask-texture as shadowmap.
Then I wrote a raytrace-function that analyzes the whole level to create the needed shadowmap.

Edit:
I'm still working on it.
To get the overall darkness of 1 m² I use 8 traces now, 4 to get the terrain heigt at 4 places in a square within the 1 m² and another 4 traces to see how many actually hit the ground.
Thus there can be 100% lit, 75% lit, 50% lit, 25% lit and 0% lit for each alpha(shadow) pixel.
This applys to shadows cast by the terrain itself, too.
Rendering the shadowmap for a 250x250 meters Level takes more than 3 minutes...

This is the result:

nice game, and I really like the thing floating on the water, it become
moves react to player model its very good!
but the interface need some more works!

Thanks!

I just reworked the whole ring menue, I hope it is better now than before, but if you have specific things where you say "hm this should be made a bit different" or soemthing like that, please tell me!!!

Hello boys and girls!

Now it is time for the second Dragonrise Demo, 10 months after the last demo and 16 months after I started the project.

I made a lot of improvements during that time, some of them are written in a couple of previous postings, others aren't (like the character creation system).

I think most of it has to be seen in runtime like the new evasion system.
Others were shown above like the terrain shading.

In addition to the technical parts I finally was able to begin making the stroy because the systems are well enough developed to support it.
But I'm sorry for all of you who can't speak german, but I had to translate it back to german. I don't have problems with english, but it fits more to the game in my oppinion.

With the new sector system I was able to increase the framerate very well and I removed some redundant data, too.

As before I included a html manual into the archive.


And as always some screens before the link comes:

Close shot of Queen Juliana from Alcelen


Shot of an evasion



DRise2.exe - 28.5 MB selfextracting WinRar archive

yay, downloading right now

Well, I played it.

Was quite cool, just that the terrain multitex shader does not work on my GF 4000. Also I had once the problem that Benezos didnt load when I came across the bridge. Besides of that it looks very nice yet, keep it up!

ps: the intro was cool

ill download it and give an in dpeth review lateron;-)

Im bummed that you wont make the game in english... If your still keeping it in german only then,

that was a VERY BAD TEASE I liked the graphics, inventory ring, and the scrolling dialogue very much. But I didnt know how to get off the boat and fight some bad guys

throw us yanks a bone

At least the manual is in english..

You simply have to talk to everyone on the ship.

Maybe I'll build in language selection, but I'd have to define hundrets of strings to make them changeable...

Thanks Michael, luckily Blitzblaster made me that into music in the last moment!


Edit:
You're right, it's a lot of work but there has to be an english version.

That Game is one of those Games you wont get a hang on soon. It takes its time to introduce itself and the game emchanics, but once youve played it it is enjoyable to seom degree...

Graphcis:
The Graphics are nicely done. all models share their style and are nicely animated. while the shadows are missing, sometimes objects are infront of your view. a changeable cameraprespective would not have hurt. also the camera could zoom out a little more to give the game a wider appeal.
animations are smooth, however the attack animation of the heroine, whos named lise wich is, in my opinion, such an ugly name for such a nice girl it hurts, is rather slow. too slow.

Sound
While the sound effects are nice, the music lacks. that does not mean its bad, it simply is not there...

gameplay:
it takes some time till youre in the game. but once on the island, it begins to make fun. what feels strange are the controls. everything is done with space, no mouse use, no nothing. that coudl be tweaked a little bit.

overall:
a nice demo, even if it still needs loads of work...

I played this demo also and it's really great. But one time i didn't know what have i to do next and where must i have to go. Also the camera(when you walk its bad, when you run its better) and the control only with the keyboard is not the best. But now the great sides of the demo: Sounds,Menues,Texts(sometimes tool long),FPS(is really good), Music(well done blitzblaster), Models(animation!) and the level constructure.

Regards,
beegee

-----------------------------
GenuineMotors.de

Thanks for you detailed response!

