 Aug 5 2007, 12:02 AM
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The tech demo is coming along nicely. I spent the last few days getting RBGui integrated into the tech demo. It still has some rough spots and little documentation, but I'm starting to learn it, and it is fairly intuitive to use. The only screenshot I have today is the time settings gui. I started with it because it is the simplest one to implement. In the screenshot below you can see there is a setting for running the time continuously, or you can manually adjust the time with the slider bar. Pretty simple. For a little bit of polish I made it so the slider bar is in sync with the time when the time is running.
I also keep meaning to create the project files for the game engine, but keep running out of time in the day. I hope to get that going real soon though.
In other news, I'm going on vacation from the 8th to the 13th, without internet access, so I won't be around.
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Jul 1 2007, 11:26 PM
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Today I completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I feel I can finally give my thoughts on the game. These thoughts won't include the graphics or input, since I can get past all of those.
First off, this game is long. Without spending too much time on the side quests, I completed the game in about 56 hours. Is the game too long though? Not really. The action kept on coming. Not exactly a non-stop thrill ride, but the numerous dungeons will keep you entertained.
On to the dungeons. They started off nice, but I think they got worse as the game progressed. Every one felt less original than the last. Not to say that they weren't unique, because they were, but it seemed like the puzzles got worse. I think the magnets and iron boots puzzles were the best new addition.
Now on to the characters. Overall I found the character depth disappointing. I never became attached to anyone in the game, except maybe Ilia and the village kids. What I liked about the last two Zelda games was the amount of interaction you had with the characters. In Majora's Mask you learned the character's schedules and performed tasks for them. In Windwaker the islands were richly populated with characters you could talk to, and they'd offer sidequests. So where are the characters in this game? For most of the game you'll alone. The provinces start to become pointless after you finished off the dungeons in them. Nothing brings you back to the town and the people. Midna accompanies you along your journey, but she doesn't offer much. In the beginning she'll help you out when you transform into a wolf, allowing you to reach areas you couldn't otherwise get to. Later on she doesn't do much except allow you to transform. Talking to Midna is another pointless exercise. I tend to pick up the game about once a week, and by then I forgot what I was previously doing. Midna doesn't offer too much guidance for the casual player. I think Castle Town disappointed me the most, as you could interact with less than half of the characters.
I didn't do many of the sidequests of the game. I did the stars game, and I'd collect a bug or poe when I saw one, but that was about it. Some of the sidequests sound fun, like yetti sledding, but others are boring. I hate collecting things in games. All those bugs and poes...yuck. How boring. They also added more pieces of heart to the game, which I didn't bother finding. I think those are just there to consume more time. However, I did spend a lot of time fishing. There also didn't seem to be very many mini-games to choose from.
Transforming into a wolf...cool idea, poorly executed. It started off kind of fun, using your senses to trace scents and find secret digging places. It became annoying switching back and forth between forms though, mostly because you never really found anything good as a wolf. Digging would usually just give you a couple of rupees. Following scents was a cool new addition to gameplay, but you don't use it at all in the last 1/3 of the game. Actually, you didn't really switch into wolf form much at all in the last 1/3 of the game, except for warping, which was annoying since often you'd want to be human and you'd come out of the warp as a wolf.
The weapons in the game were pretty fun. I enjoyed the new additions of the double clawshot, ball and chain, and the spinner (which was awesome). The lantern was a good idea as well. The dominion rod was fun for a while, but became tedious after a while. The bomblings were useless, just like bombchus of the past. The new targeting for the boomerang was also a nice addition. The hawkeye was a nice idea, even though I rarely needed to use it. It was handy in some places, but most of the time your enemies were too close to need it.
I missed some of the classic items, like the lens of truth, magic arrows (hell, magic in general), the feather boots, the mirror shield (my favorite), and the fire tunic. The lack of fire and magic in the game astonished me. The magic armor is a poor replacement for it.
The hidden skills were a great addition to the game, even though it came at the expense of Windwaker's parry move. At least you could do manual parrys and combine them with the hidden skills, so the parry wasn't completely lost.
Music was also sacrificed in this game. I love music, and the lack of being able to play it was a blow to the game, in my opinion. What made OOT great was it combined music and magic, which brought a surreal feeling to the game. Howling like a wolf was annoying (I hate that sound) and unsatisfying.
Boss design was fairly standard and familiar. How many times do I have to hit that damn ball of light that gets thrown at you. Believe it or not, I was actually bored by about half of the boss fights. The final boss (well 4 I guess) was especially so. Both the first and last stages of the fight were lifted straight from OOT. However, stages 2 and 3 were a bit more unique, and relatively fun. There also wasn't a large variety of enemies.
The world itself is rather large, and I'm sure there are still areas of it that I haven't explored, but it is mostly empty.
So in summary, I think the game is good, but only average. The overall game is certainly well-polished and executed, with a great art style and less than immersive gameplay. I think the longest time I could stand playing was about 4 hours. The new additions were great, but I miss some of the charm and character depth of the previous games in the series. The game is definitely worth playing, but probably not replaying. I have a save point before the end that I can use to go back and do the mini-games if the mood strikes me.
