Hi guys! I haven't updated in a while, so I thought I'd let you know what I've been up to.
Recently we've been focusing on the first-time experience for the player. Previously, we've just dumped you into town with no real intro. Obviously that's not the ideal way for players to learn the game. TheAlmaity's been working on a pretty neat cutscene that we'll open the map with- it explains the origins of the starmon, gives a little bit of the backstory, etc.... After that you'll take control of your character, but we've streamlined the "tutorial section" to be much more clear. You head off to the research lab, pick your starmon, learn how to use the StarCenter, learn to capture starmon, and meet a few charactors along the way. The whole "tutorial" section should only take about 10 minutes or so, and after that you're pretty much free to explore. Obviously you can't go everywhere on the map from the start, but you're free to do sidequests, use the arena, explore, etc...
Another small, but important, change we made was to our spawning (and respawning) systems. Previously, we always started your charactor in town, but as the map grew larger we realized it was becoming annoying. Even though we do have a teleporter system that allows you zip around quickly, teleporting was just an extra unnecessary step you had to take every time you started the game (or died). Now, you'll start the game at the closest teleporter which you've previously unlocked. Since teleporters are usually found inside a StarCenter, you can easily heal your party or access the box as soon as you start. You can quickly warp to any other area. The same thing happens if you die- you'll wake up at the closest teleporter.
And finally, we've been working on the Rival. We've added him into the game and he works like you'd expect- he takes the starmon which is the type most effective against yours. His role in the alpha won't be quite as pronounced (his character will become more important following the final mission in the alpha), but you will get to see (and fight against) him.
Once we finish up the introduction quests and polish up the rest of the ones we've already got, our main focus will probably be bugfixing. This is going to be an Alpha test, so we don't expect everything to be perfect, but it needs to be reasonably stable & playable.
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Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Not as far as I know. If there is, it's probably something ridiculously large related to how the number is stored. I'm fairly certain there were bigger threads on mapster than this one, but I can't remember what they were.
First italian SC1 remake went far over 100 pages if I remember it right.
Some quests involving time travel would be cool. Especially if the terrain/zones look very different between time points.
Don't think we can do that unfortunately :( Especially if you expect us to change pathing as well. We'd need twice the space for each zone you can visit in another time period, and we're already low on space as it is.
Quests involving malfunctioning teleporters sending us to unexpected places
Easy to implement and therefore likely :) Although, on the other hand, this could potentially be annoying when you get ported somewhere else when you really want to do X :( Could maybe make the random chance check if you have fly available and ready so that you can just fly away instead (Although in that case you likely wouldn't be using the teleporter anyway as it costs a bit of money >.>)
Quests where scientists develop and hand out rare but awesome items. Maybe something that boosts exp gain, battle performance, or modifies pokeball catch chance
We have an idea for one already (involves pokeball/capture core) and I'm sure we can make more of these. I wanna make the lab guys more important than in the pokemon games (No more "Hey, help me with my research by using this thing and never hear from me again!". Stardex completion will actually do something.)
With the teleporter why npt foreshadow it? Maybe have a dialog when entering the starcenter saying "something doesn't feel right" or Bill just left after fixing the teleporter from kids bumping into it :P.
We've talked about doing something like as a random event. We'll have to see if come up with something good, but I really like the idea. :)
Being hinted there used to be an ancient robotic/high-tech civilization underground under some zone. Prob through a pic in a ruin. Maybe it's a station for some authority that came from where pokemon were originally.
We find and see a video recording (hint, cool cutscene) that shows an explorer that stumbled onto a very rare kind of starmon and the kind of technology it used
This whole "Ancient/Original Starmon" concept is something we'd like to flesh out throughout the story. There's going to be a mysterious character who's very interested in the origins of starmon, and you'll encounter him from time to time. So this type of stuff could totally happen, since we want to explore that area of the lore. Where did the starmon come from, why were they sent here, is there any "original" starmon technology left, etc...
I've wrapped up our new intro quest and fixed it up, and maity's written up our final "to-do" list for the alpha. So we've still got stuff that needs to be done, but we're closer than ever ^.^
I know we haven't posted screenshots recently- a lot of what we've been doing isn't very visual. But today we've got a screenshot of our new menu here! I just finished putting it in a minute ago, so it's not quite done. Looking at it now, I think I'm going to change the text alignment to be on the right instead of the left. But the art that TheAlmaity made is looking good ^.^
I would like to ask if hotkeys are going to be implemented for the menus. Also, if the menu bar is more important than the game world, put it on the left. If you would prefer that the players eyes rest on the main screen, leave the bar on the right. People's eyes scan from left at top, downwards, then right. At least, in the "west".
I would like to ask if hotkeys are going to be implemented for the menus. Also, if the menu bar is more important than the game world, put it on the left. If you would prefer that the players eyes rest on the main screen, leave the bar on the right. People's eyes scan from left at top, downwards, then right. At least, in the "west".
The menu bar looks quite nice.
Well, as you can see, some of the letters on the buttons in--
looks at screenshot again*
ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELDAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! YOU FORGOT TO COLOR THE HOTKEY LETTERS!!!
Also, the menu isn't permanently open - You press Q to open/close it. Stardex is D, Starmon menu is S, Bag is B (I think we should probably change that to G), Quests is S I think (Q is taken by the menu itself) and Im not sure if the others have hotkeys and what they are. Also, the menu doesn't need to be open for the hotkeys to work, and they don't get disabled if you enter any of the other "menus" (Starmon menu, stardex, bag, etc.), so you can just spam sdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsd and be constantly switching between starmon and stardex. Pressing the hotkey while the thing is open closes it. Nice and easy to use.
On the entire sci-fi thing:
I love sci-fi. But that doesn't mean I should shove it in everywhere :( The backstory of Starmon that I think I explained a while ago leaves a lot of sci-fi stuff possible, but the story arc for this specific map doesn't unfortunately - Any sci-fi stuff has to be incorporated in side stuff.
Before I go any further I also want to explain one thing again: Terrain constraints. We unfortunately are stuck with a 256x256 map, like everyone else. Yea, we've talked a lot about phasing and so on, but that doesn't give us that much freedom, not when it comes to terrain. Doodads are harder to target with triggers and data, there's barely any actions related to them and you can't just pick them out from a list, or save them in variables easily afaik. In addition to that, per-player pathing is practically impossible and would require massive workarounds and tons of work for even the smallest of areas. It's not worth the time.