It was a lot of work to change camera controls now since no object has polygons on the back side!
Even with bigger camera view the level would (again) be smaller to avoid seeing the level borders...

If you don't like "Lise" you can change it, well maybe not because the input itnerface is in german, sorry. (I'm already on the teranslation, but it took me more than half an hour to make the code and translation for only a single dialogue, thus it'll really take some time.. )
To the attack speed (as in the first demo), it still has to be increaseable by higher stats, that's waht the Character Trainer NPC is for, select the second choice from the top (high end warrior stats and skills).

For the music, I already have some kind of BGM-control system in mind, but with only 2 sound tracks it's not really useful yet...

The controls can be redefined in the status ring, maybe you'll be able to do so if it is in english. You can set attacks or soemthing else on mouse buttons, but there will _never_ be movement through mouse click like in Diablo or Baldur's Gate, that's simply not the classical retro-style I intend.

But I'll keep in mind what you (and others) said, wheren there is a possibility to change something that can be changed and is not designed to be so (like controls) I may remind and re-read it!


Thanks beegee!

I improved the camera so often within the last year... even it now moves towards enemies when you get near them... I don't know if I can still get somethign out of it without breaking the laws of the system...

its not that i wont change the name. its just too silly to select a letter in a PC game. why not just entering your name via the keyboard?
besides, i mean with zooming out that it looks a little wider. that also makes the models prettier becaus they look rounder;-)

Because it is "classical"....

Zooming out means I'd have to set the level borders further inside so that you still can't see the end of the level.

This is not even my invention, I took the camera distance/ screen width compared to the player model size from another game where I never ever heared anyone crying about too few view range...

However I try to think about a possibility to, again, improve it, but I doubt I'll increase the view range itself. Maybe at least a little map?

hey shore,

first of all its amazing what you put together alone.

now my first impressions after 15 minutes.

- the controls and menu is not starter friendly it may be easy for someone playing chinese rpgs but not for the average gamer. i would advise you to make it much simpler! it took me 5 minutes to figure out how to equip the sword.

-the overall style is too milky, i dont know how to describe but i miss nice colors, it looks like everything is foggy and dark. but thats just my opinion, the world doesnt look friendly it gives me the feeling the world is evil and cold. but maybe thats what you intend!

-some of your bitmaps have black pixels at the borders this looks not good.

-are u using triplex mp3.dll ? i did that too and after the betatest i had lots of people complaining that the game quit with an error in mp3.dll and i dont think that was my fault. triplex didnt respond to my pm maybe he is busy but you should test this. this was the reason my game wasnt running on some computers, because after i switched to gamestudios functions with the additional ogg filter it worked for those people who had problems.

-the intro is too long and confusing with the hard cuts from the ship to the island. you should spread that out so the player remembers sometimes when he is already playing.

-i have some bugs with the screensize. the bottom of the screen is cut like widescreen whereas the top looks like fullscreen. at the bottom black border there are artefacts from strings.

well all in all thumbs up. you should recruit some additional artists. i like your style apart from that i think its not colorful. this could be a very, very good game if you keep on working and make it more appealing for the average gamer. good luck

Thanks for the detailed response ulf!

I really often asked the people who complained about the ring menu, how they'd improve it, sad but true I never got any resonses after I asked, maybe you have some advice? (nevertheless I'm still shocked that so few people know secret of mana theese times... )

Interesting, nobody said this about the colors before, but please forgive me, it is not easy to design a colored game if you're partially color blind...
Maybe there really was fog? It gets foggy when it'S about to start raining and so?

Do you remember, where you saw the black pixels?

Yes I do use tripple_x's mp3.dll, but until now there were no problems with it as far as I know.


The intro, for all who didn't realize it, is the _character creation_. What means that the decissions you make in the past have influce on the character _today_. With that I combined boring character creation with the chance to bring the character close to the player right from the beginning!


Maybe you can show a screen of your screen problems?
But I doubt I could fix something there because here it works and I hear that the first time..


