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Jan. 30, 2007 - Started the project officially. Started on a program to clear the map. Had to figure out
lots of junk on my own, since so much stuff is actually poorly organized on all the PK Hack sites. In fact,
much of the info was nowhere to be found. Need to fix that. Anyway, managed to get a lot figured out.
Even took a quick walk through a blank world of EB. Kind of neat.
Also started on an early script insertor program. When completed, this will make big hacks of EB easier. In this case, I'm doing less bounds checking, but at some point I might make a user-friendly version for people to do big hacks of their own. I can even possibly seeing this eventually being used to do other-language translations of EB :O
Made some test sprites and a little test map. Tested out some control code stuff. Found that sprites located near the very edges of the EB map freak out and become non-talkable and walkthroughable. Weirdest of all though, was when I did the very first test, the Mr. Saturn I made ran right up to me and told me to "GO BACK!", complete with spooky ghost sounds. Then he ran off the side of the screen. Pretty scary.
Did my first map editing, I don't know much about it so I'm learning it as I go. I do know that I suck at making maps though. Also, the EB0 map is MUCH bigger than EB's map, so a lot will need to be compressed. I'm still trying to decide how I'll handle the various difficulties presented with converting maps over. But without a doubt, A LOT of planning and graph paper is going to be needed before I really start on the map. But first, insertor stuff needs to continue to be updated. Need to make it so item boxes are easier to make, and need to add more script code names.
Though I spent most of today looking at the hidden stuff on the old PK Hack site instead of working. Oops. Man, there is SO much I don't know much about right now, but will be a master of before long. It was also neat seeing stuff from like the last 4 or 5 years of hacking, which I was mostly absent from. So it was like a look back in time. But now it's time to kick butt!
Last few days I've been toying with the idea of making things in this project in such a way that foreign translations will be relatively painless to make. This will require even more work and planning and headaches, but it'd be so cool if it happens.
Also starting to wonder about the planning of the game. Planning it will take a while, and planning WILL be necessary. Making stuff up on the fly is a very bad idea and could kill the project or stall it for a long time. But I definitely want to flesh out the game more, such as having more houses you can enter, more people you can talk to, maybe a super secret area, and even secret items and enemies. But then I tell myself that there's much more important stuff to think about first, stuff that will be REALLY hard, like the Bread Crumbs, the Sing command, PSI animations, music writing, etc. Man, I got LOTS of work ahead of me...
Looked some more into the MIDI file format. It's annoyingly complicated and trying to make a program that converts MIDI files into an EB-compatible format will be a big project of its own. Especially since I know so very little about music. But if I'm gonna get good music in this hack, this is probably the best way to do it, aside from breaking into Nintendo Ltd. and stealing their old custom tools. And if I could do that, I'd be able to mess with Mother 2 and EarthBound so much that it's mind-boggling. I'd need to hire Lupin III to do that for me though :P
Work on Mr. Hack is gonna slow down the next few days as real life work slowly piles up again. Might do a bit of junk this weekend though.
Whew. But it didn't stop there. I made more adjustments to the insertor, did more tests. I realized I was almost at the point where I could possibly start working on the hack itself for real. I don't want to get too deep into the actual project yet but I decided on almost a whim to put the EarthBound Zero script into EB using my insertor. This required a script convertor, which I wrote. I used it to convert the script I used for my old EB0 hack into a format I could insert into EarthBound.
But, instead of cycling through each line (the convertor got like 1500 lines, but that #'s a little high) to see how they look, I realized I could make a sprite for each line and then I could walk around the empty map and talk to characters to see the text in action. I decided to use Mr. Saturn for this, and made big giant rows that stretched about 250 saturns wide and 5 saturns high. It was actually really cool. I made a video of my first visit to crazyland. I changed their motions after that to make them walk in place. I then tried to cram them closer together, but the game would freak out and freeze if I put too many near each other. Technically, there can be 256 sprites in a "sector" but I guess this shows that the hardware/programming can't handle that limit :P
So I got things working good and it was pretty exciting. I did some broad tweaks to the entire script. Then I commented all the lines out and started to slowly polish each line individually... I got maybe 50 lines in, but this really isn't the time for that level of work yet, so I'm putting that aside for now. The text REALLY just needs to be rewritten and expanded, so any polishing I do now would just wind up scrapped down the road anyway.
Jumped into IRC, talked about various things with some of the regular hacker dudes, like problem stuff that's gonna come up in the future. I don't look forward to those problems, but I bet they'll be fun to tackle anyway. Maybe.