This is why no time travelling will happen: It requires us to dynamically change the terrain. The other option would be to have a portion of the terrain duplicated, hidden in a corner and changed, which is easy, but we don't have the space for it, and if we do I'd rather use it for something else.
Back to sci-fi: I don't know how much we can do with the starmon backstory in this map. I already mentioned we'll have a drop pod site you can visit, that's something. There'll be the Wanderer/Watcher (Not sure which one to call him) Zelda mentioned, a character who seeks to find out more about the origins of the Starmon - He's disappointed that the world is only looking forward, "what can the starmon do?" but no one looks back and asks "why are they here?" - Everyone knows they were dropped from space, but people throughout all of time were so obsessed with starmon and what they could accomplish in partnership with them that they didn't even put much effort into exploring their own planet, let alone look up at the stars and wonder where the flying fuck they all came from, why, and why no one has showed up to pick them up yet.
If I can get someone to do some more modelling for me, he will be visually very interesting as well: He won't use capture cores/pokeballs to summon/recall his starmon, he'll have a unique, unobtainable starmon (that also won't get recorded by the Stardex) that won't fight, he'll demonstrate unique skills like being able to change the levels of his starmon, healing them on the spot, and I'll load him with more interesting and "different" things.
If this map becomes popular enough and people like how we handled the story, if we finish it completely, and if we decide to make a sequel, I definitely want to shift the focus more on the backstory and the Wanderer/Watcher, but until then I don't know how much sci-fi stuff I can add without it feeling forced or out of place. The zones and backstory don't really permit much sci-fi stuff to just be lying around.
it's 4:30 AM, I really need to go to bed, I probably missed a lot of points I wanted to make but I just can't keep writing at the moment. Feel free to throw arguments, questions and/or ideas at me, I'll do my best to answer everything tomorrow.
@TheAlmaity: Go You know... you can make your map larger, but it needs some work. All you have to do is to make everything that goes in the map smaller. If you reduce everything (from terrain, to doodads, to units...) to half the size they are now, you have quadrupled your map's size. By setting a custom camera you can make everything looks the same as before.
@TheAlmaity: Go You know... you can make your map larger, but it needs some work. All you have to do is to make everything that goes in the map smaller. If you reduce everything (from terrain, to doodads, to units...) to half the size they are now, you have quadrupled your map's size. By setting a custom camera you can make everything looks the same as before.
I've seen this approach but don't like it personally. I've never seen it executed in a way that didn't come with shenanigans in one form or another. Either the UI screws up, the camera move speed ends up being funny or something else pops up. The game wasn't meant for it and thus it's hard to make it work. We've already increased texture quality and zoomed the camera in and I'd rather not go much further.
I'm not sure how they did it, but I once played a map that when you got to the edge of the map, it had those lines that you see at the edge of melee maps sometimes when the map doesn't quite fit in the minimap. Then you crossed that, it brought you to a new map allowing them to have as much room as they could possibly want. I don't know what the map was, but it was like a campaign style map. I guess they could have used mods to do that.
The point is, if you could figure out how to do this, you'd have unlimited room in your map.
This is just my opinion but it's more interesting having very different environments to travel through. Instead of having most of the map as zones maybe trade some out for reusable caves/ruins/warehouses? It also doesn't make sense for a magma filled area next to an ocean next to something else wacky :P. That seems like a very unnatural environment.
Well, there is sort of a 'hemisphere'... it's not like I'm throwing down volcanos next to glaciers and lush forests. The zones also intertwine at the borders; there's no real "zone X ends and zone Y begins" - you'll see the tree types, textures and plants flow over gradually.
I'm not sure how they did it, but I once played a map that when you got to the edge of the map, it had those lines that you see at the edge of melee maps sometimes when the map doesn't quite fit in the minimap. Then you crossed that, it brought you to a new map allowing them to have as much room as they could possibly want. I don't know what the map was, but it was like a campaign style map. I guess they could have used mods to do that.
Sounds like this was a singleplayer map. For singleplayer effects like these are easy; we could've made every zone a map of its own if we wanted to and simply carry over hero/unit stats (similar to the WarCraft 3 expansion's Orc campaign with Rexxar for those who remember). For a multiplayer map, there is no map carry-over.
I'm not saying we don't have room for those :p I'm saying we don't really have much room for more than those (Like an alternative time-travel version of a zone)
We could make everything smaller I guess. Cliffs are a bit of an issue, but we don't use them much. The thing is, as Moz has said, we have enough space to do what we planned, but that's about the limit. Going back and changing everything for a smaller scale would be an enormous amount of work now, and Moz would have to re-do everything he already did, and his time is pretty limited with his job so I'd rather not have him start all over again. With the current plans, everythings fine. I'm just saying that in case of suggestions, we're very limited if something requires terrain changes - They can't be done dynamically without being too much trouble, and we likely won't have the extra space for it, and if we do there's better things to add than a one-time "zone" for a single quest, like maybe another battle arena so that we can support more players.
Instead of having most of the map as zones maybe trade some out for reusable caves/ruins/warehouses?
Not sure what you mean by "reusable". We can reuse the zones - The wild starmon are all under level 30 in most zones, but obviously the zones will be used later on for quests of all levels. You'll revisit the places when necessary.
@fishy77: Go
Not sure what method you're talking about, but all the methods I can think of that have such an effect don't work in multiplayer. We need all players to be able to do everything at the same time
Honestly I'm not sure where this conversation is going. We don't have map space issues as long as we stick to our current plan - The map isn't too small for what we want to make, the map is too small if we want to take all of your suggestions that require more terrain work. There are probably workarounds that can help with all that, but they're time consuming and might not even be worth the effort. If we have space left over once we're done we can find ways to use it, like additional battle arenas or a small zone used for a small quest or two.
Trieve suggested two things that would require a lot of terrain work (Time travel and an alternate universe) and I just reminded everyone that we don't have space for such stuff. We've got space for the planned zones, we can put a lot of quests into those zones, but we don't have space to add zones that exist for the sake of a single quest.
I guess I might come over somewhat pessimistic when talking about our terrain limitations, but I think we've got enough space, we just shouldn't plan on adding more things. Once the terrain is done, then I'll be able to say with certainty whether or not we can do any more, but until then I'll probably answer with a "probably not" if asked to do something that requires a large chunk of terrain just for itself.