I'm glad you give me such responses, I can collect what you said and try to improve it in the next demo as far as possible!

the black pixels where in a cast menu, the rose was what i remember. it didnt look good.

the screen problems may have to do with my monitor/gfx card/driver because i have problems with 3dgs apps in fullscreen.

i would make a simple drag and drop approach like in most of todays rpgs. take diablo for example and you know what i mean.
your menu style is outdated. it may be cool for consoles but a6 games dont run on consoles anyway.

with the color i mean the overall coloring, its moody but its a sad mood in my mind. the colors are just not colorful maybe that has to do with your blindnes, ask some other people about that. maybe its just my optionion. but you get a cool dark mood with that.

iam glad i could help you a little bit. greetings

So that's the point with the menu, the people want simple 0-8-15 drag 'n drop menus!

I don't know if you can speak of outdated for a menu, Tomb Raider had such a menu, too (but I don't know how it was controlled I have to admit).

So if that's the point I have to tell you guys that this won't be changed, it belongs to the classical/ retro style of the game, as the name input does and as the ISO-view or the controls do.

This is the overall design pattern of Dragonrise.

I love thos old games, they were fun to play, much more as all the crap today, that's why I even stick to those design techniques, I'm sorry for all of you who have missed those times!


btw. I'll look for the rose when I got time!

Oh great!

2nd demo now also runs on my PC.
I only took a look at the intro for now - i felt taken back to old console times.
I'll play more later.

Keyboad controls are cooool (like that - really) - but why WASD as default layout?
And I think the messages windows appear a bit... "heavy"... maybe some transparency could help.

shore, its your decision about the menu but you asked i think toombraider was also released for playstation 1:1 so thats why it had this controls because it was meant for consoles too.
older games often couldnt make use of the mouse. most people simply didnt have one so those games only used keyboard.
well its just my opinion, i would like a more intuitive approach with the mouse a lot more.

I think it's better that I write in German so I can write better what i mean.
The game texts are also in German, so it doesn't matter:

Also ich habe heute zwei andere klassische Rollenspiele gespielt eins davon in 2D (VampiresDawn2/2006) und das andere in 3D(TechnoMage/2001) . Und dabei fielen mir noch ein paar weitere Vorschläge ein.

Hauptmenü:
Erstens dein Spiel hat überhaupt kein Hauptmenü. Das typische an solchen klassischen Spielen ist doch das bei denen das Hauptmenu immer gleich aussieht. Also bei den zwei die ich gespielt habe. Und das sieht wie folgend aus:
- Titel des Spieles, also Logo
- Hintergrund: irgendein Bild, das zum Thema des Spieles passt; sollte kein Screenshot von dem Spiel sein
- Menüpunkte zum Auswählen sind folgende: Spielen, Spiel laden, Beenden

Intro:
Vor diesem Menü kommt wirklich nichts anderes davor. Nach dem Spielstart kann man noch den Schwierigkeitsgrad einstellen. Muss aber nicht. Danach kommt eine Aufforderung ob man das Intro ansehen oder überspringen will. Im Intro kommt ein kurze einleitende Szene, um was es in dem Spiel handelt. Dies wird aber erst als letztes ins Spiel eingebaut. Kann aber auch anders sein. In dem Intro soll dann folgendes vorkommen. Ein Beispiel: Vampires Dawn handelt um Vampire. Und in blutroter Schrift werden Fragen an den unwissenden Spieler gestellt: Ein heiliger Kreuzzug zur Vernichtung aller Vampire brachte Licht in die Nacht. War dass das Ende? War dass der Anfang? War das Böse besiegt? Wird es jemals enden ? Vampire. Was waren sie? Was sind sie? Und was werden sie? Jeder Satzteil wird einzeln kurz angezeigt. Somit weis man schon das gröbste, ohne irgendwelche lange Textpassagen gelesen zu haben. In dem 3D wurde ein kurzer Trailer gezeigt, was aber vollkommen unmöglich für Hobbyentwickler ist. Bei dir wäre das zum Beispiel ein kleines Intro über die fabelhaften und äußerst wenig bekannte Drachen.

