TDG Development Diary

[sverx]

... or a very new twist to the storyline

ahahah, didn't consider that point of view

[headkaze]

I've never even played this game before, so I really don't know what's going to happen. Well, yesterday evening after some 20 minutes playing I found a dead body. Then that man was alive again (changed his appearance from a corpse to a living person again) and, even if he isn't walking at all, I could question him. No answers, fortunately

Can you give me more info on this? Which character was it? When he came back alive, where was it? This is a very strange bug.

Sashanan: Welcome to the boards and thanks for the feedback I think I will have the events trigger earlier if you have the evidence up to the next murder in your inventory. If you're interested in helping beta test I can send you out the current game. If you don't have a Nintendo DS you can run it through the No$ emulator.

[sverx]

Can you give me more info on this? Which character was it? When he came back alive, where was it? This is a very strange bug.

Ahem... I'm not very good with names... it's that gentleman with a "Bowler Hat". He was standing still exactly where his corpse was a minute before, and he wasn't moving at all. Don't know what else to describe.

[spacefractal]

Some Improvements for the item system:

- Item icon should disappear after a while. When I played it it just stay even I walked around until I used the menu.
- Return to game by pressing the A button when you are in a menu.
- In the first murder, yes he was dead, BUT if you trying to ask him something, he would been in waiting position, but he do never walk. So its a simple bug I guess to fix that one, to checking out you can't ask a dead person.

Music does actually works surpricely really nice, even with the DS speaker.

[headkaze]

Ahh okay I found the bug where you can still question characters who are dead. That is fixed now. Also am taking notes of other suggestions. Fixed most bugs reported so far. Thanks for the feedback guys

[Sashanan]

Sashanan: Welcome to the boards and thanks for the feedback I think I will have the events trigger earlier if you have the evidence up to the next murder in your inventory. If you're interested in helping beta test I can send you out the current game. If you don't have a Nintendo DS you can run it through the No$ emulator.

You're welcome I love the idea of this project and I'll be happy to help where I can. For testing, well, I do have a DS but it's fully unmodified and I want to keep it that way, so emulation would be my best bet. I have zero experience with DS emulation though. Won't dual screen and for that matter touchscreen functionality be a royal pain to emulate? Or are those not a problem for this game? If possible I'd be happy to help test it.

[Sashanan]

Ahh okay I found the bug where you can still question characters who are dead. That is fixed now. Also am taking notes of other suggestions. Fixed most bugs reported so far. Thanks for the feedback guys

Funny thing about that, that bug was halfway there in the original game too. Normally, if there was no one in the room with you, the ? icon wouldn't show up, but if you were in the room with a corpse it would. Though if you clicked it it would still say there was nobody in the room.

[sverx]

I do have a DS but it's fully unmodified and I want to keep it that way, so emulation would be my best bet.

You don't need to modify the DS, just sort of an 'adaptor' which reads microSD and where you can store your homebrew. This is just the size of a NDS regular cart. Emulation is good enough, anyway Check no$gba, dual screen and touch are not a problem (in the emulator you use the mouse to touch the screen...)

[headkaze]

Sashanan: I'll include you in the next demo send out.

Okay spent quite a bit of time implementing loading and saving. This is probably the only thing in C that is harder to do than in asm since you can't just load and save a chunk of memory. Anyway that is a very big and painful job out of the way. So we are very close to finishing now.

Things left to do..

- Make it so murders will trigger earlier if you are holding all collectable evidence for that time frame
- I am considering changing the 4 pieces of unmarked evidence to marked. Still not definite though but I was going to do this originally and since it's been requested aswell I think it might be worth doing. It will make the game much easier to finish (dunno if that's a good or bad thing really). Also considering having more replies to different objects. I'm not sure about this either, I do want to fix the annoying parts of the original but want to be careful not to over do it.
- One last demo test session.. then release.. I'm aiming for a December release (should be before XMas still)

Also attached is a screenshot showing how I've enhanced the menu system a bit so when you roll over an icon it tells you what it is. This seemed to be a common problem and I must admit even had it a bit myself. I preferred the original design better but this one is more practical.

[sverx]

Okay spent quite a bit of time implementing loading and saving. This is probably the only thing in C that is harder to do than in asm since you can't just load and save a chunk of memory. Anyway that is a very big and painful job out of the way. So we are very close to finishing now.