Then I decided maybe it's time to do some general planning. I need graph paper though, so I'll have to wait until I can get to the store to get some. I was gonna print some out, but I can't find any good ones that suit my needs. So instead, I decided to get started on the items. Items are easy. Sort of. On the outside they are, anyway. So I went into PK Hack/JHack and edited all the item names. I made their # designations match what they had in EB0. There's still like 150 free spaces though, so maybe I'll make more items later? I bet the same thing will happen with enemies too.
But, by editing these names in PK Hack, I realized that it would be a bit of a pain if I wanted to change any of the names, and it'd be even tougher for foreign translators to get the item names translated. So then my light bulb went off and I used my script insertor's direct-editing feature to do the names instead. So now I can change item names super easily and translators will have the items names right there in the script file. Sweet.
I started to document the command codes my script parser also allows, but there's just so many that I sorta gave up halfway through. In fact I'm maybe only 20% done with making more command codes. They're not absolutely NECESSARY, but they'll help when it comes time to write complicated control code sequences. So at some point I'll have to be not lazy and go finish all that stuff.
Then I played around with trying to get that Twoson song off of the map and the happy Threed song on. But after a few minutes I finally realized how music on the maps work, so no happy Threed music for now. I got it on Summers for now though.
Since the actual game project is coming up fast, I'm realizing that there's so many different paths to take and so much work I need to do that requires extra planning. Like I need to get a full list of NPC sprites I'm going to need, plus a full list of outside enemy sprites. Need to figure out good tilesets for maps, and I need to figure out HOW I'm going to handle maps. I want the map to be one giant big map if possible, since that's what EB0 was about IMO, but the hurdles that presents might be too much. Anyway, probably will ask good sprite guys to help with the sprite stuff soon. Just need to get lists done.
Whew!
Started on the map stuff, sort of. Got graph paper, posterboard, and some construction paper. I'm not very far along, but I'm trying to figure out good sizes for each area in the game, and then I'm going to rearrange the pieces like a puzzle so I can get everything to fit. And then I'll recreate that in the game. Much, MUCH tile work is going to be needed though, and I suck at tiles, so this is going to be tough. Unfortunately, the map isn't going to be one giant explorable world like in the original game. The EB map is just too small to allow that. The EB map is 8192x10240 pixels, while the EB0 map is approximately 16384x14336 pixels. I timed how long it takes to go from one end of the EB map to the other, and it takes ~2 minutes and 3 seconds to walk from top to bottom and ~1 minute and 39 seconts to walk from left to right. That's really not that much, so I'm going to need to be creative with how my maps are laid out.
I was going to make it so one sector of the EB map equaled one square of graph paper, but then I realized almost too late that the resulting map would need 60 to 64 sheets of graph paper. That's A LOT of paper, and all laid out together, that would've taken up most of my office floor :O So instead I made it so that one graph square equals 4 tiles in EB, which makes things a little more livable.Anyway, the best news of all is that michael_cayer kicked ass and contacted Blue Antoid :D BA had already done lots of work on an EB0 remake hack of his own, so this means that now I'll have a lot less work to do. He'd already done all the enemy graphics, enemy palettes, sprites of three of the main characters, lots of item descriptions and just lots of tedious work that I suck at. So this is BIG. Here's some pics and stuff of a WIP he had going a few years back. It's cool junk :)
I'll probably just try to finish up the map arranging for now and then try out some of BA's enemies and stuff. I need to make sure that his data (like enemy sprites, etc) will be compatible with my stuff; I don't want to overwrite any data that's already there and important. So I'll probably have to do a good deal of trial and error, since I don't know how PK Hack/JHack's graphic import features work exactly.Once I decided to ignore the tree tiles, I started to build the actual town of Podunk. I pieced it together while looking at a map of the EB0 version of Podunk. I was surprised by how roomy the area I made for Podunk is. It definitely retains that feel of a big open area. There's even lots of extra space, which I might use to add more houses or maybe just to add more nature and places to find enemies.
At some point, the map editor had messed with something so that suddenly my map wouldn't play any music, even though the music data was completely intact. I had absolutely NO idea what was wrong, so after 3 or 4 hours of eye-gouging and hair-ripping, I wrote a program that extracts the raw map data from one ROM and copies it into another. After tinkering with stuff to get this to work right, I managed to get the full map back and the music was working again. Whew. I think that map copier is going to be very useful down the road.