Tutorial:
Danach befindet man sich zum Beispiel in einem Raum wieder in der vielleicht eine andere Person ist. Natürlich weiß man immer in solchen klassischen Varianten man muss raus kommen. Das hast du natürlich auch gewusst. Doch am Anfang solcher Spiele wird entweder im Spiel die Steuerung erklärt oder einfach kurz die Tastenbelegung angezeigt. Zum Beispiel man steht vor einer Tür,Schrank,Kiste und will sie öffnen. Oder man steht vor einer Person mit der man reden kann. Wie man die Karte öffnet, das Equipment-Menü aufmachen kann oder den Questlog anschauen kann.

Dialoge:
Die Dialoge werden folgend angezeigt: Unten im Bildschirm; immer nur einer; die Schriftzüge erscheinen viel schneller; ein Sound habe ich bis jetzt noch nie gehört; es wird meistens dazu ein Blendeffekt eingesetzt was bedeuten soll die Buchstaben erscheinen „langsam“. Im Dialog wird auf der linken Seite ein Bild von der sprechenden Person angezeigt; der Name der Person wird über dem Text mit einer anderen Farbe angezeigt;

Steuerung:
Eigentlich immer wird diese Steuerung bei solchen RPG’s benutzt:
Pfeiltasten zum Bewegen; X- und Y-Taste zum Drehen des Pan-Winkels des Players, Leertaste und Enter(!) zum Lesen eines Dialogs, beliebige Taste zur Aktion(Strg), M zur Minikarte und Q zum Questlog.

Minikarte/Questlog:
Diese beiden Features werden meistens auf ein Pergamentpapier angezeigt. Im Questlog steht genau drin was man tun soll (z.B. zu Onkel XY gehen). Danach schaut man auf der Karte nach und sieht rechts neben der Karte eine Legende auf der das Symbol des Ortes und daneben der Name angezeigt wird. In diesem Beispiel: Onkels XY Haus. Die Karte ist aber nicht zwingende notwendig, doch in solchen Spielen sehr nützlich. Man könnte auch späteren Spielverlauf nur zuvor entdeckte Stellen auf der Karte anzeigen. Das Questlog hakt Aufgaben ab, die man schon erledigt hat. Und nicht so umständlich wie du dies machst also mit solchen Einträgen.

Interface:
Das Menübild sieht folgend aus. Unten rechts im Bild ist eine kleine Lebensanzeige(rot) daneben die Manaanzeige(blau). Die Gegenstände welche man sieht werden in Nähe eigentlich nur in Point&Click-Adventures angezeigt, aber wenn du meinst in RPG’s soll es sowass auch geben. Na gut. Wo man sich befindet wird nur bei Wechsel einer Ortsfläche angezeigt. Also nie beim verlassen eines einzelnen Raumes.

So das wärs dann mal fürs erste. Später kommt noch ein kleiner anderer Teil, falls mir noch nicht alles dazu eingefallen ist.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
beegee

-------------------------------------
GenuineMotors.de

I'm glad it works for you now Firoball!

Nice that someone likes the feeling of old console games...

Why WASD?
At laest because it is the most practical development setting.


Hey ulf, I always thought, that there are problems with the menu itself, that I should change things there. But that it is an overall design question didn't come into my mind (ok I don't know what the other think exacly because you're the only one who aswered yet about it!).

But it is good to know, no question!

However I won't change it to the standart menu because it wouldn't fit into the design pattern but nevertheless I'm open for ideas to improve the menu as it is intended.


Edit:

hui beegee wow danke das ist super!

Also ich habe auch sehr viele alte RPGs angeschaut um mir gewisse Elemente abzukupfern.
Und ich muss sagen, einige der von dir erwaehnten Dinge plante ich sogar.