I'm curious about that... aren't you using a filesystem? So loading/saving actually shouldn't be anthing else but reading/writing a single C struct to a file, am I mistaken? I'm asking because I've never done that yet and I'd like to know what you did in there...

[headkaze]

I'm curious about that... aren't you using a filesystem? So loading/saving actually shouldn't be anthing else but reading/writing a single C struct to a file, am I mistaken? I'm asking because I've never done that yet and I'd like to know what you did in there...

TDG is written in C using C++ classes so much of the game data is stored in objects. For each object that needed data saved I wrote a Load() and Save() method that takes a pointer to a "CSave" object which takes care of all the saving using helper functions such as WriteByte(), WriteUInt16(), ReadUInt32() etc. If you're storing all your game data in a struct then yes it's a simple matter of writing that off to disk. It's not such a hard thing to do if you code the loading and saving routines as you go but I left it to the last minute. Still I wouldn't have designed it differently to how I have now.

On a side note one thing that C# and .NET languages have that native C doesn't is reflection which enables you to serialize a class directly to disk (in xml format) which is a very convenient way to load and save objects.

Are you coding your game using OOP? If so the way I describe is probably the only way to do it in C++.

[sverx]

Are you coding your game using OOP? If so the way I describe is probably the only way to do it in C++.

I know, it's that using classes then your data will be private and you need methods to load/save them OR you need something (another method maybe?) that copies your data from/to another object and this last one needs load/save methods (I guess I'd choose this way...). Btw... no, I'm, not coding it with OOP, just plain C. But I also don't think I'll have a full save game feature, just a simple hi-score save, you know.

[headkaze]

The way you describe is how I do it, everything is copied into a buffer in another object and then saved to disk in a large chunk. There is a variable that keeps track of the current buffer position and increments it based on the data read and written via it's internal helper methods. The data saved is 24 KB in size and I have 5 x 32 KB save slots available in the game. Compare that to something like MMLL which has less than 1 KB save data you can imagine it's quite a bit of data that needed to be stored. Obviously this game doesn't have hiscores so I didn't need to worry about that.

[sverx]

The way you describe is how I do it, everything is copied into a buffer in another object and then saved to disk in a large chunk.

Oh, good. Thanks for explaining

[spacefractal]

Sashanan: I'll include you in the next demo send out.

- I am considering changing the 4 pieces of unmarked evidence to marked. Still not definite though but I was going to do this originally and since it's been requested aswell I think it might be worth doing. It will make the game much easier to finish (dunno if that's a good or bad thing really). Also considering having more replies to different objects. I'm not sure about this either, I do want to fix the annoying parts of the original but want to be careful not to over do it.

You could do a easy and normal version, where the easy version whould been easier to find the items and marked and the hard they are not marked. Items could also been moved a bit around in the easy mode, so you can complete and enjoy the game 2 times (with full story only in normal mode).... Or something like this.

[headkaze]

Hey Lobo do you think the new menu looks alright?

[Lobo]

Looks great to me and the actual description is quite welcomed too. I'm yet to finish the test demo thingy, got sidetracked a bit. 

[headkaze]

I will be releasing another demo soonish that will be much better and will include loading and saving and also if you collect all evidence it will trigger murders quicker so less waiting around. Should be alot less painful to test

[sverx]

... and also if you collect all evidence it will trigger murders quicker so less waiting around.

Oh good Waiting for that

[Sashanan]

You could do a easy and normal version, where the easy version whould been easier to find the items and marked and the hard they are not marked. Items could also been moved a bit around in the easy mode, so you can complete and enjoy the game 2 times (with full story only in normal mode).... Or something like this.

I was thinking something along the same lines but going slightly farther: a "new" and a "classic" mode. I'm thinking along the lines of Impossible Mission for the DS here, which had the option of making the game look and sound completely like the original next to the new look. Similarly, having such a split here could let you go wild in the "new" version on anything you want to change that might make the game better in your opinion - timing on the murders, dialogue with other guests, marking items as evidence - while still preserving everything as is in the "classic" mode. Best of both worlds. Just more work.

[spacefractal]

I'm are just now testing your lastest version today.