Then I tidied up the map a bit and fixed some graphical mistakes. But all I've really done is recreate Podunk using Onett objects. It doesn't have the right feel to it, and what I NEED to do is go in and edit the mini-tiles, but I have absolutely no idea how they work and when I tried to figure it out in PK Hack my brain died. No idea how they work. So for now stuff is stuck as Onett objects. Eventually when I get minitiles figured out, the town will become more unique, and those rivers will hopefully look good.
Anyway, there are lots of pics and videos today. Here are the highlights:
I next turned my attention to making tiles for the river and the riverbanks. Things were going well until suddenly JHack stopped saving any of my tile changes for no reason! This had me stumped for hours. Nobody knew what was wrong or how to fix it. I tried to do some poking around but I have absolutely no idea what the cause was, and I don't know where and how Mr. Accident's map editor stores its data, or where or how JHack saves its map data. So I broke down and just used my map copier from yesterday to recover the map. The minitiles I edited were lost, so all my work went down the drain.
Didn't take long to get back to where I was though. And luckily JHack didn't screw up this time. I can only pray this doesn't happen again down the road. So anyway I made river and riverbank tiles. Well, very rudimentary ones. It was about this time that I realized I shouldn't be micromanaging these maps, otherwise it'll take me a month to do a single map. So I decided to make the basic layouts for all the maps. I'm halfway through that. I got all of the left half of the whole world done. Gotta do the right side next.
Anyway, I've decided that I'll just make the bare minimum on the maps for now, in terms of gameplay, Like doors, caves, important buildings, etc. Once I got the whole world hooked together and got most everything else done, I'll come back and do the extra stuff and the fine touches. Plus this'll save me from more minitile crash headaches for now.
Again, I hate hate hate the trees in EarthBound. Trying to piece them together is horrible. I wish I knew of some way to automate the process, but I can't think of one. I kind of wish the map editors had clipboards, but oh well. I added lots of these horrible menaces to the Podunk map, I want to give it the treefulness of the original, and even have the area north of town be like a foresty wilderness type place where you can get lost and just explore. I already put a place like that up by the road to the zoo. And there's a gift box tucked in that area. As you walk along the road to the zoo, you'll see just a few pixels of stuff over there, which might make the player think, "Hey, there's something there, gotta explore it!" And then that's where the super powerful enemies will kick the player's butt :P Just kidding, but there'll be enemies in the wilderness areas for sure.
I don't expect much progress in the next few days, as I got lots of real life work to do among other things. But I'll be working on stuff whenever I get the chance. And yeah, yet again for like the 5th day in a row, I've been having crazy dreams that in some way or another involve hacking. I've also noticed that I've started to think in reverse notation when I'm typing numbers. That sucks.
No movies today, but many pics!
Coolest of all is that I have another work in progress patch so that people can see all this stuff for themselves! Check it out or don't go to heaven!
Not too much to say, except that man this is a cool yet crazy project. Anyway, here are pics of stuff.
I'm planning on modifying my work for this project to help people translate EarthBound into other languages. I'll probably work on that later this week. I have many ideas and most of them are already basically implemented in my script insertor, but I just gotta add some more stuff and dump the entire EB script into a format for my insertor. Once everything works though, translating the game will be EASY :) I'm sure we'll get tons of new versions of EB in no time afterwards!
Anyway, check out this video of stuff, it's neat :)
I added just a few lines to my script file so that now the default names are all different. Mostly this means that the characters aren't called Ness, Paula, etc. in my screenshots anymore. Questions arise about naming the dog and your favorite thing, though. Neither are really important in the game.
Not much, but here's stuff.
Lastly, did some quick enemy stuff. Gave stats to three enemies, the Snake, the Dog, and the Hippie. Gave them some simple actions (mostly non-attack for now) and then edited the enemy clusters to make them appear around the map. It's only now that I finally understand enemy clusters fully, so I'll need to go back and fix this bit of work I did. But now there are enemies all throughout the rural-ish areas of Podunk. For some reason, when you gain a level, your stats go up like crazy. I have no idea why this is. I'll need to look into it at some point. But it's crazy.
Best of all, I've got an IPS patch so that you, the rare visitor to this page, can play a little bit of the game! Get it here!
And check out all these other pics too!
Possible double all-nighter coming up, uh oh!
Mostly did some tinkering here and there. I made the enemy clusters a little better and made the enemy appearance rate much better than it was yesterday. I also made the difficulty curve much more livable. Finally broke down and did a test door using Mr. A's map editor. His editor and JHack are apparently incompatible when it comes to doors, and this can cause death if you're not careful. The biggest problem I foresee is when I have to go and edit map tiles/minitiles in JHack. The whole universe might explode. I don't look forward to that.