It also doesn't make sense for a magma filled area next to an ocean next to something else wacky :P. That seems like a very unnatural environment.
Aren't most volcanoes in/near oceans anyway? That particular example doesn't really strike me as odd.
But here's how the zones look: Middle of the map is grassy/foresty mostly. In the north we've got the cave and mountains taking up most of it, and since the mountains are relatively high they're pretty cold and snowy. The top right corner of the map is currently empty and will probably be used for battle arenas. Otherwise it'll probably be something grassy/foresty as well.
The bottom third of the map is more dry/sandy: Beach, rocky-pre-desert-area, actual really hot and dry desert, volcano in the bottom right corner.
I've been distracted way too much while writing this post, I have no idea what I covered and what I didn't >.> I guess I'll just leave it like this.
EDIT: So about two hours ago I hit post and then left the room. Turns out someone else posted before I was done. Well, here's my post 2 hours late...
A) We're going to make most buildings enterable. As in you can see them from the outside, go in through the door, and do stuff inside. No teleportation or anything involved.
B) There's some planned randomness involved. I think the Desert was planned to have some randomization (correct me if I'm wrong, Maity), as is one specific layer of cave. Either way, the two zones that will likely involve most grinding (desert and cave) are HUGE and you shouldn't become bored with the terrain any time quick there.
@Mozared: Go Nice to hear that. I only suggested making things smaller because I thought this map could benefit from it, but I understand this is something that needs to be planned from start. There are lots of ideas going on and if they were all added to the map the standard pokemon zones and routes wouldn't be enough.
I'd like to add a quick note regarding suggestions- Suggestions are great, and we legitimately read and consider all of them. I really like suggestions. But at the same time, we've got to be really careful of feature creep. The original "target date" for the game's full release was right about now; but the original vision of the game did not include any type of story (it was just trainers, wild battles, and grinding). Had we stuck with the original plan, we'd be just about on track; After all, most of the main engine is finished. But because we decided to add in a large story (among countless other things) to make the game great, we've had to push things back significantly. So we need to draw the line at some point and say "This is all we can do, if we try and put in everything we'll literally never finish this". And again, that's not to say we don't want your suggestions. You guys really wanted 2v2's, so we decided to redo most of the combat engine to support them. I'm extremely happy you guys made that suggestion, because the game is much better with 2v2's. But it did take us a good month or so to add that, so we're one month behind where we would have been otherwise (and each additional feature pushes us back more).
Onto more relevant news....Unfortunately, I feel like I need to mention a recent problem we've encountered. The latest patch has created a bug with for-loops. As you might imagine, a map of this scale uses quite a lot of those. So when all of a sudden for loops don't work properly....Well, you've got a big problem. Suffice to say it looks like we need the problem to be patched on blizzard's end before things will be back to normal. In the mean time, we'll continue to work on the map(moz can still terrain, maity can still create starmon, and I can work on a lot of systems that are unaffected), but it likely won't be playable until this is resolved by blizzard. I realize it comes at a super frustrating time, especially since we're so close to being able to start the alpha. With any luck, one of the devs can squeeze this into the next patch for us, and we'll have everything else ready to go by then.
What kind and how much randomisation? Something as simple as rearranging the 'maze-like' layout would make it very interesting for me.
We haven't done it yet, so we can't really share specifics. We tossed around the idea of a cave where it generates a maze-like layout each time you play the game. For the desert, we were thinking of making some pre-built sets of ruins, and having them placed randomly around the desert. So wandering around the desert may lead you to find some ancient ruin or artifact that wasn't there before. But again, we haven't put it in yet. The desert-style randomization should probably prove easier to add, so it would probably be first. We wanted to do some interesting things with the desert to make it feel particularly harsh- sandstorms frequently cover the area, which will obscuring your vison and affect battles. Anywhere inside the desert you can be attacked (instead of just high grass, for example), and you might see vicious starmon wandering around hunting for inexperienced travelers.
Btw Maity, I'm not trying to shove as much sci-fi into your map as possible but the more quest stories that are, the more interesting for ppl like me. Maybe you'd like to share (clearly) what constraints you have and I'll try and come up with ideas that work for you?
Any suggestions are great. Sorry if I sounded rude or annoyed :( Just explaining why certain suggestions can't come in.
The limitations are, well... Kind of vague/simple? There's so many things that can be suggested that it's hard to make non-vague "rules" :p I'll list a few:
Little to no terrain changes. We can add a small hut and a campfire and such really small things, stuff that you can just shove into a corner of a zone and be done with. We can't do large buildings or entire zones. The less space we use with one quest the more we have for the next one.
needs to "Fit in". For example, why would we make the player time travel? It's a pretty weird thing to happen. But, for example, the lore of Mortessus (Lich/Ghost thingy) states that some of them are said to be old enough to remember times before they dropped onto this planet, so we could have one of those telepathically give you a sort of "flashback" and show you the past.
Time and effort. Is the idea too complicated? Is it worth spending so much time on it instead of more but simpler things?
So yeah, a basic time travel suggestion kinda broke all three :p But lets say you suggested an NPC who said he couldn't travel much, but would like to see the world and asks you to take photographs of certain places for him: No terrain work, isn't out of place, and very easy to implement.
Based on the responses from you guys I think I'm going to stop posting in this thread for a while (after this post). I have no problem critiqueing something and providing feedback but I don't want to make you guys angry or hateful. I remembered watching a very insightful video from extra credits (youtube) that said devs need to resist telling off their testers.
You're not making us angry or hateful (Or me at least). I like discussing things, I really like posting here, and trust me you're not taking up much of my time (These may take a while to write, but if I'm writing em chances are I wasn't planning on working on the map that day or at least during that time, or I'm writing the post after I'm done for the day)
I also think playing the "devils advocate" and pointing out why we can't implement some suggestions is something I need to learn to do more on my own, and doing it in this thread helps :p
Sorry if I sound rude, harsh, angry or whatever :(
I wanna get into game design some day, and I really think this thread is a great learning experience for me.
If you don't mind me suggesting, maybe the current project is too ambitious? You guys are still in alpha so I'm hoping it's still ok to make massive changes or reworking of the map. If not then maybe things will have to be cut out. I don't want to sound like a jerk telling you guys what to do but I'm just trying to help.
