SuperAntx's site

Forum Clutter

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 06:52:26 +0000

I think the forum is just a little cluttered the way it is. Here's how I think it should be:

BYOND Feedback
- BYOND Discussion: Discuss the BYOND software or website.
- Bug Reports: Found a bug? Report it here.
- Feature Requests: Suggest your ideas for improving BYOND.
- Help Desk: Having software or website problems? Get help here.
Developer Resources
- Developer Tips: Is your game broken or you're not sure how to implement something? Get help here.
- Design Philosophy: Discuss game mechanics and world design.
- Demos & Libraries & Snippets: Tutorials and other useful material to help improve your games.
- Game Resources: Share artwork and music or discuss techniques for creating them.
- Classified Ads: Recruit team members, advertise your skills, look for people to collaborate with.
Community
- General Discussion: Introduce yourself, talk about everyday issues and topics of interest to the community.
- Contests & Events: Something special going on? Tell the community here!
- Gaming: Discussion about BYOND games.
- Work In Progress: Making a game and want to show it off or get feedback before it's done? Post it here!

Sidescroller Controls

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:06:09 +0000

2D sidescrollers most commonly have four directional buttons plus two command buttons. One of the command buttons is for jumping while the other performs actions like shooting. If you wanted to have something like dashing you'd have to add a third button or add a double-tap sensor to your directional buttons. Adding buttons to cycle through items or to open an inventory screen further complicates things. Having yet another button to use said item makes things even more unwieldy.

It seems like most PC gamers have some way of playing games with a controller, but when designing your game to use many buttons it can come out like a mess for someone stuck with a keyboard. Just how many buttons is too many?

[Paid] Pixel Art for Sci-Fi Shoot 'Em Up

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 03:04:51 +0000

Project Description
I'm working on a sci-fi shoot 'em up which is two parts Smash TV, one part Portal, and has a dash of Contra thrown in for good measure. The perspective is similar to Metal Gear on the MSX. Here's the player sprite to give you a good idea of the art style.

Job Requirements
The player, weapons, HUD, and map are all covered. What I need is someone to draw the creature sprites. I would prefer to work with someone who's very creative on their own, someone I could give a list of attack patterns to and that would be enough to come up with unique creature designs. Though, more often than not you will have concept art to reference.

Some creatures only have a projectile attack, some only have a melee attack, and others float around in the air rather than walking. This is a rough outline of what you'll be dealing with.

32x32-96x96 Resolution
3 Directions - Up, Down, Left/Right Mirrored
2-4 Frame Walking Cycle
2-4 Frame Projectile Attack
2-4 Frame Melee Attack
2-4 Frame Death Animation
Associated projectile effects.

Compensation
I'll pay $2 a frame with additional palette swaps of the same creature being $1 each. It should average out to around $15-$20 a creature. Payment will be sent via Paypal upon completion of each creature. Loss of contact or failure to complete work in a timely manner will result in termination without pay for incomplete sprites.

Contact
If you're interested please send me an email with some of your work attached. As long as you can match the art style you should be good. I'll be monitoring this thread if there are any questions.

Simple Move

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:04:44 +0000

I was looking through some of my old demos and thought to myself, man, these are terrible. So I deleted them.

Macro Move, one of the deleted demos, was my first real attempt at making smooth diagonal movement using four directional keys rather than eight. It was far from perfect but it did the job for the most part. It was after reading this feature request that I decided to take another shot at it after having gained a bit more experience.

Simple Move is the result of that effort. I chose to build this as a library rather than a demo so users could drop it right into their game and have it working with minimal effort. The code itself should be fairly self-explanatory so I didn't bother cluttering it up with comments on every other line. I really don't like how comments can sometimes be needlessly long or wordy so I tried to keep everything simple and to the point. Hopefully anyone with at least a base level understanding of DM will be able to follow along quite easily.

There are three different movement types. DEFAULT is similar to the regular BYOND movement, only when holding two keys you will move in the direction of the key you pressed first. DIAGONAL will combine keys like NORTH and EAST to make you walk NORTHEAST. STRAFE will use movement similar to what's in Decadence where if you're walking NORTH and go to step EAST, your character will step NORTHEAST while still facing NORTH.

Simple Move is being released for free. You could donate if you'd like, but that's not necessary. If you notice any bugs or can't get it to work please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:07:56 +0000

Wish Maker - GIAD 2011

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 05:12:11 +0000

Wish Maker is my GIAD 2011 entry. Iain's choice in themes was a bit hard to work with, but after wrestling around with a few ideas I decided there was probably no way I could make a meaningful game based on mechanics alone. I also realized there was probably no way I could generate enough artwork to make it look even half way decent.

With that in mind I decided to take a different approach. Rather than focusing on complex mechanics or fantastic artwork, I chose to do something I could actually pull off in a day. I took an artistic approach to this contest, not in terms of fancy art, but in terms of trying to make a game of artistic merit. Using a minimalist art style and a two button control scheme I managed to create something I'm quite happy with.

Win or lose, I had some fun and I guess that's what it's really all about. I know everyone is going to have a good laugh at the source code once Iain is done judging everything. I guess my only real fear at this point is people getting stuck on the tutorial screen.

QuakeCon 2011 - John Carmack Keynote

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 06:59:52 +0000

Capcom, you are dead to me.

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:28:31 +0000

Megaman Legends 3, the 3DS sequel to a great series on the original Playstation, has been discontinued. Despite all the effort Capcom made to get the community involved they're going to cancel it anyway. From the way the message is worded it's a safe to say the decision most likely came from one of the higher ups. I'm guessing it's a shining example of why Inafune left the company in frustration.

A Message from Capcom:

"We'd like to thank you for your ongoing loyal support of Mega Man Legends 3. Today, however, we must regrettably announce the discontinuation of this project.