So anyway I made it so you can go into Ninten's house. His house is very temporary. Once again, there were 5000 tiles and they were in no real order so I just sort of copied Ness's house (very tedious!) and squished it down. It's a temporary house and I forgot to put a basement door, doh. Might have to make new tiles/minitiles for that basement door, ugh. But best of all, you can now save your game. So cool.
Get the latest patch here.
Didn't bother with a readme since it's pretty obvious by now what you need to do to get the hack working.
Some uninteresting pics are here.
Coffee ahoy
Obviously, not much work was done at all. Once I finished up today's real life work, I decided to take it easy, and after ordering tons of pizza stuff, I got working on the game's items. I threw out all the old item work I did and started new. I set up a spreadsheet so that I could easily categorize and arrange items. After much talking with people on the forum, I got most of the items named and organized. I left room for lots more stuff in each category, and there are also 28 extra item slots I can do anything with. I've only gotten up to implementing the first 100 or so items, though. Getting this stuff to work is annoying, plus trying to guess good numbers for prices, HP recovery, weapon strength, etc. is pretty tough. Don't want to make the game too easy or too hard, and don't want to accidentally wind up making a certain item pointless to buy. More detailed gameplay polishing will come later, but it's always good to have a strong foundation.
Once I get all the current items implemented, I'll probably release a patch so that people can help try to debug them. One super annoying thing will be the help messages for them. I can probably automate most of that though. The hard part will just be writing the actual descriptions :P
Pics and a spreadsheet of the items are below. The spreadsheet is about 90% accurate to what I have in the ROM. I made changes/additions/removals here and there while implementing the items. Had to ditch the compass so I could put the repel ring in its place. I might re-add a compass later though. Compass as in the kind used in math class.
Also threw a bunch of stuff into my script file so that now the items will have all-new descriptions. I was shocked that all that stuff worked on the very first attempt :O So now I have to go and write 254 item descriptions, add in control codes, and then test out THAT stuff too. Ouch. Lots of work, but lots of fun can be had too, since item descriptions can add a lot of flavor to a game.
Oh, and coolest thing of the day was when I used code I wrote in 2000 to dump the item names/info out of my hack and into a text file. The code compiled with absolutely no trouble at all. I even gave full documentation for everything in the source file. It's so awesome and crazy to think that work I did 7 years ago still proves extremely useful and works perfectly for me even now :O :D
Once I get all the item descriptions done, I'll be putting out a testing patch so that people can help me debug all the items and help me create new ones, too. So that'll be something to look forward to :)
This update brought to you by the letter Zzzzzzzzz
I was hoping to finish all 200+ item descriptions today. Wrong, only got like 40 at most. But they're actually pretty funny/interesting, which is cool. Also made an item debug patch for people on the forum to test for me. Already found tons of bugs in the items, and that was really cool that people helped as much as they did. Had I tried to do that all on my own, it would've taken me a couple days and I might've missed stuff I bet. In the process, I think we even found a bug/typo in EB :O
Also did a good deal of gfx importing - got better-quality sprites for the first three main characters. They look very cool. Some things need to get fixed, but other than that, I'm really happy with how they don't look like Ness, Jeff, and Paula copies at all.
I also implemented an extra enemy, the Mobile Cerebrum. The outside sprite animation was just too cool for me not to try it out in the game. It's not in the current item debug patch, but it'll probably be there next patch.
Probably the absolute coolest thing was this. Very awesome! Thanks to lewahi x 500! Looking forward to more updated music very much. Can't wait until Podunk has some Pollyana music going :)
I forget what else I did, but suffice to say, it wasn't too much. The end. This weekend is busy-san and got other projects/work to do stuff with, so I probably won't focus too much on this stuff, though I'm sure I'll still be lured to it anyway. But I really gotta get this other stuff out of the way and done or I'll explode.
Got stuff done and stuff. Did some minor stuff, like make one of the houses work and put the talking mouse in there. Started to connect Podunk with Canary Village, but it's annoying having to get it working right. So once I get into CV, I can't leave.
lewahi got a pretty cool version of Pollyana set up, so now the bg music for Podunk (and most of the world at the moment) is using that. Still needs work, but it's improving very well indeed.
Released a weekend fun patch. I think by adding lewahi's work into the patch, it automatically makes ROMs 6 MB. That's why the patch is so big this time around I think. I'll write a quick utility to chop those last 2 megs off automatically. That should make it so the patch works for more people, probably.