It may be a bit too ambitious, and chances are it will end up more grindy than we want it to be simply because we'll not make as many side quests as we want to and won't be able to cover the entire path from level 5 to 100 with them.
Progress may seem slow at the moment, but Zelda was gone for a good two weeks, Mozared doesn't have that much time to terrain, and most of my work always needs Zelda to finish it (I make the UI art but have a hard time implementing it as I'm not familiar with most triggers in the map, etc.) and we're currently killing bugs and finishing up some systems. Zelda is able to make quests pretty quickly, and I will sooner or later be helping out with those as well, so once we have the game fully playable it's just a matter of us adding as much content as we can before we decide that we're done. We can always add more after release/beta - Personally I just want the storyline to be done with some side stuff that can help make it less grindy (Like some of the suggestions from way earlier in this thread about challenge battles and "endless mode")
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My personal opinion is that if you're claiming to have a pokemon like map (and want it to be really good), you should prob include most of what made it successful which was kinda, everything (because the formula didn't change much since first gen). The different places to explore, variety of battle strategies, mini-quests, and just about anything that made it feel like an open world RPG (which I think is why I like it). It's a bit hard to explain but everything in pokemon seems to fit nicely together making a very enjoyable play experience.
One of the main reasons we decided on pokemon as our project was because we had such a good foundation we could easily copy :p We tried being unique and innovative with RuneCraft, and I think we did pretty well there, and it was popular for a week or two, and everyone on map night loved it, but I guess it was too complicated for most people on the arcade.
You guys have focused alot on combat and catching starmon and while you've put good effort in (and prob beats how pokemon did them), it seems pretty dry on its own. I prefer more of an adventure game than a hardcore battle game (if I'm expecting pokemon). I really support the idea to progress or solve problems without conflict which Zelda said will be done. Cooping is also cool because pokemon didn't have it so you get thumbs up from me.
We definitely want nice and exploreable zones. Map size limit will obviously not allow as much as the actual pokemon games though :( Being able to make different choices will at least partially make up for that I think.
It's perfectly fine to not have the same things as pokemon had like a larger map area or more room for pokemon and that's why you guys are making a mini starcraft version. Also, you don't have to listen to me :P. I'm sure there's plenty of other people that would give better feedback than me so I'm sorry if I'm stressing you guys out. I guess I'm saying we wouldn't have a pokemon like game (or the same enjoyment) without caves, ruins, houses, and everything else we'd like to explore (including safari zones) plus all those little distractions from battles. This is just my opinion as someone who's loved pokemon so you don't have to follow it.
As I said above, you're not stressing us out :p
I've never really found the safari zones appealing personally :( I guess we can try adding one if we end up with enough space though.
About the desert: As Zelda said, we're gonna have sort of preset "chunks" that will be spawned in random locations. We can probably scale things down a bit here as well to make it larger. I'll try something very hard and time consuming - Creating sets of doodads attached to a single unit - which, if I can do it without wasting ages on it, would allow us to very easily re-randomize the desert without restarting the map.
We're gonna make it a very harsh environment and limit the time a player can spend in it. We haven't nailed down any specifics yet for this as we haven't begun working on it, but we've talked about it back when we first made the map layout. There's probably gonna be some sort of "dehydration" mechanic that's gonna prevent you from staying in the desert for too long. You'll probably be allowed to bring some consumables (like water bottles) with you to remove the penalties for a certain time. We'll probably make your starmon lose energy and health while you're dehydrated, maybe reduce your movement speed or even in-battle stats.
The reason for these penalties is to prevent players from just easily exploring the zone and getting all the rewards - It'll be over too quickly. But if we wear the player down while exploring we'll be forcing him back before he's done with everything, making it harder to get all the loot hidden in the desert. I think we may want to hide XP boosts there as well.
The wild starmon will also be seen wandering about and the longer you are in the desert the higher level they will get, and I think disabling the run mechanic after a certain point may be good as well. (You also won't be able to avoid all of them - We're using the Lurker model for one of the desert starmon, and that guy can burrow :p and we can simply have certain starmon just charge at you out of nowhere if you go too long without a fight.)
I don't know how well we'll manage this, but hopefully it'll allow people that like exploring and treasure hunting to keep replaying the desert without getting bored out of their minds.
A) Are you saying you guys can set up mini towns now? What about warehouses?
B) What kind and how much randomisation? Something as simple as rearranging the 'maze-like' layout would make it very interesting for me.
Btw Maity, I'm not trying to shove as much sci-fi into your map as possible but the more quest stories that are, the more interesting for ppl like me. Maybe you'd like to share (clearly) what constraints you have and I'll try and come up with ideas that work for you?
A) Yes and no. I can confirm that there's room for at least one 'town' outside of the main city - it's yet TBD how big that town is gonna end up, but it'll have at least a Starmon Centre and two houses. Other 'towns' aren't officially planned but will/might be added as there is room for it. There's also a route which has just a Starmon Centre and no additional buildings. We'll decide this more or less on the fly as we figure out what we need.
B) Maity will have to get back to you on this. I've left some room open for both these zones. I'm not sure if there'll be much (if any) randomization in the cave's lay-out, though it might be possible to change the looks slightly. We'll have to see. As for the Desert: I think the plan was to make it both huge and completely randomized in terms of doodads, though I'm not sure how that'd work and if that is at all/still the plan.
The Desert sounds Excellent with Hidden Treasures to be PLUNDERED and Starmon Charging at you, I hope if you use Water Bottles to prevent Dehydration there the same Water Bottles used to Heal Starmon.
Amazing you got More Buildings you can go into as before it was only gonna be for the Starcenters I believe, I only Thought up 8 Zones so if you have 12 Planned I look forward to exploring them all.
I've not posted much since I like the decisions you're making and just want you to get the MAP READY for ALPHA PLAYING, can't wait to PLAY this and GOOD LUCK with the For Loops Issue. This might have the Solution for the For Loops LOOP Changes in Patch 2.0.10
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Blizzard Fan since Starcraft. The Single Player story is AMAZING IMO, I can't wait for the Expansions. In Warcraft 3 I only enjoy the Custom Maps scene (& Blizzards...
