Project Multi Sketch

Oh, Gee. Informative.

πŸ˜›

Should I start now?

Sorry Conelight, I forgot to give the A-OK like I usually do. πŸ™‚ Yes, you may start whenever.

As for the quote, it was Eccles. ^_^
The Goon Show

He's working on it, even if he hasn't posted as much. It looks cool so far.

And ah, ok. That works.

How's progress going with Area 9 Conelight? Have you added the Upgrade yet?

It's doing good, and no i haven't added the upgrade yet.

I'm off to merry old England tomorrow for 10 days, and I'm not sure if I'll have any internet access. If anyone expresses an interest in participating in the project while I'm away drinking tea and saying "spit spot, good show, tally ho!" make sure to graciously welcome them to Project Multi Sketch.

So long people, or rather "cheery oh!"

PS. Good luck finishing Area 9 Conelight, I hope to play it when I get back πŸ™‚

This post has been edited by Silverwind : 10 July 2007 - 05:00 PM

Oky Doky Silverwind Have fun! And I have officially Added the upgrade!

Once Again Have Fun!

Yeah, enjoy yourself Silver! Bring back some of that tea!

πŸ˜›

Pi

lol

Back, and with lots of tea! :laugh: Not much has changed on the boards I see, and no Area 9 to explore, hehe.

Hidi ho there, neighborino! Quietly steals tae

Yeah, sorry about Area 9. i forgot to post saying that my brother and I are in North Carolina visiting Grandparents. Due to lack of computer that can run SKF editor...No progress. We return triumphant on Saturday, and i will poke Conelight until he gets to work.

Also, i'm missing the HP7 Party at our local Library... Sniff

Also, what kinda tae did you get?

Actually, I'm not one for tea, so it's the rest of the family who'll be drinking that. But as far as melted iron goes, I- wait, I'm straying from the point... oh yeah, no need to rush your Area Conelight. A job done right is better than a job done quick. (and anyways, I'm sure we'll all be busy reading, hehe πŸ™‚ )

On another note, I'd love to get back to SKF editing again. I can only half remember how the editor works, as I haven't played the game let alone opened the editor in ages. I got into game design awhile ago, and ever since most of my days are spent making simple RPG's, lol! But, like I said, I'm gonna try to make at least one more giant level before I get completely obsessed with programming, disappear from the boards, forget about humanity and spend the remainder of my life in the catacombs beneath an opera house living off small creatures who stumble upon my living quarters. Or... something like that.

How's progress on Area 9? Enough for a teasing screenshot? πŸ™‚

Heres one: Posted Image

Heres another: Posted Image

And another: Posted Image

This post has been edited by Conelight : 02 August 2007 - 05:03 PM

Wow, looks interesting, especially the first one. πŸ™‚ (wonders "is it mist? Or water?")

I was bored today, so I decided to see what Project Multi Sketch would be like if one spliced together all of sections so far, so I spent a few minutes in the editor and SketchMapMerge, and assembled it.

The spliced-together version of the first eight areas weighs in at 2.5MB, with roughly 24000 sprites. The map measures 45000 pixels wide and 25500 pixels high (although admittedly 14000 pixels of the width are the empty space of my airship battle).

It takes three-quarters of a minute to load in the editor (on my iBook G4), and is almost completely impossible to edit, as I found while adding a corridor to splice together Areas 4 and 5.

In-game, it takes just as long to load as in the editor, if not longer, and in addition, it is laggier than anything I've encountered. When I ran it under 1.0.2, a total of about ten frames got displayed, at one or two per second, before the game just gave up and stopped updating the screen- and that was in the nearly-empty starting point of the level. Results in 1.0.0 were so astoundingly better that I really wish that there was a version of the game with 1.0.0's collision detection and 1.0.1's custom level saving. Under 1.0.0, the level is definitely slowΒ– enough frames are dropped that it looks like the Sketchfighter is bouncing down a gravel road rather than flyingΒ– but is quite playable, even in the beginning of cheleball's Area.

