(Beta Testing) 1999: Megallennium 6-in-1 Mega Cart

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Post by Newbie Newtype »

Uh, wow. That is definitely not happening on my end either (I got like 38k points testing it out though). I wonder what is going on?

On that .gif speed note, I always forget to mention that .gif exports have had incorrect speed for awhile now. They've always been sped up for me like in this fun .gif I made from when the game was still in development.
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Post by TMC »

I'm not buying it!

But I do think it's spawning so many enemies because I have to hold down Enter for the Start Game option to register (the intro and highscore scroller also is bonkers); it doesn't spawn that many enemies after I die once.

I rewrote gif frame timing a couple days ago to fix a different problem; maybe now it's gone from too fast to too slow.
Did you only notice gifs at the wrong speed when recording games running at 60fps?
Last edited by TMC on Sat Apr 22, 2017 1:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by SwordPlay »

I think that that screen full of enemies looks hilarious
I can see it being used for a comedy scene or bonus content :p
I'd love to see something like that worked in as an e.g. ending or game over screen, or something like that, even if it is unintentional. It's really cool!
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Post by Newbie Newtype »

Which .gif? Mine was intentional (done for testing) and can still be done.
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

Newbie: I noticed something while messing around with the menu today. You can open Owlbear's main menu as its title screen is slowly fading it. See the screenshot for a better explanation. If you can't fix this, it's not a big deal, but it might be nice.
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Post by Newbie Newtype »

If I may make a suggestion, MorpheusKitami's cover art is still an uncompressed .bmp file and still takes up an enormous amount of file space. You should be able to save it as a .png to save a lot of filesize and not lose any quality.

Also, it appears that all of the games are missing in the official release rendering Megallenium unplayable.

Great job on the .pdf, the text formatting looks nice.
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

Newbie Newtype wrote:If I may make a suggestion, MorpheusKitami's cover art is still an uncompressed .bmp file and still takes up an enormous amount of file space. You should be able to save it as a .png to save a lot of filesize and not lose any quality.

Also, it appears that all of the games are missing in the official release rendering Megallenium unplayable.
Jeez! What a screw up!

I fixed both these things now.
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

Probably should've mentioned that, my mistake there.

Seems like there are a few problems with the new credits in a forest. Apocalypse seems to be misspelled in the last cartridge and the first bit of paper has some very noticeable problems. Not sure I like the new text either, but admittedly I didn't get a good look at all of it.

EDIT: Also, Dr. Moonlight isn't exactly set in the UK.
Last edited by MorpheusKitami on Sun May 07, 2017 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

MorpheusKitami wrote:Probably should've mentioned that, my mistake there.

Seems like there are a few problems with the new credits in a forest. Apocalypse seems to be misspelled in the last cartridge and the first bit of paper has some very noticeable problems. Not sure I like the new text either, but admittedly I didn't get a good look at all of it.

EDIT: Also, Dr. Moonlight isn't exactly set in the UK.
Please Note: I fixed 3 or 4 bad doorlinks I found in "forest". Please keep the new version (included with the 1.0 release) with your files. If you make updates to forest, use the new version of the RPG file I worked on. It was really exhausting to find those door links and neither of us will want to redo that work.

I just fixed the Apocalypse typo. When I make other significant changes, I'll update the download link.

Concerning the changes to the text, I was trying to format the text to make it a little clearer. I thought some more spacing would make the text easier to read. If you want to change it, please do. Or tell me how you want it changed and I can do it.

I'll change the UK line.

I attached an image of the first text box. I'm not sure I understand the problem, unless you mean the "something something" part. I left that in because I thought it was intentional, like the name of the multi-cart had been lost to time. Maybe I'm mistaken?
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MorpheusKitami
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

Ouch, thought I got all of those.

I wasn't referring to the text formating, I was just a little unimpressed by the fictional part of the credits. Well, parts of it anyway.

Yeah, I'm talking about the Something something, which I put in because I didn't know if you decided that Megallennium was the final name or not.
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

I'll change the "something something" part.
MorpheusKitami wrote:I wasn't referring to the text formatting, I was just a little unimpressed by the fictional part of the credits. Well, parts of it anyway.
Cool. Let's make it better! Want to rewrite it for me? If you don't want to bother, I'll can do it, but give me some ideas.
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Post by SwordPlay »

SCREEN SETTINGS (don't seem to stay put)
It acts weird when I go to options and change the screen settings.
When I start, it's fullscreen. Selecting any game (including options) makes it windowed.
Changing the screen setting from options doesn't save when I drop back to the main menu.
I'm using WINE to run it though, so maybe it's a problem on my end?

A FOREST
It looks cool! Not sure of the relevance of "a forest" but I got a chuckle out of it.
Bit confusing and empty, but the text is spot-on. I'd like to see a game filled out in that kind of style. Sadly the "gameplay" elements leave something to be desired, and I hope no-one chooses that initially.

MENU
When I select "rules of smirf" or "megallennium history" it only goes forward by pressing the USE key,
doesn't it allow cancelling or Left/Right to browse the textboxes?

DAILY FORTUNE
Daily fortune is neat, but I don't know how many people will use it everyday, it being nested in a menu.
Trust me on this, have the daily fortune appear automatically at the main menu or title screen. (Up to you)

PRESS START
On the first screen (the rad box-art) I think you could add a blinking "PRESS START" or "INSERT COIN" type dealy, maybe appearing if nothing is pressed for 2 or 3 seconds.
It's really awesome looking! Very shmexy.

BACKSTORY
If you wanted to rewrite the backstory, you could possibly look at my post here:
https://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewto ... 959#127959
I just took all your ideas and compiled it in a list and jazzed it up a little bit.)
Last edited by SwordPlay on Sun May 07, 2017 9:52 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by kylekrack »

I have two quick comments.