We made lots of progress today. We fixed a whole bunch of little bugs with the battle system and the in-battle UI, and added new abilities for the starter starmon. We also got the rival working properly, and added him into the existing quests. We finished redoing the introductory quests, and the "tutorial battle" is now much more clear.
The Desert sounds Excellent with Hidden Treasures to be PLUNDERED and Starmon Charging at you, I hope if you use Water Bottles to prevent Dehydration there the same Water Bottles used to Heal Starmon.
I used to play a lot of Runescape back in the day, and there was this desert which partially inspired the one we're planning for starmon. I'm not sure if any of you played as well, but after you passed the border into the desert, you would start to get thirsty over time. If you ran out of water, you would begin to get weaker until finally dying. We'll likely make the desert more harsh the longer you spend in it exploring as well. It'll prevent you from just running through and checking all the spots for nice loot, and also make it a really cool & unique zone.
I've not posted much since I like the decisions you're making and just want you to get the MAP READY for ALPHA PLAYING, can't wait to PLAY this and GOOD LUCK with the For Loops Issue.
Thanks ^.^
Except for the for-loops issue, we're very close. I need to make a few tweaks to one dialog to make it work properly in multiplayer, add a few more moves which aren't fully working, and polish up a few wierd issues with a quests. Moz is almost finished terraining our powerplant zone, and maity should be throwing together a few final things. We'd likely have had all of this wrapped up within a week or two, but now we'll need got to wait for blizzard to hotfix this bug >.>
Unfortunately, there isn't really a quick solution to the for-loops issue, except to go to each loop and either change it to a while loop, or manually lower the variable by 1 after it terminates. The problem lies in the way the compiler translates GUI triggers into actual galaxy code. If Blizzard says that this was intended for some reason (which I doubt, they've stated that they don't want to break compatibility with old maps) it's not like the map's totally ruined- it just means I'll have to go through and fix them all. But I'm waiting to hear a response before I touch anything. After all, if I "fix" the loops by lowering them all by 1, and then Blizzard patches them back to the old way, we've got the same problem again ^.^
Anyways, we appreciate all of your guys's support and patience. We realize we've had to keep pushing things back, and this recent patch hasn't helped much. Rest assured, when the alpha finally starts, we'll be contacting all of you to get things set up. ^.^ With any luck, the next phase of development (Adding content) will go much more quickly, since adding quests is a whole lot faster than creating the engine to run them.
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Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Just an idea, but if you reference other games, they use a fly ability to teleport to other towns. If you want a teleport in your map it would be pretty simple. The revive ability in my map War of Duality (WoD) has a similar concept that it has to target a specific structure (for me it's a town hall). You can use validators to check for this.
I'm looking forward to playing this whenever it comes out.
Have you tried contacting Blizzard about the For Loops, or are you waiting for a public announcement? You might get your answers quicker if they are talking to just you, not the world as a whole.
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Hi guys! I haven't updated in a while, so I thought I'd let you know what I've been up to.
Recently we've been focusing on the first-time experience for the player. Previously, we've just dumped you into town with no real intro. Obviously that's not the ideal way for players to learn the game. TheAlmaity's been working on a pretty neat cutscene that we'll open the map with- it explains the origins of the starmon, gives a little bit of the backstory, etc.... After that you'll take control of your character, but we've streamlined the "tutorial section" to be much more clear. You head off to the research lab, pick your starmon, learn how to use the StarCenter, learn to capture starmon, and meet a few charactors along the way. The whole "tutorial" section should only take about 10 minutes or so, and after that you're pretty much free to explore. Obviously you can't go everywhere on the map from the start, but you're free to do sidequests, use the arena, explore, etc...
Another small, but important, change we made was to our spawning (and respawning) systems. Previously, we always started your charactor in town, but as the map grew larger we realized it was becoming annoying. Even though we do have a teleporter system that allows you zip around quickly, teleporting was just an extra unnecessary step you had to take every time you started the game (or died). Now, you'll start the game at the closest teleporter which you've previously unlocked. Since teleporters are usually found inside a StarCenter, you can easily heal your party or access the box as soon as you start. You can quickly warp to any other area. The same thing happens if you die- you'll wake up at the closest teleporter.
And finally, we've been working on the Rival. We've added him into the game and he works like you'd expect- he takes the starmon which is the type most effective against yours. His role in the alpha won't be quite as pronounced (his character will become more important following the final mission in the alpha), but you will get to see (and fight against) him.
Once we finish up the introduction quests and polish up the rest of the ones we've already got, our main focus will probably be bugfixing. This is going to be an Alpha test, so we don't expect everything to be perfect, but it needs to be reasonably stable & playable.
First italian SC1 remake went far over 100 pages if I remember it right.
I was the first to propose that! Nice ideas ;-)
Don't think we can do that unfortunately :( Especially if you expect us to change pathing as well. We'd need twice the space for each zone you can visit in another time period, and we're already low on space as it is.
Easy to implement and therefore likely :) Although, on the other hand, this could potentially be annoying when you get ported somewhere else when you really want to do X :( Could maybe make the random chance check if you have fly available and ready so that you can just fly away instead (Although in that case you likely wouldn't be using the teleporter anyway as it costs a bit of money >.>)
We have an idea for one already (involves pokeball/capture core) and I'm sure we can make more of these. I wanna make the lab guys more important than in the pokemon games (No more "Hey, help me with my research by using this thing and never hear from me again!". Stardex completion will actually do something.)
We've talked about doing something like as a random event. We'll have to see if come up with something good, but I really like the idea. :)
This whole "Ancient/Original Starmon" concept is something we'd like to flesh out throughout the story. There's going to be a mysterious character who's very interested in the origins of starmon, and you'll encounter him from time to time. So this type of stuff could totally happen, since we want to explore that area of the lore. Where did the starmon come from, why were they sent here, is there any "original" starmon technology left, etc...
I've wrapped up our new intro quest and fixed it up, and maity's written up our final "to-do" list for the alpha. So we've still got stuff that needs to be done, but we're closer than ever ^.^
I know we haven't posted screenshots recently- a lot of what we've been doing isn't very visual. But today we've got a screenshot of our new menu here! I just finished putting it in a minute ago, so it's not quite done. Looking at it now, I think I'm going to change the text alignment to be on the right instead of the left. But the art that TheAlmaity made is looking good ^.^
I would like to ask if hotkeys are going to be implemented for the menus. Also, if the menu bar is more important than the game world, put it on the left. If you would prefer that the players eyes rest on the main screen, leave the bar on the right. People's eyes scan from left at top, downwards, then right. At least, in the "west".