Vroom
Connected Canary Village and Podunk fully. Implemented the rest of the Podunk enemies. Made the road to the cemetery work. The road back to Podunk doesn't work, though. Made a test cemetery, complete with cemetery enemies. Figured out the event to make a tombstone change into a ladder entrance. Made it so you gotta talk to the mayor before a tombstone in the cemetery will open up. Made it so that you can go down it and into a very very temporary cave. This cave has my first ladder I ever made, and it caused quite some trouble. Right now the ladder and the cave are very buggy. But it works. In the cave is a coffin and Pippi. Pippi will join you... Am definitely going to need to make climbing sprites for her :P
Talking to one of your sisters will put you in a fight with Artemis' latest Gabilan. Very, very good looking battle sprite.
Wrote a very quick program to trim down the ROM before I go to make patches from it. Using lewahi's 6 MB ROM turns my stuff into 6 MB ROMs, so I think that might've caused patch problems for people earlier. That should hopefully be fixed now in these newer patches.
I've decided that I'm only gonna release patches at most once a week. So here is the current one. It's playable and actually in a way it's almost like a very very early version of the actual game. Pippi's mom says Pippi is missing and to talk to the mayor. Talk to the mayor, and you can go to the cemetery to get Pippi. Then you can go there and get her and take her back out with you. The end. But hey, it's a start!
Check out the patch and stuff below!
Pics & a slightly better patch than yesterday I put up for dev reasons
Also was wondering how long it'd be until people were like "OMG He's not working on M3!" Took less time than I expected :P Actually, this is the only project I've actually made a page on, thinking people might enjoy to see it going along. I had actually planned to say nothing at all and just one day show up and say "Hey, here's this neat thing! Bye!" as I do with most all other projects I do, including Mother 3. So just because M3 doesn't have a page with daily updates and screens and stuff doesn't mean it's dead. It's not my intention to rush through the game at breakneck speed and produce a mediocre translation, though.
Anyway, speaking of translation, I threw together some quick code that will eventually result in letting foreign language speakers translate EarthBound into other languages. Until now, translating EB has been hell x 1000. It's semi-based on my script insertor code for the EB0 project, which makes things easier for me. It'll still be a while until it's in usable form, and I have no idea how I'm gonna test it, seeing as I can't translate into foreign languages myself (aside from yo como en el baņo), but it'd be cool if people who don't speak English or Japanese can finally discover the weird charm of EarthBound.
Shockingly enough, no pics or stuff today it looks like. Doh :(
Oh yeah, finally registered my copy of textpad yesterday. I use it so much now and it's so useful for all my various projects that I felt morally obligated to support its creators. Been using it with all my EB0 stuff very extensively.
A ton of translation stuff tomorrow/today so I doubt I'll have much time to work on EB0 remake then. I also really need to catch up on all the sleep I've been missing.
Tested some more music. It's coming along very well. So well that I decided to post MP3s of the music as it sounds in-game. It still needs work all around, but I never thought that EB music hacking could be achieved, much less hacked to this level. It sounds especially 16-bitish, but whatcha gonna do? Anyway, check out the three main tracks below :)
Even if you've never played EB0 before, you'll probably recognize those songs from Super Smash Bros. Melee :)
Let's see, what else. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the very latest patch I made a few days ago is uhh the latest patch. I guess that goes without saying. But I didn't post it. Anyway, check it out here. The biggest new thing is that you can go save Pippi (talk to the mayor first) and then you'll have a neat boss fight. After that all the cemetery guys run away from you. This is because I don't know how to handle things in the event that you die after you get Pippi. As things are now, you'll wake up back in bed with her if you die. Well, at least you would if I hadn't deleted Ness' bed. But anyway, that poses a problem that I have yet to solve. But check out the patch, it's neat.
Also, here's stuff that people might be interested in: EB0 script, EB script, as dumped by my current program (and in HTML form)
No Mother 3 script just yet though :P That'd be a goofy albeit nearly impossible hack though. A recreation of Mother 3 using EB's engine. Also probably pointless. Oh, I should mention that my dump of eb's script also includes all the item descriptions too. There's still a lot more text that I need to dump though.
I anticipate that the next few days will be more EB trans stuff, plus some modifications to my script insertor. It won't be terribly exciting, but it'll allow for lots of neat stuff down the road. So it's sort of a short return to a month ago where I was just working on the tools. All the fancy flashy stuff will make a return at some point though!
