Are you sure in this for 100%? It is very important for me and I'm very trust on your answer.
If your map is private, only you can see it. Now, if you started the map lobby and then invited him to a game, I believe he would have a copy saved locally. But if you never invited him to play, and it really was private, there's no way he should be able to access the map. Now, it used to be possible to break the security on a locked & public map, but I'm not sure if that's still possible.
Did you create any custom dependencies/mods? If you made a dependency, and then uploaded THAT publicly, he would be able to get it even if the map itself was private.
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.
I contacted them directly, and they're looking into at the moment. I also did a bit of poking around the map, though, and it seems the problem isn't nearly as bad as I thought. The concern was that since the variable was increased at the end of the loop, many calculations that used the variable after the loop would be off by 1. However, I've realized that if you use a break statement, the variable doesn't get increased by one at the end. And since most of the time I used a break statement for these types of situations, it's not too bad. For example, say you open an item box and get a new item. I need to find the first empty slot in your bag so I know where to put the item.
For each int "slot" from 1 to 100
{
if item_in_slot[slot] == 0
then break;
}
// Do something with the slot variable here
See, in this case, everything would be fine. Because of the break statement, there would be no problem. I didn't realize this was the case before, so I thought we'd get the wrong result (in this case, the correct slot +1). Luckily it appears like most stuff is still working- the things that did break were unique because of the how they were written. So I just need to find out if this was intended (and thus not changing back) or accidental (and thus it will change back) so I know how to proceed. But there's only a few things that need to be fixed now, since I fixed most of the serious, game-crashing stuff yesterday to work either way ^.^ So long story short, it won't be a problem either way, we just need to know which it is (bug or intentional) so we can fix up a thing or two.
As for today's progress- more polish, more bugfixes, more little things. I redid the way that we set up the zones. We can now modify spawn rates for any starmon based on the weather of the zone you're in. Plus, the redesign of the internal workings for zones will make them much easier to set up in the future. I also finished adding support for multiplayer-friendly dialogs. We weren't able to send actor messages to model dialog items on a per-player basis, so we created a separate copy of every model dialog for each player.
There's still a few more things we need to get in. For one, you still can't re-arrange your party order very well. Right now all you can do is select a starmon and then pressing a "Move to slot #1" button. That worked okay for a while, but it'd be frustrating if you weren't able to move stuff around just the way you want. We ran into a super weird bug regarding model-swapping between our various costumes. We've got no idea what's causing it but there's a workaround, so that'll be added soon. We need a few more pieces of art to get finished up, and a little bit more terraining to get done. Anyways....It's late, I'm going to bed. ^.^
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.
"For each integer/real" seems to work different now. After finishing the iteration, the variable won't end with the end value that you set in that function.
All for loops now compile to galaxy for loops. All the unnecessary stuff that was done before has been removed, which should lead to a small performance improvement. I did never really understand why the variable shouldnt be 10 after the loop in the first place.
The problem is the fact that it suddenly changed- Starmon was using these loops a whole lot, and so when they suddenly work differently, you've got a problem :P I'm sure they set them up that way to be more friendly to the average modder. After all, it does say "for eacn int from 1 to 10", so it makes more sense that way if you don't see the actual code for a loop.
I posted to the technical forums & shot them an email about it....We'll see what their response is. Since they've stated that they don't want to break compatibility with old maps, I can't imagine that this is intended.
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.
Right, that's basically still the case. A determined and knowledgeable player can get into your bank if they want. That said, I'd guess that a good 90-99% of players on bnet have no idea how to even break the bank signature. Your best bet is to use some type of hash security along with an encryption (starcode is a good option for both). If you're very concerned about security, you can obfuscate the map code. That makes your mapscript nearly impossible to read, which can make it more difficult (or at least more time consuming) to break your security. We've got a few obfuscation tools available on mapster if you;re interested. I wrote a more detailed writeup on the whole subject here if you're interested- it should be mostly up to date.
I've poked around looking for a way to do this myself, but I'm not aware of any method that works. The problem is that there's no way to get the current date from within the editor. If you had some kind of 3rd party program, you could modify the bank, but that would be extremely difficult to get players to download seperately & run (and probably against the ToS).
You could always ask players to enter the date, of course, and then save it as integers or strings. But I doubt that's what you're looking for. :/ That said, if anybody else knows of a way to do this, please chime in ^.^
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 ^.^
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.
I'm leaving for holiday as well, but I'm gunna try and buy things as they go on sale from my phone :P
FTL is fantastic, for 2 dollars it's absolutely worth it. Dishonored was one of my favorite games ever, so on sale it's definitely worth it.
The walking dead is something I enjoyed a ton- that said, I'm a big fan of zombie games and the walking dead TV show. It's definitely very focused on the story/dialog. If you want zombie shooting action, this isn't your game.
A quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
We recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
Intentionally hiding mechanics that improve your pokemon is not cool :P. Only hardcore players may research this up and be willing to grind for it.
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
Hopefully somewhere down the track you'll edit this to say alot easier :P. I agree that it would be interesting feeling like we 'trained' our pets but after a certain point it gets repetitive and boring, especially for several starmon. Sure, you'll include those items but if I have to grind to get them, if they're stashed behind BP hoarding, then I wouldn't get them.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Pokemon's repel doesn't seem practical. I usually zig-zagged alot to find items or other goodies. Repel gets used up too quick and isn't worth the money when I could spend it on other things (like the expensive vitamins). You guys aren't doing grid-based movement so I'm curious how your repels work, how long they last, and if they get used up only if we only move through grass. I'm just gonna cross my fingers that wild battles can be avoided for free :P.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Peaceful solutions to conflicts is pretty cool and was really fun from mass effect. I'm crossing my fingers some more that we'll get plenty more quests that use this :P.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
Battles weren't forced onto you, you could pick them
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
I'm not saying implement all these now or I will show up at your home :P but having something at least close would be cool. Especially the picking our own battles, like the option to run before the battle starts. Players should be given a flexible amount of choices and not be 'forced' to do many things imo.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
At some stage you're gonna have to show us all the starmon you have and their info so I can decide what goes on that milestone trainer's team that shares my name. Shock-eve sounds cool but is he steel, electric, and super fast? Wow, it's like magneton and jolteon had a baby :P.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Will the pokedex give Pokemon locations? Like it does in the game.
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
Zelda, I was totally unaware that Blizzard allowed you to publish maps with a white-list. Absolutely wonderful if you can.
You can't do it via the bnet service, but you can whip it together with triggers. We already have an admin/ban system set up (just fyi, we don't plan on banning anybody, it's there for emergencies only ^.^), and the same sort of thing would work for a whitelist.
I recall some sentence in their ToS for the editor, that it is not allowed to restrict access to the map and have users pay for full access or something, so a white-list for testing might be somewhat of a grey area.
You recall correctly. But the way I see it, the only way something like that would ever be reported is if the map was popular, and people were being frustrated they couldn't play it. If we publish it with zero advertisement with a whitelist, it's not possible for it to get popular (you guys couldn't possibly play it enough to bump it up in popularity). So the only people who would be aware of it's existence would be the whitelisted people. It's a little tricky- I'll have to go over the ToS word-for-word again, but I don't forsee any issues.
To be safe, according to Kueken, why not just invite us to a privately published map?
If the whitelist doesn't work out, we can fall back on that. The problem would be that you guys would need to be invited by us every time you want to play. So you wouldn't be able to play on your own time. We'll have to see what we can do when we get there....
The engine should support up to 15 people at once, but we're not going to allow that many. The biggest issue is that we need to have enough space to give each player a little battle arena where they can fight. If every player is engaged in a fight simultaneously, we need a spot for them all to be battling. Right now we're thinking we should be able to fit in 6 players- maybe 1 or 2 more if we can fit it. It ultimately depends on which zones we decide to do, and how big/small moz wants to make them- is removing a planned zone worth increasing the player cap by 1? It's a tricky question. We're literally using all the map space here. And then there's the issue of actually being able to run everything for 6 people without lag- it's a lot.
Yep, it is called bother the moderators to change it however you want or remove you from it. Due to the amazing lack of versatility seen here at sc2mapster.com, you get to bug moderators about those things in order for them to happen.
Zeldrarules28, Sixen are a couple mod names you might try towards that end.
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If your map is private, only you can see it. Now, if you started the map lobby and then invited him to a game, I believe he would have a copy saved locally. But if you never invited him to play, and it really was private, there's no way he should be able to access the map. Now, it used to be possible to break the security on a locked & public map, but I'm not sure if that's still possible.
Did you create any custom dependencies/mods? If you made a dependency, and then uploaded THAT publicly, he would be able to get it even if the map itself was private.
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@Trieva: Go
I like the ideas- I'll throw them into the idea document. Thanks ^.^
I contacted them directly, and they're looking into at the moment. I also did a bit of poking around the map, though, and it seems the problem isn't nearly as bad as I thought. The concern was that since the variable was increased at the end of the loop, many calculations that used the variable after the loop would be off by 1. However, I've realized that if you use a break statement, the variable doesn't get increased by one at the end. And since most of the time I used a break statement for these types of situations, it's not too bad. For example, say you open an item box and get a new item. I need to find the first empty slot in your bag so I know where to put the item.