The menu bar looks quite nice.
Well, as you can see, some of the letters on the buttons in--
ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELDAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! YOU FORGOT TO COLOR THE HOTKEY LETTERS!!!
Also, the menu isn't permanently open - You press Q to open/close it. Stardex is D, Starmon menu is S, Bag is B (I think we should probably change that to G), Quests is S I think (Q is taken by the menu itself) and Im not sure if the others have hotkeys and what they are. Also, the menu doesn't need to be open for the hotkeys to work, and they don't get disabled if you enter any of the other "menus" (Starmon menu, stardex, bag, etc.), so you can just spam sdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsd and be constantly switching between starmon and stardex. Pressing the hotkey while the thing is open closes it. Nice and easy to use.
On the entire sci-fi thing:
I love sci-fi. But that doesn't mean I should shove it in everywhere :( The backstory of Starmon that I think I explained a while ago leaves a lot of sci-fi stuff possible, but the story arc for this specific map doesn't unfortunately - Any sci-fi stuff has to be incorporated in side stuff.
Before I go any further I also want to explain one thing again: Terrain constraints. We unfortunately are stuck with a 256x256 map, like everyone else. Yea, we've talked a lot about phasing and so on, but that doesn't give us that much freedom, not when it comes to terrain. Doodads are harder to target with triggers and data, there's barely any actions related to them and you can't just pick them out from a list, or save them in variables easily afaik. In addition to that, per-player pathing is practically impossible and would require massive workarounds and tons of work for even the smallest of areas. It's not worth the time.
This is why no time travelling will happen: It requires us to dynamically change the terrain. The other option would be to have a portion of the terrain duplicated, hidden in a corner and changed, which is easy, but we don't have the space for it, and if we do I'd rather use it for something else.
Back to sci-fi: I don't know how much we can do with the starmon backstory in this map. I already mentioned we'll have a drop pod site you can visit, that's something. There'll be the Wanderer/Watcher (Not sure which one to call him) Zelda mentioned, a character who seeks to find out more about the origins of the Starmon - He's disappointed that the world is only looking forward, "what can the starmon do?" but no one looks back and asks "why are they here?" - Everyone knows they were dropped from space, but people throughout all of time were so obsessed with starmon and what they could accomplish in partnership with them that they didn't even put much effort into exploring their own planet, let alone look up at the stars and wonder where the flying fuck they all came from, why, and why no one has showed up to pick them up yet.
If I can get someone to do some more modelling for me, he will be visually very interesting as well: He won't use capture cores/pokeballs to summon/recall his starmon, he'll have a unique, unobtainable starmon (that also won't get recorded by the Stardex) that won't fight, he'll demonstrate unique skills like being able to change the levels of his starmon, healing them on the spot, and I'll load him with more interesting and "different" things.
If this map becomes popular enough and people like how we handled the story, if we finish it completely, and if we decide to make a sequel, I definitely want to shift the focus more on the backstory and the Wanderer/Watcher, but until then I don't know how much sci-fi stuff I can add without it feeling forced or out of place. The zones and backstory don't really permit much sci-fi stuff to just be lying around.
it's 4:30 AM, I really need to go to bed, I probably missed a lot of points I wanted to make but I just can't keep writing at the moment. Feel free to throw arguments, questions and/or ideas at me, I'll do my best to answer everything tomorrow.
@TheAlmaity: Go You know... you can make your map larger, but it needs some work. All you have to do is to make everything that goes in the map smaller. If you reduce everything (from terrain, to doodads, to units...) to half the size they are now, you have quadrupled your map's size. By setting a custom camera you can make everything looks the same as before.
I've seen this approach but don't like it personally. I've never seen it executed in a way that didn't come with shenanigans in one form or another. Either the UI screws up, the camera move speed ends up being funny or something else pops up. The game wasn't meant for it and thus it's hard to make it work. We've already increased texture quality and zoomed the camera in and I'd rather not go much further.
On the flipside, I'm more positive about the room we have than Maity. There may not be space to add in all possible ideas, but we currently have... what is it Maity, 12? zones planned total and they should all fit in easily. Each of these zones will be relatively the same size as one in the original Pokémon games.
@Mozared: Go
I'm not sure how they did it, but I once played a map that when you got to the edge of the map, it had those lines that you see at the edge of melee maps sometimes when the map doesn't quite fit in the minimap. Then you crossed that, it brought you to a new map allowing them to have as much room as they could possibly want. I don't know what the map was, but it was like a campaign style map. I guess they could have used mods to do that.
The point is, if you could figure out how to do this, you'd have unlimited room in your map.
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Well, there is sort of a 'hemisphere'... it's not like I'm throwing down volcanos next to glaciers and lush forests. The zones also intertwine at the borders; there's no real "zone X ends and zone Y begins" - you'll see the tree types, textures and plants flow over gradually.
Sounds like this was a singleplayer map. For singleplayer effects like these are easy; we could've made every zone a map of its own if we wanted to and simply carry over hero/unit stats (similar to the WarCraft 3 expansion's Orc campaign with Rexxar for those who remember). For a multiplayer map, there is no map carry-over.
I'm not saying we don't have room for those :p I'm saying we don't really have much room for more than those (Like an alternative time-travel version of a zone)
@SoulFilcher: Go
We could make everything smaller I guess. Cliffs are a bit of an issue, but we don't use them much. The thing is, as Moz has said, we have enough space to do what we planned, but that's about the limit. Going back and changing everything for a smaller scale would be an enormous amount of work now, and Moz would have to re-do everything he already did, and his time is pretty limited with his job so I'd rather not have him start all over again. With the current plans, everythings fine. I'm just saying that in case of suggestions, we're very limited if something requires terrain changes - They can't be done dynamically without being too much trouble, and we likely won't have the extra space for it, and if we do there's better things to add than a one-time "zone" for a single quest, like maybe another battle arena so that we can support more players.
Not sure what you mean by "reusable". We can reuse the zones - The wild starmon are all under level 30 in most zones, but obviously the zones will be used later on for quests of all levels. You'll revisit the places when necessary.