From the outset the MML3 Project was intended to give gamers across the world insight and input into the development process. Part of this process includes an assessment of whether the title will go into full production, and is based on a number of criteria with input from different sectors of the company.

Unfortunately it was not felt that the Mega Man Legends 3 Project met the required criteria, and it is with regret that we must announce that the Mega Man Legends 3 Project has been cancelled, meaning that Capcom will not be releasing the Prototype or the full game. Additionally, updates of the Mega Man Legends Developer Room will cease as of today, though the North American Developer Room and its forums will remain open indefinitely.

We can only express our deepest apologies to all of you who have lent us your unending support, including participation in the Mega Man Legends 3 Developer Room. On behalf of the entire Legends team, please accept our sincere apology for failing to meet the expectations of the fans.

We thank you all so much for your extended support of this title and this community, and we hope that you will continue to support the Mega Man franchise as well as other Capcom games."

[Source]

The Yawning Dark

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:33:51 +0000

Feature Tracker Picks

Sat, 14 May 2011 18:54:00 +0000

A lot of people might not realize BYOND has a Feature Tracker, or maybe you do know it's there but you don't really care because you're not making games. Either way, there are a lot of things on there which could directly influence the games you enjoy playing.

If you're a BYOND Member you get to vote on which features you'd like to see added. It's not an entirely democratic process, it just gives the BYOND staff a good idea of what the community wants. The problem with this is some people might not be entirely sure about what they're voting for and end up inadvertently burring great feature requests under ones which seem nice but aren't very practical or feasible.

What I'm going to do is list off a few of the popular features and give my opinions on them. I'm also going to point out a few lesser known feature requests to hopefully give them some support.

Popular Feature Requests

Client Sided Icon Manipulation

BYOND uses a very server-focused method of hosting. When playing a BYOND game over the internet the sever does all the calculations and sends the info to the players' game clients. For the most part this works out just fine but, this also means game resources (changing your hair color, rotating projectiles, etc) are created server-side and sent to the client. This uses up a lot of bandwidth and makes the game lag.

What this feature is asking for is a way to offload some of the burden of icon operations from the server onto the client. If the server only had to send instructions for generating icons rather than the icons themselves network lag would decrease dramatically during icon operations. This feature is definitely worth the votes.

Pixel Movement

Pixel movement is a method of collision detection which doesn't rely exclusively on tile-based coordinates. Basically, when you take a step you move a few pixels rather than a whole 32x32 tile.

It's a feature which sounds great but isn't quite as simple to implement as you'd think. There are many ways BYOND could add native pixel movement but, there's no uniform method of collision detection which would benefit every single game using it. BYOND already has the tools necessary to make your own form of pixel movement just the way you want it and with Forum_account's extremely polished pixel movement library I think it would be a waste of time to focus on adding this.

Selectively Hiding Objects from Players

What this feature is asking for can be summed up as a much more versatile invisibility variable. Invisibility works in a linear fashion right now, atoms can be more invisible or less invisible than other atoms. If you want to see the more invisible atoms you also see the less invisible atoms. There's no way to break the invisible atoms into different groups where you can see one set of invisible atoms without seeing the other set. That's what this feature is asking for.

There are all sorts of uses for this feature. A few examples I can think of are making instances a whole lot simpler to create. Survival/Horror games would be able to have many different new traps and puzzles. The elevation in my own game Decadence would become an obsolete thing of the past. Pretty much everything about this feature request is positive and I'd like to see it added.

Get DD Hosted Mode

This is one of those features which may seem pointless but would actually save developers from a lot of headaches. BYOND has three security modes: trusted/safe/ultrasafe. This is to prevent people from turning a BYOND game into a keylogger, trojan, or some other nasty thing. The drawback is normal developers have to jump through security checks in order to have simple server logs, player saves, and so on.

When starting up a game things can look pretty messed up depending on your security settings. What this feature is asking for is a way to actually check what the security settings are so developers can set up contingency plans to deal with not having read/write access. I would really like to see this added.

Not So Popular Feature Requests

Multiple Guests/Debug Key

When developing a multiplayer BYOND game a normal part of the testing process is logging into the game with a whole bunch of different accounts and testing out all the game's mechanics until something breaks. This process can be bogged down by the fact you have to log in and out of all those accounts just to connect to the game with them in the first place.

This feature is essentially asking for a way to log into a game a bunch of times without having to change accounts. It would make testing a lot easier and quicker. I'm the one who submitted the request, so obviously I would like to see it added.

Macros solely for Shift, Ctrl, and Alt.

This one's a no-brainer. BYOND doesn't support macros for just shift, ctrl, and alt. They're modifier keys for commands like Ctrl+F. We aren't able to use ctrl on its own as a crouch button just like you would find in most FPS games.

Having the ability to use ctrl, alt, and shift as macro keys would improve the gameplay experience in a lot of games which require rapid user input. Modern games use WASD controls with the pinky on ctrl and the thumb on space bar. Not being able to use layouts like this only serves to promote the use of awkward control schemes.

Map Resolution stretching alternative to AA

When stretching game windows icons lose their crisp image quality and become blurry.This feature request is asking for a way to change the behavior of this resizing.

It's a much needed feature but, I'd like for the BYOND staff to really sit down and give this particular area a complete overhaul. Your average SNES emulator has all sorts of view filters; nearest neighbor interpolation, grayscale, scanlines, you name it. I would really like to see these things added.

ping(Address)

Pinging something is a way of measuring network latency. It's how you tell when someone's connection has gone bad. BYOND has a few methods for measuring network latency but, none of them are reliable and accurate enough for normal use.

This feature request is asking for a simple built-in procedure for having a server ping an IP address. Being the one who submitted the request, it's safe to say I'd be happy to see it made so.