Joyce

I don't think the real game should be at the level cap though. If you keep it varied and balanced inbetween, reaching the cap won't matter much and you can spread out content over much larger areas and really let the player explore, rather than being forced to level to "get to the real stuff" as some people say. If there is no large benefit to being max level, your players could spend more time exploring and doing what they enjoy most. Be it the usual end-game rabble of doing dungeons, or exploring zones they simply enjoy. Personally, I feel like in the type of setting you're trying to make levelling should take a while. Sure, it ticks some of the modern MMO hoppers off. But they'll get mad at you for changing anything in a content update and leave over that anyway. They always do.. But the main audience your game seems tailored to seems like people that remember the older games, or people that simply liked the style of them. Would rush levelling and some bland end game grind/content really be fun in this? When you could make it take much longer and have a large rich world available to explore, and some instances/dungeons that scale along with you, rather than requiring you to reach the cap or a certain level to enjoy it all. And ignore the rant/rambling, I'm tired and this is the best I can come up with right now. 

Could be a caching issue, just Control + F5 while in the folder it glitches out on.

Not really, it's never been finished or declared official. :] As long as Snider doesn't declare it 'done' in a sense, it'll remain there.

Custom Versions, slightly down the page: http://www.touchofdeathforums.com/community/index.php?/topic/127309-eclipse-nightly-releases-24-30/

> kinda agree. the control of items,maps,players and such max number should have stayed in a ini file. not everyone can program or get access to vb6. > > everyone keeps for getting that. XD Considering you more or less need it to customize your game, you'll need it eventually regardless. So I don't see how this is very valid. (Unless you enjoy making another generic clone of the standard engine with thousands of entries that contain no data) Not to mention, with the default max numbers you can host quite a decent game with content. I doubt most people even manage to actually fill it all up if they have a proper design idea rather than just throwing nonsense together.

Different rendering engine, it uses Direct3D8 instead of DirectDraw7(It's based off of the Nightly Releases, which are the more worked out and fixed versions of 2.3, but were never marked as official because they were in development). As I said, most of the nonsense you're spouting is completely misinformed. DD7 can NOT now and will NEVER support *.png. It can load *.png files with an additional library, but converts this to bitmaps during the process.. So it still won't support any *.png features, it just loads and converts them. Please, for the love of my sanity look into things before yelling.

> Also FreeBASIC isn't "tinkertoy to play with", as you wrote. True, it lacks good IDE (there are some FB IDEs out there, but we have yet to see something that would be for FreeBASIC same thing what Lazarus is for FreePascal), but other than that it's powerful and useful language. > > I meant Eclipse. > > > And guess what? With time more and more "tricks" will be needed to get it to work. > > > > Because restarting the setup is hardcore and tricky right? > > > > And are you even reading what nonsense you're spouting about not having to rewrite it? have you even LOOKED into the programming languages you've suggested? They are nothing alike aside from the way IF -> END IF works. There is no easy porting it over, it's rewriting the entire thing in a new language under the same theories. Just because it has BASIC in the name does not mean you can copy/paste the code and make minor adjustments to make it work. VB6 and FreeBasic for example have near to nothing that makes them similar, forms, standard API libraries and a lot of direct calls to Windows subset commands as well as a whole bunch of graphical methods are completely different or non existant. > > > > If you think it's so similar and must not be hard, what's stopping you?

No offense, but half of your planned features seem misinformed.

As I said before, there is NO PROGRAM that magically generates stuff for you. You need skill, time and dedication. Graphic artists really don't just run a random program and get their UIs done. They open up confusing as hell programs and work that shit hard to get something decent. Paint.NET and GIMP are decent free alternatives for such software.

I don't see him specifically mentioning it'd be done in VB6 anywhere?

For the record, I have had zero trouble getting it to work on Win7 and Win8, just need to know the trick of manually restarting the setup. ;] Anyway, don't get me wrong. A more recent programming language would be beneficial. BUT, would you write a complete game engine for free just for the hell of it? Or would you be willing to teach everyone here to work with a new language? Not to mention, such projects have been worked on in the past, Java, C++, C# and various incarnations of these languages. But the sheer amount of work required puts people off and makes them stop, not to mention most of this community is too greedy to even appreciate part of the effort it takes to write something from scratch.

Do you have any idea how much time and effort it requires to reprogram such a thing? The idea has been widely discussed mind you, it's just not as simple as people tend to assume. I see you posting on this, and asking people to do things that're simply not possible for the current language and I wonder, are you not expecting too much from a free tinkertoy that people just work on for fun? EDIT: I looked at FreeBasic, and to get an ORPG engine to run in it you'd need to make two versions still: Linux and Windows, since it uses API commands rather than its own library for such things. Again, it isn't as easy as one might imagine. It lacks a lot of functionality that'd be required for something like this and the way it is handled as well. So, a complete rewrite would be required. And enlighten me, what version(s) of VB that are recent are not .NET based?

