Sept 21--
Currently in the early development stages - we have begin the process of structuring what needs to be done. I know we have gone through this speech before on how we are working on something and nothing ever is produced. Hopefully with a little bit of effort and "hell week" is finished up for Fryedsoft (If you must know - ask him what "hell week" is) I must say I am really excited and have begun doing alot of the storyboard drawing. So far this has become a huge artwork project that I have taken on and in drawings alone is probably x10 the amount of pictures then any other game we have done and I am 'still' working on the pictures. After some discussion with Fryedsoft on the direction we would like to go and some personal decision making - I wanted to kind of emulate the story telling on how "Phantasy Star 4" did it. It won't be a matching copy but our own unique style which will still make the story worth it and hopefully with all the additions that we are planning for this should be a chart topper or at least a fan favorite. I will have some pics or hopefully a full working beta site for the game soon. Keep checking back here for more updates.

Sept 28--
Well I finished a couple more pictures and I figured it was time to post thumbnails of the storyline I have completed so far. This by no means is everything completed for the game. This section of pictures are just the story line pictures and this is still far from the intended amount that will be completed for the game.


Removed Preview - Check current posts for picture updates.

A couple more pictures done - been thinking on how I want to do the fighting engine still...not sure if I want to do a side-scroll, 2/3rd view, 3rd person view. No matter what - I will animate all the fighting sequences. That's going to be so fun to draw
Anyways - I am going to use this thread as my project journal and maybe alittle venting here and there
Hopefully by next week I will have a set of more thumbnails to post.
-Peace

Just to show where the engine stands, and since I actually had to learn visio to teach someone else how to use it, lets have fun with flowcharts!

Basically, this lays out the general plot of the Landel Engine. (formerly the Slayers Engine.) This is a very rough layout and is not true to the actual layout, since many of the tasks (such as boxctrl and menuctrl) are reused throughout the entire engine. It's more of a what needs to be done kind of guide.

Box colors denote where a part of the engine stands. Red for not done, Orange for on paper, Yellow for done but needs fixed and Green for done. Most of the yellow boxes are pretty much completed, but were based on the older vnum system, which eats precious variable space. Since the 89 has a 2000+ variable limit, those modules are going to be coded to use more data matrices and consolidate multiple files into one file, which should eliminate that problem from the engine.

Edit: Moved the pic to another post. see below.

Project Update: Oct 8 - Too freaking early in the morning

Finalized more of the story line, so now I am up to part 27 in the story arc. I am going to assume the story line will be at least 50+ parts(not including side stories). I decided to post the completed world maps of 3 zones - these will be heavily explored during the first part of the game and probably used often throughout the game. So far I have one more zone I am currently working on and possibly more on the way. Depends on what Fryedsoft says what we can handle as far as area maps and memory. I have a fear we might be hitting a memory limit on the TI-89+ and that's what screwed us on FF7 last time. I guess I really want the game to be awesome but I don't want to get half way done and the calculator starts screaming at us for using too much damn memory. I would of had more to report but the last day has really been troublesome and having to sit at the hospital for a couple hours and listening to retards with doctor outfits on kind of killed my motivation to do much of anything tonight. Well.. back to work or sleep - which ever comes first.

Map 1:

Map 2:

Map 3:

Still playing with graphs.

I'm trying to get a feel on how many system variables we can have before the Ti-89 starts to show significant slowdown. after a few trials, I found that it could be measured by calculating the time it took for the home screen to go from the main line to one of it's stored history values. The Graph shows the results.

Pretty much, once you get around 1500 variables, the Ti-89 AMS starts to choke up until you get to 2400. Past that and you're most likely going to get a memory error when you try to run a program. It doesn't seem to effect program execution much, but it does affect calling other programs and variables, something the Landel engine does a ton of.

This was tested in VTi 2.5 using AMS 2.09.

the graphics look superb on the map and all those thumbnails.. yes, going to be an awesome game. ^^

Wondering what I've been up to?

