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Little Fyora

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Everything posted by Little Fyora

  1. I've to get back to adding a character editor to the zone simulator. Whew, making a Spiderweb game is fun, but it's no joke even when you have all the data and just need to make a front-end. I don't know how Jeff does it even though it is his job. As always, I'd love to share the Game Maker source (as messy as it is right now) to anyone who's interested and can develop it further.
  2. I like the A1-BoA interface/graphics better than A2:CS for some reason (nostalgia doesn't have anything to do with it). Except maybe for the name of the game displayed at the top, maybe Jeff just had some space left over that he didn't know what to do with.
  3. Imagemagick looks great, thank you ! Checking it out right now.
  4. I saw a few open source engines but it'd be too much work to port it from GM to something else (and I shudder at the learning curve), so keeping that as the last alternative. Can whiten the border but having to tell the users to swap out their original images with the modified ones is totally uncool imo, though it may come to that.
  5. No it always takes the bottom-left pixel into account for transparency. As far as I have seen from their forums, there is nothing anybody can do about this. GM's commercial and we don't have the source. Here's why one must never rely on game engines like these; creating the same thing in SFML or SDL with good old C/C++ would have taken a lot of time, but at least the programmer has complete control. This is the function in GM's scripting language to load an image from a file :- sprite_add(fname,imgnumb,removeback,smooth,xorig,yorig) imgnumb : Number of sub-images in the file. removeback : Here you set true to remove the background colour (which is the colour of the bottom-left pixel).
  6. I did consider that, and painting that line white is as simple as using a fill-bucket tool, but doing that will only change the graphics on one system. Then we'll have to include all the customized graphics along with the Zone Simulator and ask the user to replace the original ones (which isn't so bad, but if there's an alternative it'd be nice). Here's the problem :- The black border would have been okay if they were all precise to the pixel for all of the images, but they're not and neither does GM allow custom-set transparency. Interesting. That would have made modding the graphics more difficult while increasing the size of the *.exe.
  7. Good old complex and unforgiving RPG's with excellent storylines, abundant replayablilty and the ability to create a horde of deadly mutant monsters.
  8. So for all you hobbyist/professional progammers out there, we have a problem. I've been working on a program that creates a look-alike of a Geneforge game, and so far it simulates the floors and most walls quite well. The problem is, the entire coding relies on having all the floor/terrain/etc images as resources included within the executable, unlike the actual Geneforge 5.exe which dynamically loads all the *.png graphics from within the "Geneforge 5 files" folder. The entire program is created with Game Maker (a game making engine which uses a C/C++ interpreted variant, and can load DLL's), and GM does have a function to load an external *.png image, but the problem is with transparency. When loading a *.png, it always considers (no workaround) the bottom-left pixel as the transparent pixel denoter for the whole image. No doubt the makers of GM did this instead of passing a colour's name as a parameter as they wanted to simplify things. Now for the game, White is obviously the colour that should be made transparent, but some of the Geneforge 5 graphics have a useless black line at the bottom. And all programs made with GM which load those images will check the bottom-left pixel, find it black, and happily go about making all the black pixels in the entire image transparent. Is there a workaround for this ? Edit : Btw I mentioned that all the images are included within the exe. I did this through the painful and redundant process of cutting up all the *.png graphics into new individual sprites within the program. A waste of effort, I'm sure you'll agree, and I'd like to hear your ideas/pointers regarding this.
  9. @Thynar I'm not sure whether Chairs come under 'terrain' or 'objects' but iirc it's an object. All stuff that can be interacted with (like doors, levers etc) are 'objects'. Big and movement-blocking props like walls, trees and rocks come under 'terrain'. @Ishad But I remember you saying something about where the bytes denoting number_of_zones are located...at the start of the file someplace ?
  10. Here's the second version of Zone Simulator, it can change the walls and floors of the game. Download the new version here. (Windows, 4 MB).
  11. Yes the G5 conversion should be quite simple I think. I've modified the Zone Simulator so you can right-click a floor or terrain, and put in diferent one. The problem's that I didn't take the floorsets into account, so all the user can see is floorset 0 for all zones.
  12. In the console, the commands terrain_visible(0) and floor_visible(0) can be used to hide the terrain or floors. Using 1 will make them visible again. Floorsets and Wallsets - ouch. I'm sure G1 didn't have those, did it. Change one little byte and watch the world transform into a wholly new environment. Rather convenient, though. What's unfortunate is that I assumed that floor 0 would always be snow, and didn't take the floorsets into account.
  13. Beta testers are welcome! Btw there's an anomaly I can't quite figure out - according to GF5Floorster, floor 0 is 'plain grass' but the game represents the 0's stored in aGF5ScenData's floor-section as 'plain snow'.
  14. This program simulates most of the floor and terrain of Geneforge 5, and can be used to precisely identify the row and column locations to, say, insert a new character or object. It's based on the research conducted by Ishad Nha, Tridash and all others who contributed to the BoG wiki. Download here : BoG Zone Simulator.exe (Note : This version is outdated, see below for version 2!) Courtesy : CalRef for the file hosting. References : How it all Began and Blades of Geneforge Wiki To use the program, place it in the same folder as Geneforge 5.exe. Right-click on a floor or terrain(wall) for detailed information and left-click or use the arrow keys to move around. This is a beta version so suggestions are welcome, as are ideas for future improvements!
  15. Don't give up hope; BoG will arise one day and life will be beautiful, just like old times. You just need to believe blindly in it
  16. Little Fyora

    *yawns*

       ∧∧   (  ・ω・)   _| ⊃/(___ / └-(____/  ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ *giggle*
  17. Still, it'd probably be better to just modify the BoA (3D ?) editor and teach it to handle Geneforge. I'm not sure how far this is possible though; but from what I see, Ishad Nha, Tridash, Niemand and Isaac are the ones who have specialized in BoA editor handling, so what do you think ?
  18. What is UAShell, what does it do (I tried searching for the source, but couldn't find one) ? Also, do you know whether the byte-structure of the ScenData is the same for the Mac version also, because if it's the same then the idea of mac-friendly custom scenarios goes from 'impossible' to 'probably achievable'. ^^^ I've been working on a gooey to simplify scenario editing. I'm working on putting in all of the information/memory locations you've discovered, but it will take some time. There are problems when using colours to represent floor and terrain tiles : there are too many floors and there just aren't enough colours for the human eye to have a unique colour for each floor.
  19. I'll check them out too. But supposing they're just padding, is the current knowledge of the script enough to create a new scenario ?
  20. There's a copy of the original file available, just in case you had fun without making a backup. Download Geneforge Scenario Data (322 Kb)
  21. I'm reminded of the time when a group of fellows got together and decrypted the entire mission data for an FPS PC game. It did take a while, but they had brilliant results; they made a function-oriented language and a compiler to create new scenarios, like what it would have been if the whole Blades of Avernum was created by fans alone.
  22. I've always wondered about what these fluffy turtles were and what they have to do with sanity, but I was too shy to ask. Could anyone tell me ?
  23. I can't decide whether that's a good or a bad thing from the player's perspective; I guess it depends on the player and also on what type of game it is.
  24. There's a physical constraint. You can't press the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination with one hand without using your thumb (Just kidding, it's actually possible)
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