Ich hatte mir auch bereits GEdanken ueber ein Intro mit Drachen getrennt vom Spiel selbst gedacht.

Warum es noch kein Hauptmenue gibt ist eigentlich recht simpel:
Es wuerde beim entwickeln unglaublich stoeren, das ist unter anderem ein Grund weswegen auch noch kein speichern implementiert ist (der aufmerksame Spieler wird bemerkt haben, dass dies im Gasthaus moeglich sein wird, eben wie in den Konsolenspielen).

Ansonsten werde ich mir die ganzen Punkte auf jeden Fall mal vormerken, da sind echt interessante Sachen dabei, die muss ich alle mal durchdenken und abwaegen (diese Eingabeerklaerung hatte ich auch irgendwann mal geplant gehabt) ob es sinn macht einzelne Dinge so umzusetzen, vielen dank!

I also found the controlls and UI unintuitive. I'm not used to these old-school games, but I understand your decision to stick with it. It might be a good idea to add some ingame hints, though.
For example:
-In the first dialog of Lise waking up, put a 'press space to continue' text in the lower left corner.
-When you first get to control your character put a 'Hint: use WASD keys to move your character.' in the same place.
-When entering your name, explain the controlls (I didn't know I had to use space here, so I got a little annoyed). I also found it to be slow in response; sometimes just tapping the space key doesn't add the letter, you have to actually keep it pressed. This also added to the confusion because I thought space was not the right key because nothing happened when I tapped it.
-Maybe, when encountering the first enemy, explain how to fight it.

Now, I know I could have known all this from reading the manual, and these problems are only minor (anyone who has used a pc before can figure it out), but it can still be anoying. If the player is constantly annoyed by minor things it won't be fun. Many players, including me, are too lazy to read manuals, and rather get straight to the action. I think that by improving these things, your game will feel much more polished.

I really like your ideas exessuss, they are easy to build in and could improve understanding it a lot, thanks.

I just remembered, that there is actually a map in the Benezos Inn, the way there is explained at the beginning from "Breg":

still haven't managed to take ome time and play further than the intro. Last time I wanted to take the time I accidentially selected "exit" and the game exited right without any confirmation. I was just done with the introduction part... doh.

Back to the menu:
On my system they are too fast. I tend to skip the option I originally wanted to select because it switches so fast to the next one. You could improve that a bit.
I haven't played Secret of Mana much, but I wondered why I can equip weapons directly from the main menu whereas for armor I have to go to a sub menu first.

The bear hunting was a bit strange to play. I wondered how the game would play if double tipping a directio key enables running isntead of Shift. Maybe it's worth a try.

I found some minor mistakes in the texts - you should check them again.

But now to the positive things. This game is really fun and I like what I've seen so far. You came further than msot people here trying to create such kind of game alone. That deserves a "well done"!
The flair of a console classic is there, so keep on improving the game.
I think when taking a look at the proposals odne in this thread and picking some of them, you can make a really great game.

I will report again once I played more than the ship wreck sequence.

Thanks!

You're right, I should make a "security confimration" before exiting the game. I'll put it on my to-do list.

I don't think the menu rotation speed can depend on the system, it's framerate-compensated (MY.PAN += 30 * MY._Drehrichtung * TIME).
Just don't hold down the button until you reached the object you want to reach, because it'll rotate to the next one automatically after you hit it once.

In Secret of Mana weapons and armor rings are made the same. The reason is quite easy:
You have to change weapons much more often than armoy.
If armory was part of the main menu it was to big to roll through, thus therfore armory is collected in a sub-menu.

I don't exactly know what mistakes, some things are my... "personal style of writing" when I don't write texts for the university or something like that.
For example "sz" or "ss" instead of "ß" or "ae" instead of "ä".

After the story part on the ship there are only ~two litte quests to solve in the area of Benezos, but there you can play with all the technical features like different kinds of weapons against the enemies, charging attacks, casting spells, using skills, evading attack, stunning enemies, playing around with different character settings at the Trainer NPC ect.