The forest is a little bit barren. It took me a while to find a single cartridge, and if the point of the minigame is to show the credits for the cart, Maybe they should be a little bit more frequent? I can imagine getting confused and bored and exiting the game before realizing what the point is. I definitely got bored after finding two cartridges. I couldn't find another for several more screens and gave up.

The file structure for the multicart is wacky. I guess all you have to do is find the executable, but there are so many files in that one folder that it's messy, to say the least. I don't know how possible it is to change this, given complications with Game.exe running .rpg files automatically and the run game() command. Still, I think it's worth looking into. It's not good to make the user feel overwhelmed just trying to run and play the collection.
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Post by SwordPlay »

FOREST
kylekrack wrote:I have two quick comments.

The forest is a little bit barren. It took me a while to find a single cartridge, and if the point of the minigame is to show the credits for the cart, Maybe they should be a little bit more frequent? I can imagine getting confused and bored and exiting the game before realizing what the point is. I definitely got bored after finding two cartridges. I couldn't find another for several more screens and gave up.
Wait, you can do stuff in "a forest"?! I literally just walked left and up and it ended. I didn't even interact with anything


EDIT:
Just had a look at "forest" in CUSTOM. I think 100 rooms is waaaay too much· Maybe cut it down to 20/30ish?

"Crys" should be "Cries" I reckon (textbox 11)
Last edited by SwordPlay on Mon May 08, 2017 1:36 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by TMC »

Awesome! No better time to provide feedback than the 1.0 release, right?

Firstly, Owlbears is still completely broken. For me the whole game goes crazy under Linux (see gif I posted earlier). I was quite serious when I accused Newbie of putting a kill switch in the demo to make it stop working after a certain date.

Long story short, after I found the bug in Owlbears, I committed a fix to the engine to work around it, since it's likely that other people will make the same mistake. Testing it out I found that it also fixed the YOU WIN! banner in PicOHRoss not appearing.

I spent some time poking around in Owlbears. I had already previously excluded the problem being a recent engine bug, since it doesn't work even with older versions of the OHR with which it used to. The first thing I noticed is that it uses milliseconds for timing. So I extracted the scripts and took a look at them. (I'm impressed! Very professional looking; better than my crud. I can tell how much time you poured into this project.) Sure enough, it turns out that there's bug in the way the game uses milliseconds, which amounts to a kill switch. Every 25 days the game will switch from working to not working when milliseconds wraps around to negative values after it gets past 2147483647 (which is normally not a problem). I think that on Windows this counter resets when you reboot the computer so you won't see a problem unless you haven't rebooted recently, but it doesn't reset under Linux.

The script to blame is getGlobalTimerChange

Code: Select all

	i &#58;= milliseconds -- globalTimer
	globalTimer &#58;= milliseconds
	timerChange &#58;= timerChange + i
	if &#40;timerChange > 55&#41; then &#40;timerChange &#58;= 0&#41;
There are two bugs here. Firstly, globalTimer is never initialised (should have done that in your newgame script), so if milliseconds is negative then on the first tick of the game timerChange gets set to a huge negative value, screwing up timers. Secondly, "timerChange := timerChange + i" makes no sense at all. You should just have written "timerChange := milliseconds -- globalTimer" instead. Due to the interaction with the final line, if the frame rate drops below 55 fps, then Owlbears will suddenly start running at nearly double speed! As long as it's running at 60fps, timers will advance in a pattern like this: 17, 34, 0, 17, 34, 0 ... It just so happens that that averages out to the correct number of milliseconds, so fixing it should mean the game speed stays identical.

(BTW, you overlooked the stringcompare command, and lastascii/getinputtext for that matter)
Virtuous Sword wrote:SCREEN SETTINGS (don't seem to stay put)
It acts weird when I go to options and change the screen settings.
When I start, it's fullscreen. Selecting any game (including options) makes it windowed.
Changing the screen setting from options doesn't save when I drop back to the main menu.
Did you use the included .exe? I just tested it in a Windows VM and it works fine for me.

So, I played the surprise addition, forest. I think I got lucky because I didn't have to look through many screens to find about three scraps of paper and three carts, and then reach the ending. (I assume there's only one ending. I didn't play again to look for more content, since it's pretty empty and the text itself on the paper/carts wasn't really so interesting. It's too bad, for a short while I thought this game might have had a little bit of the flavour of Adventure for the 2600.) But the ending was so out of the blue and over the top that it was pretty entertaining while it lasted.
(But the contrast between his shirt and the sky on the finally backdrop was so low that I didn't even understand what I was looking at at first. )
Virtuous Sword wrote: When I select "rules of smirf" or "megallennium history" it only goes forward by pressing the USE key,
doesn't it allow cancelling or Left/Right to browse the textboxes?
I agree, would be nice to allow cancelling with ESC.

The little UI thing that really annoys me is that the main menu doesn't support the page up/down and home/end keys, unlike normal OHR menus. It occurs to me that Giz had to script his own menu in order to display slices on top of it.
kylekrack wrote:The file structure for the multicart is wacky. I guess all you have to do is find the executable, but there are so many files in that one folder that it's messy, to say the least. I don't know how possible it is to change this, given complications with Game.exe running .rpg files automatically and the run game() command.
Yes, that can be done; I nearly suggested it earlier. You just put all the .rpgs except for the menu in a subdirectory, like "games", and then do e.g. 'run game($0="games/xeno.rpg")'.
However then the games would all have to be modified to run "../megallennium.rpg". (If I had finished adding those extra commands to rungame, then the subgames wouldn't need to call rungame at all, and this would have been trivial...)
Last edited by TMC on Mon May 08, 2017 3:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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