What I've been working on for the past 6 weeks

[Ganonator]

For those of you who don't know, I am required to work on a 2-d game this year for school. What do you didn't know is that I'm making ZC, but with 32-bit tiles, particle effects, but retain the great playability that ZC had.

Just to show you some of the work I've done, here's some screenshots from the current build I just hacked out -

http://www.thedpshack.com/aoe1.gif
http://www.thedpshack.com/aoe2.gif
http://www.thedpshack.com/aoe3.gif

Yes, the first two are almost identical to the current version of ZC. I'm coding it in openGL, and not using any windowing widgets, so, all of the sliders, drop down boxes, and check boxes, etc were coded by hand. I find that it's a lot easier to get exactly what I want when I don't have to go through an API for windowing.

Also, the program is completely portable to Linux, Mac, etc.

Why do this? Why show you guys this? I want to do this not only to learn how the engine was created, but how to make a full-scale editor like ZC. I'm not the only person on this dev team, as 4 other people are coding on the Engine full time. It currently has a weather effect engine, where I just click a few buttons in the editor and I have instant snow.

Maybe someday, I can import unencoded ZC quests, but that's still a long ways off ;)

This was roughly 10,000 lines of C++. It has about 1/2 of the features of ZC, since I can't do simple file I/O, and a bunch more stuff added because programmers like to make things as best as possible for themselves. All of the GUI colors are customizable, and I even added in a 'interpolation' mode, where the GUI cycles between 0-60 on red, green, and blue on random intervals. Quite fun.

The project should be completed April of 2005, and I expect to have the editor completely done by February 15th of 2005.

[Dart Zaidyer]

Pretty cool, although I'm not sure why you'd want to put out another Z1 clone. I suggest you try to shoot for Oracles functionality, if not LttP/Four Swords. The ZQuest interface would still work great on games like that, especially for those of us familiar with it. =)

[Ganonator]

Oh, this isn't just for emulating Z1. It plays a lot closer to Lttp, there is already scrolling rooms, vertical rooms ( w/ gravity), the ability to create your own items, weapons, enemies, bosses, etc.

Heck, we might even add the possibility for RPG battles. You could practically clone Chrono Trigger by the time we finish it :shrug:

[*b*]

...how many pictures of me naked will it take for you to send that to me?

that sounds freaking awsome. I know you told me about it already, but you are planning to release it to the public, right? RIGHT!?


oh, and I was joking about the naked pictures...

[Ganonator]

I'm sure that we will need some alpha and beta testers the closer we get to April. I'd send it to you now, but it's just an in-house tool that you'd have to re-compile every time you wanted to do anything.

Actually, I don't even have a working version of the player. You could make some swingin' .aoe files, but to no real use.

[Orion]

Chrono Clone would be awesome (although Square hasn't taken too kindly to them in the past). I always wanted to do a CT tileset for ZC, but I just don't have the ambition right now. The project looks promising. Just curious what it is doing in the ZC Beta forums though?

[*b*]

I'm sure that we will need some alpha and beta testers the closer we get to April.
sign me up! er, if want.. or can, for the matter

[Ganonator]

Just curious what it is doing in the ZC Beta forums though? Just something I'm showing off to the die-hard ZC guys out there that may know a thing or two about programming. Also, if I put it in the main forums, people will think that the actual ZC has noboy working on it, and that maybe this is the new version or something.

[Orion]

Just something I'm showing off to the die-hard ZC guys out there that may know a thing or two about programming. Also, if I put it in the main forums, people will think that the actual ZC has noboy working on it, and that maybe this is the new version or something.

Ah, i get ya.

[Dart Zaidyer]

Y'know, a while back I did try to plan an LttP-styled engine with the familiar ZQuest design tools. If you need any suggestions or ideas, I'd be happy to give them.

Anyway, if you plan to support LttP-sized characters with complex animations, you should probably make them separate from the main tiles. Link alone would require a lot, for instance.
I suggest you try a visual WYSIWYG animation builder tool like Graal Online did. (One of the few ideas they had that didn't suck, actually.)
You'd import sprites from a typical image, arrange them on a field in the order you like, and animate them, with sounds and support for 4 directions. It's surprisingly intuitive, flexible, and way easier to make sure you get it right than, say, trying to do it with text or tiles.

[Jigglysaint]

BTW, somebody on the rom hacking scene released a Chrono Trigger level editor. If you can't wait that long from a clone, hack the ROM!

This project sounds very nice. I am a fan of the LA/Oracle Series(for several reasons), and I would love to be able to make my own dungeons---without having to hack the rom and mess with it's dungeon format compression. I would love to beta test this project.