Castle Paradox

[Mike Caron]

I would have to disagree with you there. Have you seens the requirements for Vista?! The low-end (there's four "categories", depending on what you want out of Vista) is like 2 GhZ processor, and buckets of RAM. I shudder to think of the high end specs...

Anyway, if you're correct about the drawing routines, it'll work on both Windows 95 and NT 4. Unless some of the other libraries we inevitably use won't run on those. XP

As for the slashes, it has nothing to do with windows. Windows happily slurps up either. The problem is with Linux (linux port means linux, ya know), which doesn't like \'s.

\home/mike\ohr will cause it to look for the "mike\ohr" file/folder in the folder "\home", in whatever folder you're in.
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I stand corrected. No rivers ran blood today. At least, none that were caused by us.

Final Fantasy Q
OHR Developer BLOG
Official OHRRPGCE Wiki and FAQ

[Inferior Minion]

/ vs \ was extremely easy to fix...it's the ext filesystem's case sensitivity, file permissions (for some reason, freeBasic creates playing.tmp but doesn't give itself permission to access it), and an odd issue I'm having with directory listings that's causing the most problems. I'm able to play games, but I have to manually create playing.tmp, supply the RPG as a commandline argument, and cleanup the files myself once I exit the game.
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[FyreWulff]

[Mike Caron]

I still run a 600 Mhz PIII with windows 2000. I see no pressing need to upgrade to an OS that is shiny. Yes, Vista is shiny. Shiny doesn't necissarily mean good.

If I understand correctly (which I do most of the time), Vista will not allow OpenGL to run, instead translating OpenGL calls into DirectX calls (slow).

Further, just because it has more options for setting file permissions doesn't mean squat. Windows NT could set user-level permissions. Big whoop.

In addition, if I understand this correctly also, it'll provide support for BIOS upgrades in the OS. That's a very big security hole. If Joe Q. Haxor rewrites your BIOS to do nothing, all the shininess and file permissions in the world won't help you.

However, this is neither the time or place to discuss this.

---

Any other suggestions?
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I stand corrected. No rivers ran blood today. At least, none that were caused by us.

Final Fantasy Q
OHR Developer BLOG
Official OHRRPGCE Wiki and FAQ

[tgfcoder]

Can't wait! I'd love to see a Windows version of OHR. My WINSLOW computer is a 120MHz, and I hope it still fits in the requirements

I'm sure you need not hear this but:..

Don't forget MIDI!
Sound, yes. .wavs.
Changeable sprite sizes(?) and automatic paletting (import straight from files)
Greater level of in-game sprite and maptile editing.
Support for 256 colours is fine. 32k would be nice.
More frames for animations! 2 frames for walking, euh, 3 frames is ideal.
In dire need of a Victory frame.
Enemy animations, perhaps death animations too.

Are there any limiting factors to these?; RAM, HD, language-based problems?

I'm a QBasic programmer myself but the most advanced thing I programmed myself was a Sierpinski Triangle "flowing down" a waterfall-looking surface. And that was completely by accident, in 8 lines of code.

I've moved on the Python and C mostly.

[TMC]

Alot of those things would require changing the RPG format. Since we must always be backwards compatible, that would require some very many very ugly hacks.

It was suggested that you should be able to specify hero victory frames in the general game settings or in each hero's settings.

What do you mean by "Greater level of in-game sprite and maptile editing"?



I look forward greatly to real file permissions. XP is insanely annoying. But if that thing about killiong OpenGL is true, it more than makes up for that positive.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[tgfcoder]

Hmm, well if the Dos version also had these things then backwards compatibilty isn't an issue

OHR should just check how many frames there are, and use that many. (For attacks;) It should let you add more independantly to a max amount (say 25)

Also with hero graphics the victory sprite could be optional (for backwards compatibility) and would just use the Attack A frame instead otherwise (default)

A greater sprite editing sub-probram would be nice- Maybe a line drawer that draws lines LIKE THEY SHOULD BE I always end up drawing them pbp

Maybe a selection tool and some more advanced effects like blur, (motion blur?) anti-aliasing, gradients (use with Selection), hue change, saturation change? I don't expect those though.

The airbrush is nice though

I reckon you're doing a great job.

EDIT: I don't want to sound like a newb who genuinely asks for the impossible. . ie. "OHR should be 3D, and it should be able to make MMORPGs. Oh, and make it for Macs so I can use it. When you're done send it to me! Thanks!" Yeah. I'm sure that'll happen.

[Joe Man]

[Mike Caron]

[LeRoy_Leo]

I was just thinking, while I was creating a map for the epic... And I was wondering why we don't have tools for Tile mapping like what we have for the graphics editor. We could have a shape tool to fill in specified areas with a selected tile and maybe a line tool to quickly make walls, stairs, and things... Yes, we have a screen fill thing, but what if someone wants to fill a semi large area and doesn't want to scroll tile by tile to fill half the screen? Might make the map editor more flexible.
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "

[tgfcoder]

Ohhh... Well, it's better now that I know how that is done. So I know it definately can't be done Has anyone ever posed the question, "why quickbasic?"

[NeoTA]

tgfcoder: FreeBasic (which looks like it's going to be the first complete port) is better than QB.
Aside from that , I'm rewriting it in Python, and some other rewriting or ports are happening too.

See this page and the Ohrrpgce source ports page reachable from there for more detail on what is happening regarding all ports/rewrites as well as mainstream development.

Regarding the painting features: Apart from the line tool which should be fixed, I think it is wiser to direct you to google for 'deluxe paint 2e' (or iie) and/or 'grafx2', both of which are far better at manipulating 8bit pictures than the OHR will ever be. They have most of the features you mention and many more besides.

Maybe they should be mentioned in the FAQ.


Automatic paletting is something I'm iffy about. If it was implemented, there is no way it would be as good as what a dedicated paint program like GIMP could do.

[PlayerOne]

Well, the backwards compatibility problem is that any new versions still need to be able to run existing games, it doesn't actually matter whether the new version is for DOS or not.

FreeBasic does already give us a lot more scope to rewrite things than QB. The sprites are currently stored in a page of video memory, and there's no particularly good reason to leave it that way (since it's only fake video memory under FreeBasic anyway, I believe), but at this early stage it is most important to make sure the new versions work the same as the old ones, so it is best to leave as much of them the same as is possible.

I guess I'm quite conservative in that way. I would never change A, B and C in one go, I would change A, then make sure it's all fine, then change B, and so on. The FreeBasic version, for me, is actually the first step to a PalmOS version, which means I am intending to go via C at some point, although I can't guarantee that I won't be distracted by another project.

There does come a point, though, surely, where you have to ask: is it still OHR? Or why is it still OHR? There are other RPG engines around if you want different features. What is the essence of OHR? Once we start to get to features like true colour and more frames of animation, would it be better to simply start over?

What drew me to it was that it was only 320x200 and 256 colours, and that it doesn't require massive system resources. That's what made me think it might be possible to get it running on PalmOS. (It might not - disk space is going to be the big headache.)

[NeoTA]

[tgfcoder]

What parts of Python are being used? The only graphics I've ever done with Python was in my MMORPG using Tkinter. Very strange things happened, I won't even start.