At the college where I work, I've been asked to work on a haunted house display system using 4 separate monitors on one pc, which has been eating up most of my free time.

With what little time I've had, the Landel Engine Room Editor with all the new room file changes is done. now to make a room and design walkctrl to read it. from there, the inventory system gets worked on.

Redit (not shown in the diagram. The Landel Engine Room Editor) is in the green. It's important, since I need maps to test and fix walkctrl. That should be in the green soon enough, taking checknow and checkesc with it.

walkctrl, checknow and checkesc are back in the green. At this point, we can start working on map designs and concepts. The Next step will be the data variables system layout, since this is needed to work on buynsell, invctrl and equip. The next step may also get loaddata, savedata, and the savefiles in th green or at least in the orange/yellow.

Updated Engine layout. Also added menuctrl in the green since it's code is done, but the menu files still need to be made.

Here's the December update:

Currently we are focusing on variable file layouts, which is going to be the core data sets for both the inventory and fighting engines. We're also playing around with how to layout the fighting graphics. it's come down to two choices so far, the "Slayers RPG" like behind the player view with mobs facing them seen in many Phantasy Star games, or the "FF7:CQ" like side by side system seen in many Final Fantasy titles. We're also considering how this is going to effect available memory to work with.

With side by side, it opens us up for more animations during the fight, but would eat much more memory that we want to dedicate towards the storyline. The rear view has less and smaller animations, but that frees up RAM and Archive for other things, like more maps or more storyline or both.

We can alleviate many of these issues by making LoL HW2 only, or we can make the storyline episodic in nature. (a la .Hack) Currently, I'm looking into a way of doing both so that episodes can be added to fill more spacious calcs (such as the Titanium) but keep the older calcs in play. I should know more at a later date whether that's possible or not.

Jan 07 Update:

Yeah its been a while since I bothered to update the thread but here we go. After alot of talking with Fryedsoft on how we are going to work with memory and what calc version we are going to shoot for. It wasn't much of a ground breaking decision but it looks like we are going to break the game up into episodes/disks. After this decision was made - a realization that memory will be factor and I need to rethink on how I am going to present the storyline so I went through the entire collection of pics and conformed them all to the same size. Before it was 2 different picture sizes and alot of switching between the two. So I went in and turned all the wide formatted pictures into the standard size(81x76 if I recall). Some made an easy transition while others had to be converted into 2 separate pictures. Also I retouched up on some while adding a bit more to the overall completed folders.

As you can see this is now the format I am working under - this is disk 1 of the game. Within each disk the storyline is broken up in parts and named. However I removed the names in the picture because I don't want to reveal anything about the storyline.
As you can see Parts 13, 15~20 are still being drawn and probably will be another week or so before I update with alot more completed or the entire disk completed. Once I have the first disk completed I will move over onto the battle system pictures and finalize all of them for disk one.
Till next time, peace.

Jan 30 Update:

Working on Disk 1 Progress: Finished Parts 1 - 14 (Currently working on Part 15)

Well after much thought about the storyline - I added alot more pictures in Disk 1 and its coming along nicely. I am currently in the process of finishing Part 15 and so forth. Once I have Disk 1 storyline pictures completed - I will continue onward as planned. I am way behind my own deadline so I don't think I will have this stuff all done before Feb 1st as initially planned. Anyways enjoy the picture preview of what I have in store for Landel so far.

Well, it's still technically January, so...

Not much done this month, mostly due to work eating a ton of time between virus outbreaks and virus software replacement decisions. (About time thank god, although this could eat more time.)

What little I did do is change the look of the inventory control so that it shows more items on screen vs the old one. See for yourself below. This still works like the old invctrl, (Up-Down selects. Right-Left pages) but shows more than three items on screen. the only thing now to do it size the inventory correctly to handle this change.

Next step is get back on track and start working on the variables again. That was supposed to happen after this change but hopefully I can get time to get started on it next month.

Seems like you guys are booming with progress on this, which is amazing to see.

Do you guys expect any demos out eventually?