Hello again!

Here comes the 2-language version of Dragonrise!

I just saved all im the cirtiques from you into a text file so that I can look them up later more easily.

During the last week I worked much on the translation and finished it yesterday.
Thus you're now able to select wheather english or german at game start (can be made changeable ingame later, too).

It was really really much text so I'm sure there may be mistakes here and there, maybe forgotten a newline or a letter, but I've looked through it and think it's quite ok so if you find something, please tell me.

The translation is more or less a context translation, maybe the "depth" is not the same as in german...

But I hope you'll now be able to use the menu or see the sense of the intro part!

A friend of mine said he'd prefer a demo where you really only have the stuff you can have at this time in the game, do you think so, too?


Beside the translation I fixed some minor stuff:
- Controls are mentioned in dialogue before you need them. (thanks beegee)
- At the name input screen you now can use arrow keys and enter as well. (thanks excessus)
- At the name input screen you can now immediatelly select a character after moving the cursor. (thanks excessus)
- Fixed two little string bugs in the menu.
- Fixed a little animation bug in the bear hunting sceene.


This time I don't have any new screens because there is nothing new to show beside the translation...

DRise2.exe - 29.8 MB selfextracting winrar archieve of the two-language-version

Ich hatte die letzte demo gespielt, also die vor dieser. In dem Level mit dem Schiffwrack waren die Texturen von allen Terrains schwarz.

Die Bärjagtszene musste ich bestimmt 10 mal spielen bis ich sie geschafft hatte. Weiß nicht ob das so gedacht ist. Achja, ich hatte es nur dadurch geschafft, da ich Geschick upgrades und sowas bekommen hatte, da ich anscheinend mit jedem Versuch mehr Erfahrungspunkte bekommen hatte.

Und ich hab nicht kapiert wie ich das Schwert ausrüste das ich am Schiffwrack gefunden hatte.

Die ganzen Zwischensequenzen (zB auf dem Schiff) sind etwas Langatmig. Wenn ich das Spiel zum zweiten mal Spiele würde ich das Ganze gerne abkürzen oder beschleunigen können.

Achja, das man da schon soviel Ausrüstung hat verdirbt den Spaß schon. Wäre besser wenn man das nur durch einen Cheat aktivieren kann. Dann setzt man es nur ein wenn man wirklich nicht weiter kommt.

Anonsten gute Arbeit.

Hello EX Citer, thanks for your comment.

Where is the black Terrain, in the last or the new demo? (maybe it makes no difference because I doubt I could do something against it... )

In general to the bear hunting sceene:

1. The sceene is _not_ intended to be easy.
2. You do _not_ have to kill the bear.
3. The bear _can_ be killed at the first try.
4. Thus to point 3 the sceene is there to _teach_ you how the battle system works, too.

To the weapon selection since everyone asks it over and over again:

- The ring menue functionality is shown at game start, there you can see that you have to go up/ down 2/ 3 times from the status ring to reach the weapon ring.
- In the weapon ring there is a description how to equip you weapon (press the action key twice)
- Thus when you open the ring menue to the status ring you equip the sword by pressing [up], [up], [action], [action]

To the ship/ story part:

Maybe the first demo made Dragonrise look like a hack'n'slay-game, but that's not my intention. I don't want to create a game like Diablo where you log in and start to smash enemies. I like it to be more like Final Fantasy, thus there will be much more story parts which keep up the game.

I'll think about your idea with the equipment cheat.

I hope this cleared up a bit?

Hello again!

Did anyone try a spell.. ?
Minutes ago I realized that there were some sprites and models missing so only the fire spell worked.

However I now included them and fixed a lot of other bugs through the last days.

I made my own savegame system so that it is not necessary any more to replay the ship-sceene all the time.
- There is one saved game included where you are in the Benezos Inn
- Clickin on an empty slot in the loading screen starts a new game, too.
- The game can be saved at the Benezos Inn when talking to the innkeeper.