Edwards

Forty five thousand pixels wide?! Gah, I can't think of much to say in response, except big... BIG... level...

Actually there is something else I wanna say. Did you encounter any problems with Extra 2 values when playing the map? No multiple used ones?

Remember folks, Project Multi Sketch is sponsored by SketchMapMerge - SketchMapMerge, the tool that allows you to make unplayably large levels without even realising it! πŸ™‚

Well, at that point, I think a reasonable course of action would be to have the level distributed in separate "acts", with one SketchMap file for each act, that the player does in order. The drawback is that the gear the player has is fixed at the beginning of each act, and the player cannot return to a previous act. That, or you figure out how to have the game use your acts as the main level files (including how to have these gates between levels). πŸ˜‰

@edwards, on Aug 5 2007, 02:06 AM, said in Project Multi Sketch:

Results in 1.0.0 were so astoundingly better that I really wish that there was a version of the game with 1.0.0's collision detection and 1.0.1's custom level saving.

Well, if you hadn't reported it so soon, everything might have been possible πŸ˜‰

@silverwind, on Aug 5 2007, 10:23 AM, said in Project Multi Sketch:

Actually there is something else I wanna say. Did you encounter any problems with Extra 2 values when playing the map? No multiple used ones?

Well, given how playable it is, I suppose it's kinda hard to tell for him. Edwards, do you want an experimental, unsupported, undocumented, unstable, explosive build of SketchMapMerge with Extra2 collisions warnings implemented to check it?

@zacha-pedro, on Aug 5 2007, 12:37 PM, said in Project Multi Sketch:

That, or you figure out how to have the game use your acts as the main level files (including how to have these gates between levels). πŸ˜‰

Bah. Trivial. The only difficulty would be in the way the levels are currently designed- in most cases, there's no way to go back more than one Area even when the whole thing is spliced together. However, you would be able to split the map up into a total of six to ten properly-linked sections, depending on how many sections you end up stuffing into each file, so even that one-way nature of the map might be changeable (well, except for the airship- it can't exactly turn around). It would take a fair bit of work to chop up the map properly, though, and the music would be locked based on which built-in maps you replaced with which Areas (which isn't as arbitrary as it might seem- you're limited to the pre-existing relationships between the various map sections).

Right off-hand, I'd arrange things as follows:
Areas 1 and 2: Racetrack
Area 3: Wasteland
Area 4: Volcano
Area 5: Factory
Area 6: Wasteland (set a few thousand pixels away from Area 3, using separate entrance/exit)
Area 7: Forest
Area 8: Ice Caves
Area 9: Factory (see explanation for second Wasteland)
Area 10: End Zone

To get ten divisions, you would insert another jog through the Factory in between Areas 6 and 7, although this might push the file-size too high.

Posted Image
...I think I put a bit more thought into this than I'd intended... :unsure:

@zacha-pedro, on Aug 5 2007, 12:37 PM, said in Project Multi Sketch:

Well, given how playable it is, I suppose it's kinda hard to tell for him.

The playability isn't really a problem, at least as far as I've gotten, but the lack of saving is a real pain. I could simulate saving by advancing the Game Start in the editor, and adding the appropriate weapons, but that wouldn't work for timed runs or checking Extra2 values.

@zacha-pedro, on Aug 5 2007, 12:37 PM, said in Project Multi Sketch:

Edwards, do you want an experimental, unsupported, undocumented, unstable, explosive build of SketchMapMerge with Extra2 collisions warnings implemented to check it?

Well, I'd been planning on using the pre-pre-pre-alpha version of MapText (I need to get back to work on that) and checking the outputs manually, but given how much of a pain it would have been to juggle multi-megabyte gazillion-row spreadsheets, I think I'd prefer to go with SMM:EE. Thanks!

Edwards

This post has been edited by Edwards : 05 August 2007 - 01:55 PM