@fishy77: Go Not sure what method you're talking about, but all the methods I can think of that have such an effect don't work in multiplayer. We need all players to be able to do everything at the same time
Honestly I'm not sure where this conversation is going. We don't have map space issues as long as we stick to our current plan - The map isn't too small for what we want to make, the map is too small if we want to take all of your suggestions that require more terrain work. There are probably workarounds that can help with all that, but they're time consuming and might not even be worth the effort. If we have space left over once we're done we can find ways to use it, like additional battle arenas or a small zone used for a small quest or two.
Trieve suggested two things that would require a lot of terrain work (Time travel and an alternate universe) and I just reminded everyone that we don't have space for such stuff. We've got space for the planned zones, we can put a lot of quests into those zones, but we don't have space to add zones that exist for the sake of a single quest.
I guess I might come over somewhat pessimistic when talking about our terrain limitations, but I think we've got enough space, we just shouldn't plan on adding more things. Once the terrain is done, then I'll be able to say with certainty whether or not we can do any more, but until then I'll probably answer with a "probably not" if asked to do something that requires a large chunk of terrain just for itself.
Aren't most volcanoes in/near oceans anyway? That particular example doesn't really strike me as odd.
But here's how the zones look: Middle of the map is grassy/foresty mostly. In the north we've got the cave and mountains taking up most of it, and since the mountains are relatively high they're pretty cold and snowy. The top right corner of the map is currently empty and will probably be used for battle arenas. Otherwise it'll probably be something grassy/foresty as well.
The bottom third of the map is more dry/sandy: Beach, rocky-pre-desert-area, actual really hot and dry desert, volcano in the bottom right corner.
I've been distracted way too much while writing this post, I have no idea what I covered and what I didn't >.> I guess I'll just leave it like this.
EDIT: So about two hours ago I hit post and then left the room. Turns out someone else posted before I was done. Well, here's my post 2 hours late...
@Trieva: Go
Two things:
A) We're going to make most buildings enterable. As in you can see them from the outside, go in through the door, and do stuff inside. No teleportation or anything involved.
B) There's some planned randomness involved. I think the Desert was planned to have some randomization (correct me if I'm wrong, Maity), as is one specific layer of cave. Either way, the two zones that will likely involve most grinding (desert and cave) are HUGE and you shouldn't become bored with the terrain any time quick there.
@Mozared: Go Nice to hear that. I only suggested making things smaller because I thought this map could benefit from it, but I understand this is something that needs to be planned from start. There are lots of ideas going on and if they were all added to the map the standard pokemon zones and routes wouldn't be enough.
I'd like to add a quick note regarding suggestions- Suggestions are great, and we legitimately read and consider all of them. I really like suggestions. But at the same time, we've got to be really careful of feature creep. The original "target date" for the game's full release was right about now; but the original vision of the game did not include any type of story (it was just trainers, wild battles, and grinding). Had we stuck with the original plan, we'd be just about on track; After all, most of the main engine is finished. But because we decided to add in a large story (among countless other things) to make the game great, we've had to push things back significantly. So we need to draw the line at some point and say "This is all we can do, if we try and put in everything we'll literally never finish this". And again, that's not to say we don't want your suggestions. You guys really wanted 2v2's, so we decided to redo most of the combat engine to support them. I'm extremely happy you guys made that suggestion, because the game is much better with 2v2's. But it did take us a good month or so to add that, so we're one month behind where we would have been otherwise (and each additional feature pushes us back more).
Onto more relevant news....Unfortunately, I feel like I need to mention a recent problem we've encountered. The latest patch has created a bug with for-loops. As you might imagine, a map of this scale uses quite a lot of those. So when all of a sudden for loops don't work properly....Well, you've got a big problem. Suffice to say it looks like we need the problem to be patched on blizzard's end before things will be back to normal. In the mean time, we'll continue to work on the map(moz can still terrain, maity can still create starmon, and I can work on a lot of systems that are unaffected), but it likely won't be playable until this is resolved by blizzard. I realize it comes at a super frustrating time, especially since we're so close to being able to start the alpha. With any luck, one of the devs can squeeze this into the next patch for us, and we'll have everything else ready to go by then.
We haven't done it yet, so we can't really share specifics. We tossed around the idea of a cave where it generates a maze-like layout each time you play the game. For the desert, we were thinking of making some pre-built sets of ruins, and having them placed randomly around the desert. So wandering around the desert may lead you to find some ancient ruin or artifact that wasn't there before. But again, we haven't put it in yet. The desert-style randomization should probably prove easier to add, so it would probably be first. We wanted to do some interesting things with the desert to make it feel particularly harsh- sandstorms frequently cover the area, which will obscuring your vison and affect battles. Anywhere inside the desert you can be attacked (instead of just high grass, for example), and you might see vicious starmon wandering around hunting for inexperienced travelers.
Any suggestions are great. Sorry if I sounded rude or annoyed :( Just explaining why certain suggestions can't come in.
The limitations are, well... Kind of vague/simple? There's so many things that can be suggested that it's hard to make non-vague "rules" :p I'll list a few:
So yeah, a basic time travel suggestion kinda broke all three :p But lets say you suggested an NPC who said he couldn't travel much, but would like to see the world and asks you to take photographs of certain places for him: No terrain work, isn't out of place, and very easy to implement.
You're not making us angry or hateful (Or me at least). I like discussing things, I really like posting here, and trust me you're not taking up much of my time (These may take a while to write, but if I'm writing em chances are I wasn't planning on working on the map that day or at least during that time, or I'm writing the post after I'm done for the day)
I also think playing the "devils advocate" and pointing out why we can't implement some suggestions is something I need to learn to do more on my own, and doing it in this thread helps :p
Sorry if I sound rude, harsh, angry or whatever :(
I wanna get into game design some day, and I really think this thread is a great learning experience for me.
It may be a bit too ambitious, and chances are it will end up more grindy than we want it to be simply because we'll not make as many side quests as we want to and won't be able to cover the entire path from level 5 to 100 with them.
