LN2 tech demo

[gimbal]

Well it does me good that so many people take the time to read my long posts, even if the topic is not exactly for everyone I am running out of things to rant about without becoming too technical though, but I do had some fun writing this. Perhaps for my next project I will do the same, only I will put more effort into the hints. It is a fun little game

I would examine post #4 more for the hidden clue. It is in there twice.

[OddbOd]

It's a bit cheeky to post a guess without explanation but what the hell... Gauntlet III ?

[gimbal]

noooooo, way off

Alright, if people do not guess it after this one I am going to flat out say which one it is.

The original Amiga game had serious flaws in the gameplay and had big performance issues, which the version for the first original system did not have. So the Amiga version was a very bad port, only with better graphics.

Come on StrategyGamer, you must know it

[Graham Humphrey]

It's a System 3 game isn't it?

Myth perhaps...?

[gimbal]

yes it is Well done reading the clue, either or the two of them

But the biggest clue was that the game is isometric and myth clearly isn't, nor does it have any blatant issues. Also remember that I am a huge git.

[Yoto]

Hey gimbal, i like your long posts btw!
I made some cool stuff in X3D but i lacked the programming habilities to go further, and the guys from Web3d Consortium take so much time to standardize new stuff that most people just lost interest. So i´m in a kind of sabbath vacations...
Btw have you ever considered Xj3D?

[gimbal]

Xj3D??? No, I don't think I would ever consider that Besides, I am more comfortable doing 2D in a true 2D environment, even 3D isometric games (which are only fake 3D anyway). Call me old fashioned, I just like pushing pixels in stead of polygons.

But thank you for your nice words!

[OddbOd]

*sigh* if it's LN2 then I incorrectly took you at your word regarding subtlety.

[gimbal]

I should have mentioned I'm a git earlier Yes you are correct OddBOd, the game actually is...

LAST NINJA 2

Sorry StrategyGamer, you were really close but I didn't want to make it that easy

The game with horrible slowdowns, terrible jumping, a lack of sounds, stupid combat, even more idiotic enemies and very harsh punishments when it comes to making a mistake. Some improvements I aim to make ( + = I already did it)

+ every action is bound to a key in stead of to an insane joystick direction + button press. The game has keys for punching, kicking, picking up things/activating them, rotating items, rotating weapons and jumping. Special weapon attack moves will still be done with a combination of pressing the punch key and an arrow movement.

+ movement orientation is changed a little. For example, moving forward is now straight up in stead of moving diagonally (left+up or right+up). I think this works more intuitively. When moving in the opposite direction you still walk backwards.

- better AI and enemies may even roam from screen to screen if I allow them to. Enemies will have behavior patterns, like being aggressive, protective or simply whimpy. They may change their pattern even, for example they may go from aggressive to whimpy if they have only their fists and you come at them with a sword, or the other way around if you punch them relentlessly.

- enemies are dead after killing them once, no resurrection madness

- either health pickups in the form of hamburgers, or slowly regenerating energy. Don't know yet exactly.

+ fixed the damned jumping. I even split jumping into two modes; if you stand still and jump then you do a shorter and heigher jump, if you run and then jump you do a lower and farther jump. More realistic that way. I may add backwards jumping also, which will only be a short jump.

+ add a story mode with comic like text balloons. As said this is optional.

+ added 'active texts', simple words that appear above the heads of actors when "something" happens or changes. When an enemy spots you for example a "!" might appear above his head for a few seconds. Other possibilities are "flee!", "aggro!", "thinking...", "kill!", etc.

- falling in water or off a cliff does not kill you outright, it will reduce your energy in stead. The height you fall determines the amount of energy you lose, so if it is too high you may still die.

- climbing is more forgiving, the ninja will automatically put a weapon away when climbing down for example, in stead of just stupidly falling.

- better combat. I don't know how exactly yet however, but I aim to make it less mindnumbing. I was thinking about adding combos, knockdowns, sneak attacks... Enemies may have an 'aggro' effect where they do a knockdown attack if you do not move away quickly enough. Lots of possibilities to consider. I have to be careful, because by assigning keys in stead of joystick movements it is now only too easy to keep attacking relentlessly.

- I was thinking about adding a feature where you cannot simply walk into water, the ninja will take a step back one time when you try to. If you do it again... splash.


Not everything will be in the first tech demo, just enough to see what the new additions feel like.