These things does not effect gameplay elements at all, and then no reason to fix it if you wont:
 - First I think was in the pause menu, there should hold the b button to restart the game.... So you don't hit that button by accident (I actuelly did that once).
 - The drop sound in the washer room start when it the water start to drop and not when it hit on floor (as that it sound).
 - In the same room, it the water still drop in the pause menu.

[flash]

Well spotted SF..


HONESTLY HK, what are you playing at?



I will have to get some testing doen in the next day or two. I have to also do something nice for a vid... I remember that someone was going to send an audio file.... no, who was that? hm. nope, it's gone!!! LOL

[Sashanan]

Must make sure to run another test tonight. It looked very promising, had a few kinks to work out but those should have been worked out in the latest version I've got in my inbox now. Just bad luck that last night marked both the release of the final episode of Tales of Monkey Island and a major content update for World of Warcraft and there's just only so many hours in an evening

[sverx]

Some (minor) problems I found:
- When you go close to a bed you can walk 'down' but you can't walk 'up'.
- In the dining room you can walk so close to the table that chair legs looks closer than the investigator, even if you can see the chairs are behind him.
- Colonel speaks and grumbles in the same sentence, such as "Colonel speaks: '<something>' Colonel grumbles".
- Savegame slots do not change names so you can't say if they're free or busy. I think they should be named 'empty slot #x' or 'save @ hh:mm' instead.

I'm home with sore throat so if you don't find some of these I understand

See ya later, I guess.

[sverx]

Some more: also when going close to the right end of a room you can walk up but you can't walk down, the opposite of what happens when going close to a bed.
- "Colonel" actually is "Mayor"
- When swapping upper and lower screen I guess touchscreen should be disabled... (or, even better, you could make the inspector move to the place you selected touching the screen...)
- Bentley locked me in his room after leaving (!!!) I couldn't do anything else but leave the game.
- Once I've seen the 'pause' panel appeared behind some sprites, I think it was Bentley. I couldn't reproduce that again, though. :|

Hope this helps!

[flash]

That'll teach ya for snouting around in Bentley's room LOL...

[headkaze]

Thanks for the feedback sverx. I have implemented the suggestion you gave about the save slots. The only thing I probably won't be fixing is the diagonal collision issues. Since I'm using an 8x8 collision map you can get "stuck" if you try and move too close to the edge. The only way to fix this would be to calculate everything on an angle and I don't think it's that much of a problem to warrant putting the effort in. I'm not worried about it too much since the original game is the same. Not sure about the pause panel appearing behind sprites. If you get locked in Bentley's room and you've already taken the keys from his jacket in the cupboard then you will have to restart - same as the original

Peter has been working with me to make the game a bit easier, such as marking the bomb as evidence and adding in some extra dialog.

SF: Can you please send Flash mp3 versions of the music for the YouTube video?

[spacefractal]

allready done, I do first can resend the tune again on mondag, due my motherboard is dead and have ordered a new. I do still have the dropbox link, so I PM Flash it. Its the Studio version of it.....

[Sashanan]

Some more: also when going close to the right end of a room you can walk up but you can't walk down, the opposite of what happens when going close to a bed.
- Bentley locked me in his room after leaving (!!!) I couldn't do anything else but leave the game.

Hope this helps!

I've noticed the same thing at the right end of rooms.

For Bentley, he does this in the original as well - as part of his regular rounds he sometimes enters his room (your chance to do the same) and relocks it upon leaving. The means to get yourself out are in fact in that same room - though if you removed them previously, follow him into his room and THEN get locked in, you have no choice but to wait until he returns. He will, but it may take a while.

Examining the wall to the left of the knight armour in McFungus' room gives a "You see: (null)" message.

I'd like to report the ease of restarting the game from the pause menu as a bug. As I just discovered, it's very easy to do this accidentally when you intended to resume. A confirmation dialogue would be very welcome.

By the way, I goofed on the item descriptions for the Doctor, I just found. The line I'd put for the Bottle of Pills was actually intended for the Small Bottle. It's the Reverend that should (and does) react to the Bottle of Pills.

[headkaze]

Actually I forgot about that if you wait for Bentley he will eventually unlock the door again.

Lobo could you please change the pause graphic to be X+Y for restart. That should fix that problem.