Progress may seem slow at the moment, but Zelda was gone for a good two weeks, Mozared doesn't have that much time to terrain, and most of my work always needs Zelda to finish it (I make the UI art but have a hard time implementing it as I'm not familiar with most triggers in the map, etc.) and we're currently killing bugs and finishing up some systems. Zelda is able to make quests pretty quickly, and I will sooner or later be helping out with those as well, so once we have the game fully playable it's just a matter of us adding as much content as we can before we decide that we're done. We can always add more after release/beta - Personally I just want the storyline to be done with some side stuff that can help make it less grindy (Like some of the suggestions from way earlier in this thread about challenge battles and "endless mode")
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One of the main reasons we decided on pokemon as our project was because we had such a good foundation we could easily copy :p We tried being unique and innovative with RuneCraft, and I think we did pretty well there, and it was popular for a week or two, and everyone on map night loved it, but I guess it was too complicated for most people on the arcade.
We definitely want nice and exploreable zones. Map size limit will obviously not allow as much as the actual pokemon games though :( Being able to make different choices will at least partially make up for that I think.
As I said above, you're not stressing us out :p
I've never really found the safari zones appealing personally :( I guess we can try adding one if we end up with enough space though.
About the desert: As Zelda said, we're gonna have sort of preset "chunks" that will be spawned in random locations. We can probably scale things down a bit here as well to make it larger. I'll try something very hard and time consuming - Creating sets of doodads attached to a single unit - which, if I can do it without wasting ages on it, would allow us to very easily re-randomize the desert without restarting the map.
We're gonna make it a very harsh environment and limit the time a player can spend in it. We haven't nailed down any specifics yet for this as we haven't begun working on it, but we've talked about it back when we first made the map layout. There's probably gonna be some sort of "dehydration" mechanic that's gonna prevent you from staying in the desert for too long. You'll probably be allowed to bring some consumables (like water bottles) with you to remove the penalties for a certain time. We'll probably make your starmon lose energy and health while you're dehydrated, maybe reduce your movement speed or even in-battle stats.
The reason for these penalties is to prevent players from just easily exploring the zone and getting all the rewards - It'll be over too quickly. But if we wear the player down while exploring we'll be forcing him back before he's done with everything, making it harder to get all the loot hidden in the desert. I think we may want to hide XP boosts there as well.
The wild starmon will also be seen wandering about and the longer you are in the desert the higher level they will get, and I think disabling the run mechanic after a certain point may be good as well. (You also won't be able to avoid all of them - We're using the Lurker model for one of the desert starmon, and that guy can burrow :p and we can simply have certain starmon just charge at you out of nowhere if you go too long without a fight.)
I don't know how well we'll manage this, but hopefully it'll allow people that like exploring and treasure hunting to keep replaying the desert without getting bored out of their minds.
A) Yes and no. I can confirm that there's room for at least one 'town' outside of the main city - it's yet TBD how big that town is gonna end up, but it'll have at least a Starmon Centre and two houses. Other 'towns' aren't officially planned but will/might be added as there is room for it. There's also a route which has just a Starmon Centre and no additional buildings. We'll decide this more or less on the fly as we figure out what we need.
B) Maity will have to get back to you on this. I've left some room open for both these zones. I'm not sure if there'll be much (if any) randomization in the cave's lay-out, though it might be possible to change the looks slightly. We'll have to see. As for the Desert: I think the plan was to make it both huge and completely randomized in terms of doodads, though I'm not sure how that'd work and if that is at all/still the plan.
The Desert sounds Excellent with Hidden Treasures to be PLUNDERED and Starmon Charging at you, I hope if you use Water Bottles to prevent Dehydration there the same Water Bottles used to Heal Starmon.
Amazing you got More Buildings you can go into as before it was only gonna be for the Starcenters I believe, I only Thought up 8 Zones so if you have 12 Planned I look forward to exploring them all.
I've not posted much since I like the decisions you're making and just want you to get the MAP READY for ALPHA PLAYING, can't wait to PLAY this and GOOD LUCK with the For Loops Issue. This might have the Solution for the For Loops LOOP Changes in Patch 2.0.10
We made lots of progress today. We fixed a whole bunch of little bugs with the battle system and the in-battle UI, and added new abilities for the starter starmon. We also got the rival working properly, and added him into the existing quests. We finished redoing the introductory quests, and the "tutorial battle" is now much more clear.
I used to play a lot of Runescape back in the day, and there was this desert which partially inspired the one we're planning for starmon. I'm not sure if any of you played as well, but after you passed the border into the desert, you would start to get thirsty over time. If you ran out of water, you would begin to get weaker until finally dying. We'll likely make the desert more harsh the longer you spend in it exploring as well. It'll prevent you from just running through and checking all the spots for nice loot, and also make it a really cool & unique zone.
Thanks ^.^
Except for the for-loops issue, we're very close. I need to make a few tweaks to one dialog to make it work properly in multiplayer, add a few more moves which aren't fully working, and polish up a few wierd issues with a quests. Moz is almost finished terraining our powerplant zone, and maity should be throwing together a few final things. We'd likely have had all of this wrapped up within a week or two, but now we'll need got to wait for blizzard to hotfix this bug >.>
Unfortunately, there isn't really a quick solution to the for-loops issue, except to go to each loop and either change it to a while loop, or manually lower the variable by 1 after it terminates. The problem lies in the way the compiler translates GUI triggers into actual galaxy code. If Blizzard says that this was intended for some reason (which I doubt, they've stated that they don't want to break compatibility with old maps) it's not like the map's totally ruined- it just means I'll have to go through and fix them all. But I'm waiting to hear a response before I touch anything. After all, if I "fix" the loops by lowering them all by 1, and then Blizzard patches them back to the old way, we've got the same problem again ^.^
Anyways, we appreciate all of your guys's support and patience. We realize we've had to keep pushing things back, and this recent patch hasn't helped much. Rest assured, when the alpha finally starts, we'll be contacting all of you to get things set up. ^.^ With any luck, the next phase of development (Adding content) will go much more quickly, since adding quests is a whole lot faster than creating the engine to run them.
@Trieva: Go
Just an idea, but if you reference other games, they use a fly ability to teleport to other towns. If you want a teleport in your map it would be pretty simple. The revive ability in my map War of Duality (WoD) has a similar concept that it has to target a specific structure (for me it's a town hall). You can use validators to check for this.
I'm looking forward to playing this whenever it comes out.
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Ah, the Kharidian Desert. Now with randomization!
Have you tried contacting Blizzard about the For Loops, or are you waiting for a public announcement? You might get your answers quicker if they are talking to just you, not the world as a whole.