[gimbal]

(if you have ideas of your own or are absolutely not agreeing with one of my suggestions, please let yourself be heard right here )

[gimbal]

since I'm home again since today (sob sob) (and relearning how to use my own keyboard, been using the rediculous Spanish layout for five weeks!) I hope to release the tech demo within the next week. Need to flesh out a few more things, but I'm going to leave some quirks in there so other people can give their opinion about them.

First of all, here is the basic project page I have for all my projects:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~gimbal/projects/ln2.htm

And I have four screenies of the editor to show you the current state. I can show screenies of the game, but I think everybody here has a fairly good idea of what the game looks like.



This is a basic screen. On the left you see a bar with all the items you can place in the level. The editor will sort them by depth based on their position. In the top-right you see a very uninformative area which holds the items that are actually already painted. It gives a unique ID that is used to for example match a key to a door opening event. The checkbox allows you to make an item visible or invisible; if an item is saved as invisible it is actually invisible in the game as well, but can be made visible programmatically (in an event).



This shows the same screen only with the collision boxes visible. You can draw them, edit them and delete them from within the editor. Different colors have different meanings, the red ones are simple 'block' boxes so you cannot go past that point, the light blue one represents a screen change, if you touch it you go to a different screen. As you can see it can become quite a chaos, but this is actually one of the more complex screens in the game to do. Other screens contain far less boxes. I am not done with this screen yet, I need to slice more foreground items from the background (so you can move behind them) and tinker with the collision boxes.


Simple enough, this allows you to select a different screen to edit from any level. It only shows the background image without any of the foreground images.


This screenie is really uninteresting, yet it is the most powerful function of the editor. Because the editor and the game are basically the same code, you can start the game from within the editor on any screen you want. You simply select the entry point in the screen and run it and voila, the game starts instantly with the ninja in that position. in the future I may need to make it possible to allow the selection of what items you want to start with, or you may not be able to properly test some screens.

As you can see the editor is quite primitive and user unfriendly at the moment, but for now it is sufficient for only me

[gimbal]

alright folks, LN2 Tech demo 1 is up and downloadable here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~gimbal/projects/ln2.htm

The default keys are also listed on that page, and I made a list of what I think is still wrong with it. It is far from perfect, but I got it to the point where I think it runs very decently. Also there are no enemies yet in it, that is going to be tech demo 2 stuff.

Be sure that you have Java 6 installed and to run it on a flavor of Windows. Linux could also work, but I simply cannot test it (yet). The game uses no 3D, so any graphics card should work, including crappy intel chipsets.

Try it (only the first three screens for now) and tell me what you think. Be brutal

[TCD]

Can't wait to test it
In about 1 hour I'm home and tell you all the bugs

[Marcuz]

thread title changed per request

[TCD]

Sorry gimbal, but the version wont start at all for me I get a window which is completely black. I waited for over a minute and nothing happened. I thought my JRE might be too old, so I updated it and run the test. Here's the result :



I noticed that the soundpack is missing in the archive (found this in the gameconf.xml '<soundpack>sp_dd2.zip</soundpack>'). Could that cause the problem?
Can someone else check if the game runs on his PC?

[gimbal]

nope, the soundpack is disabled because I don't have one yet, and there is nothing in the game that plays a sound yet.

TCD: could you try this. Open a command prompt, navigate to the directory where you installed the 'game' and run this:

java -jar ln2.jar

and see if that produces an error.

The strange part here is that I tested this on a laptop that is quite shitty and it worked flawlessly

[TCD]

Yup, produces the following error :



I tried to redirect the output (pipe it with '>') but Java still writes to the console window Seems like something is missing in the jar.

[gimbal]

Eh? Do you have the 'lib' subdirectory??? It must contain two files, ln2res.jar and xom-1.1.jar. Java is complaining that it cannot find a class inside the xom-1.1.jar file.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Eh? Do you have the 'lib' subdirectory??? It must contain two files, ln2res.jar and xom-1.1.jar. Java is complaining that it cannot find a class inside the xom-1.1.jar file.

Bloody zip format. Sorry, I just drag and dropped the files in one directory and didn't look at the folder structure. Works flawless now. Gonna eat something and test it then

[gimbal]

*whipes sweat off forehead*

No worries, I will get the 10 years back that I just temporarily misplaced. No permanent damage done.