For each int "slot" from 1 to 100 { if item_in_slot[slot] == 0 then break; } // Do something with the slot variable hereSee, in this case, everything would be fine. Because of the break statement, there would be no problem. I didn't realize this was the case before, so I thought we'd get the wrong result (in this case, the correct slot +1). Luckily it appears like most stuff is still working- the things that did break were unique because of the how they were written. So I just need to find out if this was intended (and thus not changing back) or accidental (and thus it will change back) so I know how to proceed. But there's only a few things that need to be fixed now, since I fixed most of the serious, game-crashing stuff yesterday to work either way ^.^ So long story short, it won't be a problem either way, we just need to know which it is (bug or intentional) so we can fix up a thing or two.
As for today's progress- more polish, more bugfixes, more little things. I redid the way that we set up the zones. We can now modify spawn rates for any starmon based on the weather of the zone you're in. Plus, the redesign of the internal workings for zones will make them much easier to set up in the future. I also finished adding support for multiplayer-friendly dialogs. We weren't able to send actor messages to model dialog items on a per-player basis, so we created a separate copy of every model dialog for each player.
There's still a few more things we need to get in. For one, you still can't re-arrange your party order very well. Right now all you can do is select a starmon and then pressing a "Move to slot #1" button. That worked okay for a while, but it'd be frustrating if you weren't able to move stuff around just the way you want. We ran into a super weird bug regarding model-swapping between our various costumes. We've got no idea what's causing it but there's a workaround, so that'll be added soon. We need a few more pieces of art to get finished up, and a little bit more terraining to get done. Anyways....It's late, I'm going to bed. ^.^
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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.
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^ I can confirm that one.
The problem is the fact that it suddenly changed- Starmon was using these loops a whole lot, and so when they suddenly work differently, you've got a problem :P I'm sure they set them up that way to be more friendly to the average modder. After all, it does say "for eacn int from 1 to 10", so it makes more sense that way if you don't see the actual code for a loop.
I posted to the technical forums & shot them an email about it....We'll see what their response is. Since they've stated that they don't want to break compatibility with old maps, I can't imagine that this is intended.
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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.
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@sethmachine: Go
Right, that's basically still the case. A determined and knowledgeable player can get into your bank if they want. That said, I'd guess that a good 90-99% of players on bnet have no idea how to even break the bank signature. Your best bet is to use some type of hash security along with an encryption (starcode is a good option for both). If you're very concerned about security, you can obfuscate the map code. That makes your mapscript nearly impossible to read, which can make it more difficult (or at least more time consuming) to break your security. We've got a few obfuscation tools available on mapster if you;re interested. I wrote a more detailed writeup on the whole subject here if you're interested- it should be mostly up to date.
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I've poked around looking for a way to do this myself, but I'm not aware of any method that works. The problem is that there's no way to get the current date from within the editor. If you had some kind of 3rd party program, you could modify the bank, but that would be extremely difficult to get players to download seperately & run (and probably against the ToS).
You could always ask players to enter the date, of course, and then save it as integers or strings. But I doubt that's what you're looking for. :/ That said, if anybody else knows of a way to do this, please chime in ^.^
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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 ^.^
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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.
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I'm leaving for holiday as well, but I'm gunna try and buy things as they go on sale from my phone :P
FTL is fantastic, for 2 dollars it's absolutely worth it. Dishonored was one of my favorite games ever, so on sale it's definitely worth it.
The walking dead is something I enjoyed a ton- that said, I'm a big fan of zombie games and the walking dead TV show. It's definitely very focused on the story/dialog. If you want zombie shooting action, this isn't your game.
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A quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
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We recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
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Sorry for not answering anything, I've been away from home (and away from the internet) for a while :P
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
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You can't do it via the bnet service, but you can whip it together with triggers. We already have an admin/ban system set up (just fyi, we don't plan on banning anybody, it's there for emergencies only ^.^), and the same sort of thing would work for a whitelist.
You recall correctly. But the way I see it, the only way something like that would ever be reported is if the map was popular, and people were being frustrated they couldn't play it. If we publish it with zero advertisement with a whitelist, it's not possible for it to get popular (you guys couldn't possibly play it enough to bump it up in popularity). So the only people who would be aware of it's existence would be the whitelisted people. It's a little tricky- I'll have to go over the ToS word-for-word again, but I don't forsee any issues.
If the whitelist doesn't work out, we can fall back on that. The problem would be that you guys would need to be invited by us every time you want to play. So you wouldn't be able to play on your own time. We'll have to see what we can do when we get there....
The engine should support up to 15 people at once, but we're not going to allow that many. The biggest issue is that we need to have enough space to give each player a little battle arena where they can fight. If every player is engaged in a fight simultaneously, we need a spot for them all to be battling. Right now we're thinking we should be able to fit in 6 players- maybe 1 or 2 more if we can fit it. It ultimately depends on which zones we decide to do, and how big/small moz wants to make them- is removing a planned zone worth increasing the player cap by 1? It's a tricky question. We're literally using all the map space here. And then there's the issue of actually being able to run everything for 6 people without lag- it's a lot.
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Shazam! Sent you a PM :P