Enough of that, here are pics of it in action: Boo
Been tossing around ideas in my head whenever I get the chance. Not sure what I'll work on next in the hack, there's so much to tackle that I don't know where to focus on. Those item descriptions are still there taunting me, but bleh. I added that Pippi stuff, but I don't want to continue off of that and try to make the game from there. I need to step back and work on something broader. I shouldn't be micromanaging yet, but it's so tempting :(
BTW, I made a short video showcasing stuff from the latest build, which can be seen in the latest patch I posted a few days ago. So the video probably won't be too exciting for most people, but hey, it's a video. Videos taste good.
Oh yeah, and I threw together a quick gallery of the cooler stuff from this project so far. See it here.
Merrysville does play the new Bein' Friends song, though it sounds slightly different in the actual game. It might be due to ZSNES' different sound core. I wonder what it sounds like on a real system, though. Anyway, all the music still needs working and tweaking and testing, but I'm liking it so far. The mood it brings to the game is good EB0ish stuff.
After posting my latest video on youtube, I got a handful of messages. I didn't even know you could get messages via youtube like that, so I was like, huh? Glad people like the project and it's great seeing everyone being so supportive. I wish I could focus more on it, but it's hard with work (which is getting crazier x 50) and life and responsibilities. How I long for the high school/college days when I could sit in IRC all day and blab and joke around and not have a care in the world. Now I'm just an old fart who pays taxes and plays Japanese lawyer games.
Enough bleh talk, I'm guessing my next main goal will be to just connect all the different areas. All the connections are temporary too. The maps are so ugly and still so based on the EB0 tileset that I have little freedom to create the really new stuff that I need. But you gotta be a crazy genius to pull off major tile revisions. Believe it or not, ALL of Onett is created from just these tiles: boo
Crazy stuff. That "Mapper Kojima" or whoever did EB's maps must be an awesome company or some guy with an IQ of 800.
Also realized today that my program that inserts foreign language scripts into EB can be used for heavy-duty text hacks too. People might wanna try it out if they're into those kinds of hacks!
Bought a new wireless controller for my PC, but it's pretty suckier than my last one, so maybe I'll try to find one of those PS2 controller USB adaptor things. Not sure where to get them though. I would've said lik-sang, but I think they got in big trouble a while back.
Thinking about finally taking out the warp saturns and making an item that will act like the debug menu in EB, only less intense.
Tried to get Onyx Hook to work. Sort of works, but what sucks is that not every item has a unique item usage line. So I'm going to need to do some clever work to make all these new items do things.
Now that I've written my script dumper for the translation thing, I can use the text dumping routines to extract stuff like the effect/action text, which means I can fix things like the Teddy Bear problem. I also need to organize/re-organize all the actions and figure out which ones I can get rid of so I can create all-new actions. That's going to be one of the most fun parts of the project, thinking up goofy/cool things for all the enemies to do. Even though it's just simple text, I think that's what set EB apart from many RPGs back in the day.
Contemplating starting many mini-tile sets from scratch completely and rebuilding maps from the bottom up. But I already have little time for this project as it is, so that'll probably have to wait a long while. Also, I can't wait to see giant elephants and tigers and stuff stampeding at you in the zoo area :) I think next I'll try to connect more maps.
Anyway, video here. Neat stuff, but nothing new really.
After that, I decided to connect all the maps of the world. After about 2 hours, PK Hack decided to be evil again with my tile editing, so allll that work had to be thrown away. I had tried to revert to automatically made backups, but they always resulted in the same thing, so I had to use a backup I made right before I did this stuff. So all that work was pointless and makes me wanna stay away from stuff for a while.
Added the ability to include files to the script insertor. That's step #1 in being able to import graphics and music via the insertor. This'll help me keep the music, test, and graphics organized, no matter what. It'll also help save some space in the expanded meg.
Wrote a to do list. It's a doozy. When I think about it, I just wanna roll over and die. So much to do... this project is definitely going to take a LONG time, despite the speed it appears to be progressing at. Hell, I haven't even REALLY started to make the game yet. Everything so far has just been a warm up and a test to see what's possible. The maps are all temporary, there are barely any NPCs, the enemies are still being redrawn, the music is just getting off the ground, the tools are still being worked on... Basically, this all means that a good quality final patch is a LONG way away. But I think a lot of people are enjoying the ride, so I'll continue to post stuff here every so often :)
I say it everyday, but I need sleep now.
Of course, work and other stuff and life in general makes me a very busy and sleepy guy. I swear, I should just quit the interweb for a year or two and just get some rest. How tempting that sounds :(