Now on a completely unrelated note, I switched browsers from Firefox to Opera, and I couldn't be happier. I still haven't found a replacement for the web developer toobar yet, but at least I'm not using 250k of ram. FU Firefox. If you ever fix your memory leak bug (not likely) and start handling pdf files better maybe I'll come back, but for now I'll stick to Opera and IE7.
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Jun 16 2007, 04:32 PM
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Today I decided to check out web browsing on the Wii, so that's where I'm blogging from. Pretty spiffy. So far every site I've been on has worked fine. Now on to finish Zelda!
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Jun 6 2007, 02:01 PM
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It's been a while since my last entry. A lot has been going on. I got the PWToolBox library done, and Grey did the Linux port for it. I also have two interviews for game dev. jobs, one for Budcat on June 14th and one (a phone interview) for Incineration Studios tonight. It'd be nice to get one of theses jobs.
In other news, Kent (effigydrums) and I have another new non-PW song out, called "Draw In", which you can find at http://www.alifeelided.net/.
That's about it for news. We'll be having an ARB meeting in the next week or so to discuss the design of the graphics portion of the game engine, and joshpurple and Jerky are going to help me with a tech demo we will be putting together, mostly for us to play around with shaders. We'll probably end up releasing it eventually, to show off the kind of graphics we can expect for the game.
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May 9 2007, 01:23 AM
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Finally done with college, all graduated and back home. Somehow I did much better than I thought I would this semester.
Anyways, this means I have more time for PW. Today I spent the better part of the last 12 hours working on the PWToolBox library. I know this library hasn't passed an official design review yet (still waiting on a vote or two), but I was bored and needed something to do. I won't be committing it to SVN until it passes.
The PWToolBox library has given me the opportunity to test the unit testing library from Boost. It seems to work fairly well, although the documentation could be a bit better, but the example programs go a long way. Already the unit testing framework has proved useful, and helped me debug an error in the library. I still have a few more features to implement in the library (I only implemented the easy ones so far), but it's going pretty well.
Maybe tomorrow I'll test out SWIG and wrap the library up for use with Python.
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Apr 30 2007, 03:13 AM
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It's final exams week, and I sure have trouble bringing myself to study. I have 3 exams on Thursday, from 8-12 and 3-5.
So over the last few days, intermixed with studying, I've been experimenting with stuff. A couple nights ago I got bored and wrote a genetic algorithm that would find a sequence of numbers and operations based on a target value for the equation (the same program that is on the aijunkie website). It's pretty cool, but I'd like to try it on a less trivial and contrived problem.
I've also been looking into ways to implement the configuration file class that is going into the PWToolBox library. One way would be to write a parser to parse the .ini file format. This isn't terribly difficult, but I'm not a huge fan of .ini files. Another option I looked into was using the program_options library in Boost. I like how easy it is to specify and parse options, as well as receive options from multiple sources, but it is lacking a way to easily save modified options while maintaining the grouping of the options. The third option I'm looking into is using XML (through the TinyXml library) for the configuration file. This has the advantage that it already does the hard part (parsing options) automatically (something I'd have to write if I went with the first option), and it allows saving modified options. The only thing I'd have to write for this is an easy-to-use interface over the TinyXml library. I guess we'll see what some of the other guys think about this topic.
I guess I'm off to bed now, and then another day of summoning the willpower to study instead of play Zelda.
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Apr 16 2007, 11:39 AM
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No, this post is not about the Natalie Imbruglia cd/song by the same name.
I should be working on my databases project now, but I decided to procrastinate and write something here instead.
There's only 9 more days of school left before I graduate. Hurray. This means I'll potentially have more time to work on the project. I still don't know where I'll end up yet. I may go on to grad school (submitting the application in the next day or two). I'll know more in about a month. If it ends up that I don't go on to grad school, then I have to worry about getting a job. Depending on the job they may consider this project a conflict of interest. Hopefully it won't come to that though, because I'd really hate to leave.
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Mar 14 2007, 04:12 PM
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Obviously I haven't been blogging lately. This semester school started to demand a lot of my time, but I think I'm finally to the point where I can get back on track here.
Recently we've had a couple of good meetings regarding the future of the project and various design and management issues.
I've also been experimenting with Boost.Thread, Boost.Spirit, and embedding Ogre into wxWidgets. For those with dev access, I have tutorials (unformatted still) on the wiki.
I'm also working more on learning shaders, although I have no new screenshots to show. I want to design a very small test room that I can use test my shaders in Ogre. Maybe the artists can help me with this.
But now I'm off to play my brand new Wii.
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Jan 16 2007, 01:48 PM
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Well I got Internet service restored. Ends up the people were just now putting away modems from last year. Seeing that we had our old modem turned in, the figured we no longer wanted service. Perhaps they should have checked the date we turned it in or our contract for the service.
Finally I'm all moved in and classes are starting. So far they seem like they will be boring.
The day before I came back up to school Kent (effigydrums) and I finished a new song, which is the first one to go on our next CD. It's the first song listed here. Enjoy.
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Blog created: Nov 23 2006, 01:25 AM
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