Well, unfortunately you need to download a fresh copy of the source code, and open it.. Then report the exact context of the error on here so we can figure out what is going on with it and fix it. (Or manually fiddle with it and see for yourself, but either way you'll need to redo the changes you've made.)

That's what caused it. ;] If it errors on opening a source file, it generally corrupts that file right from the bat. (Missing components get replaced by pictureboxes or other components, which causes issues such as this)

Seems to me like you're missing a reference of component.. Did it give any error about being unable to load a certain file the first time you opened the source?

> //edit: @Joyce, because I've forgot to. I am fully aware that there are external programs that do updating stuff, but I'd like such functionality inside client as it is both convenient for me as a developer (one less program to deploy) and end user (the just run client exe and don't worry about anything else). Except, you can point your shortcut AT the updater, and run the client with a commandline argument to make sure people can't run it seperately. Not to mention, your client has a critical bug, but you can't patch it properly because.. well, your client IS the updater itself. You can't let a program replace it's own executable, you're going to need a second program regardless. From a design standpoint your idea seems nice, but from a functional standpoint it's just too much of a risk. Sure, you can assume your application never has any issues that reside within the main code (assuming the previously implemented LUA scripting is included as was your request), but even then mistakes happen, and certain configurations just cause issues with certain code and patching it up or adding new features requires you to modify the main executable. > I know it is supposed, but checked and it isn't under other windows. All I get is "Close" button labeled Events. But anyway, I think I'll get back to origins, as I prefer its event system more (convenience and more features like move routes). Just for the record, bear in mind that the original Event System used in Origins is significantly slower because of these fluff features. Events are processed very often in the main server loop. So do keep that in mind when designing your mechanics. Spamming your game full of events will likely cause issues because non-global ones are processed (and thus generate network traffic) for every player on that map.

mrsean, yours isn't accurate when the person hasn't had his/her birthday that year yet though.

9 * 2 = 18 | + 5 = 23 | * 50 = 1150 | + 1762 = 2912 | - 1992 = 920 | = 9 and 20, seems to work.

> 1\. Usage of PNG files for graphics and OGG for sound. Aside from obvious things like 8bit transparency for PNGs, both OGG and PNG are *much* smaller than counterparts already used (WAV and BMP). OGG could be also used for music, MIDI won't do everything. Already works this way. > 2\. Autoupdate function. Basically all data files (maps, graphics, sfx, etc.) would be stored on server and client would on start check if they have current version. External programs already exist for this. > 3\. **MAJOR/BIG** Lua scripting engine integration. Why Lua? Well, it is fastest scripting engine currently made and as such, it would work very well on server. Integration itself would be simple task, I think, but what makes this major suggestion, is that I'd like all mod*.bas files into Lua to avoid engine recompilation to minimum, only if something seriously break. LUA Doesn't work well with VB6, and it isn't nearly as simple as you think it is. He'd need to write his own implementation, and it'd only result in slower execution than we have now, because well.. scripting, it's an external source of code. > 4\. Picking tile/rectangle of tiles with right click directly from map, like in RPG Maker This shouldn't be too hard, and literarily take 5 seconds to implement. > 5\. Ability to set default spawnpoint directly in map editor. If there are different spawn points on different maps, spawnpoint would be selected at random. Also class-specific spawnpoints, so all mages would spawn into Mage Tower while all warriors into Warrior training center, etc. Interesting, although this would require the entire system to be rewritten considering it isn't tied to a map at all right now, it's a completely seperate value.

VB6 isn't for sale anymore, the only way to get it is obtaining a second hand copy, OR just downloading it from a torrent or something similar. Anyway, I doubt we'll be porting it to some random BASIC language any time soon(the effort and time required is just very high, and not everyone is willing to do such a thing for free), although someone is working on a C# version of the engine.

You could go into DrawShadow and give it an offset on the X axis.

They're found in the server source. Do keep in mind that you need to compile it all with VB6 to get it to work.. Notepad won't help considering the source isn't loaded by the application itself.

I don't see the point when you can simply get a free program to do it for you. It'll just strain the connection even more, and imagine doing this on a global scale in the entire game.. X amount of people constantly chattering about something you don't care about or don't need to hear on the other side of the game world, some idiots yelling in Arabic, a spanish dude and some Dutch kid yelling all sorts of obscenities. Yeah, no thank you. I'll stick with a Teamspeak/Ventrilo/Raidcall server.

Any image editing software that can save the files in the format your engines uses (*.bmp for DD7 and *.png for D3D8) will work really. There are no magical programs that make stuff for you based on your input, you'll need to draw it yourself. :]

If you have VB6 installed it's really easy, just search the client and server code for MAX_LEVEL and change that value. (And compile the executables, of course.)