One thing I did as well was the new message managemnt system. Before that the messages overwrode each other, they are now stored in a string-array and given out one after another so that you don't miss important messages any more.
In addition to that I made that message window slightly transparent so that you're still able to see you health/ mana/ power-bar through it. (Thanks for the idea Firoball!)

So maybe if you want to try some technical stuff and not only play the ship sceene it may be worth a try.
The saved game that is already there has only the items included that you can have at this point in the game, nevertheless there is still the character trainer NPC and some weapons at Benezos fishing dock.
To have some armor and spells you'd have to play the ship sceene once and then save at Benezos inn ("Sleeping Winds").


DRise2.exe - Selfextractin WinRar archieve (29.9 MB)

I tested Dragonrise and I think its very good but I have a little graphics proplem - look at these Screenshots:


I think I need a new graphic (or graphics? bad english!)card.

hmm... yes that's a problem of your graphic card.
It has to support PS V1.1 to be able to render the terrain correctly.

What you see is only the mask-texture which "tells" the shader, how the different textures have to be rendered on the terrain.

The reason why you see the sky/ water through it is because the alpha channel of the mask texture is used as shadow-map for the terrain.
When the shader runs correctly it disables alpha-blending so that there are no "holes" (the blue areas behind the stone or the church) in the ground and the z-Buffer can be rendered normally.

Indeed it is, I have the same problem with my GF 4000 MX.



I already told ya Shore, do you remember?

I told you about a terrain problem before. All terrains at the broken ship level where completely black. And I have pixel shader and vertex shader 2

DragonRise is a cool game
I hope it will become a great complete game.

Keep it up.

i think there must be a way to check if a card supports a shader model and use a different / lower terrain solution. e.g. normal terrain with one texture. i think the conitec multitextureing shader does these kind of checks.

So there are already 3 people with the shader problems?

I took the Multitexturing shader from the wiki, but I modified it to support shadowmapping in the alpah channel of the mask texture.

As I'm not really familiar with shader programming I commented everything out that I do not need, maybe there is a way to make it a one-texture-tiled-terrain for < PS 1.1 cards.

But I think that won't solve the problem you have Exciter?


Anyway, thanks for telling me the problem!

Edit:
I'm not sure if the shader still is 1.1/ 1.1 with my modifications, too. :-/

Edit2:
I made a fixed function shader now, which tiles the base-texture in one pass over the terrain. As far as I know, fixed functions work even with non-shader-hardware?
But it, of course, lacks some "features".

With VS 1.1 and PS 1.1:


Below one of them:


The new version is _not_ online yet!!!
I'll upload it when some other minor things are finished!

Hallo,
Mit Shader wirkts cool, allerdings passen die Grasmodelle nicht wirklich zum Terrain. Entweder passt du die Farben an, ich würde sie aber ganz weglassen und stattdessen Pilze oder anderes Grünzeugs ins Level packen.

Viel Spaß beim weiteren Entwickeln
Josef

Ja Pilze und so ist 'ne gute Idee.

Eben Modelle die von oben gut aussehen, das wird in den neuen Leveln auch recht simplel einzubinden sein da das Sektorsystem nun viel performance spart, habe auch dieses Benezos-Level schon mit Felsen und Baeumen kraeftig "nachgeruestet".

Aber bis sich hier nochmal gross was tut kann noch gut Zeit in's Land gehen.
Ich glaube das einzige, was ich in der letzten 6 Monaten gemacht habe ist dieser halbe-fluegellose-Drachenverschnitt.


Mein Browsergame nimmt noch recht viel Zeit in anspruch, will mir aber auch bald mal wieder etwas Zeit naehmen Dragonrise weiter zu entwickeln.



Ehm... wieso habe ich auf einmal eine andere UserID?

lol...
also ich habe mich glaub' nicht 2 mal angemeldet... whatever...

In english:
Seems like I somehow got 2 accounts. Oo
So there have been a lot of PMs in the second one I replied to now.