Out of the woodwork

[Mitsukara]

Imagine you're 11 years old, never get out of your parents house because they don't believe in public school, and you think videogames are pretty neat, so you find out about something called Zelda Classic which is just about to release it's own editor called "Zquest".

Imagine years of internet drama as you grow up and are awkwardly open about most facets of your life because you have no one face to face to talk to, because you still don't get out of your parents' house during that time. Also, imagine an intensely dead-serious romantic relationship with someone 7 years your senior who about a year later goes crazy and sets fire to the home they're staying in, and you hear about it only via internet and a scanned local newspaper clipping.

Then imagine that, when you finally turn 18, you leave behind your parents' house (and state, and part of the country...), move far away, and start an almost new life with one other person you knew from all the way back when. To the degree you have an internet social life, it relocates and drifts around to new venues.

Imagine some stuff goes wrong, your health goes sideways in your early 20s, an ER visit and a catheter is involved at one point, and for years you pretty much forget all about that internet forum that stood in for all the awkwardness of high school most people get. But years later, when you're 24, something nags at your memory, and you remember Zquest was really pretty cool, and check in and find out holy crap, all kinds of stuff works now, there's a working item editor and enemy editor and cool scripting tricks and whoa, way cool.

So basically that's me at the moment. I don't want to stir up any old drama, and honestly it's one of the main reasons I haven't been coming here... that's just unpleasant, and I have better things to do with my mortal lifespan. Also, I've become intensely anti-social in the past few years, basically only talking to the people I currently live with, or one very old friend, or an ex/also very close friend I got to know after I stopped posting here. I don't even talk to those people all that much, proportionately.

(Also, my condolences and respects to DarkNation's wife and all his friends; I just found out about that, but decided not to reply in a months-old thread better left to rest. He was a great guy, and ZC wouldn't be what it is without him.)

So, what am I up to these days? Well, not a whole lot. I make some weird stuff over on deviantart. I have trouble squatting (as in, if I try, my legs have horrible pain and I tend to fall over), I sleep as much as 12 hours a day sometimes (unintentionally), and am kind of a mess. On the upside, I'm also finally in a relationship that I think is healthy and going fairly well, but that's a little more private so I won't get into it here. I've pretty much lost contact with everyone who ever came here but Sarria (previously known by KingArthur and Skeeve22), who remains one of my best friends but doesn't come here anymore either.

Also, I'm still agnostic, still a woman (but perhaps not the shiningest example of transition stories given my odd health issues and self-sufficiency failings), and other things you might expect. My formative/teenage years weren't perfectly representative of me and I'm embarrassed of it, but roots are roots. I try to avoid poiltical talk because it's usually awkward and I'm usually in over my head, and it's not that hard to guess which way I lean anyway. But I'm not really here to talk about any of those things too much most likely.

And... that's about it. Also I've been poking at ZC 2.5 lately and maaaaaaaaan that is awesome. Maybe even more material to file for the "makes my inner past 12 year old all giddy" list. Oh, and I'm hugely fond of Sailor Moon (mainly the anime) these days. And have an interest in the Warhammer 40K setting of all things, due to tabletop RPG stuff I've been involved with. Still fond of good old Ken Akamatsu, as well, though I honestly got behind on Negima and have yet to catch up on that. I've also seen every episode of the three live action Stargate franchises except "Gauntlet" (the SGU cancellation finale), which is on my to-do list somewhere. (I'm most fond of Daniel Jackson, personally.)

I don't know if I'm going to post here again after this or what, but, like Doc Brown taping together Marty's note after 30 years, I figured... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgA6LBz7biM)

Basically: if it's going to be hoary old drama or name-calling ("fag" etc) or whatever, I'm probably not gonna bother posting. And, if I just don't get around to it, I might also not post anyway. But, there are a few old friends and other acquaintances it'd be nice to catch up with, so, we'll see.

Also, I must admit to having done a very halfway job of checking to see if there were new forum rules I'm unaware of. If there's something I should know, please feel free to point out the obvious, and my apologies if I mess up somewhere. I'm greatly amused that "favorite Zelda game" is now a required field though.

So yeah. Hi maybe?

[Glenn the Great]

Welcome back, Tails. A lot has changed since you last popped in, here's hoping you stick around for awhile this time!

[rock_nog]

Wow, talk about a blast from the past. It's great to hear from you after all these years. Granted, I tend to be in and out myself, but I find it interesting how some of us oldies always tend to find our way back to this forum.

[erm2003]

Welcome back Jennifer! It's been a bit more quiet than it used to be here but it's a pretty tight group that still posts. It would be great to see you here more often!

[SUCCESSOR]

*Typical epic Tails post*

Hello, old friend. I don't know if I qualify as a friend, nevertheless I am happy to see you. I was hoping you'd pop in here eventually. I don't know the last time you were here but as Glenn said a great deal has changed. No one will mistreat you here.

It's good to hear things are going well. Welcome back. FYI, leaving is now against the rules.

[ctrl-alt-delete]

This never gets old. Glad to hear from you, Jennifer. Hang out a while. Make a 5th quest for the contest. Etc.

[Mitsukara]

Thank you for the polite responses! Last time I did this I read the replies and was all like "blehhhh" and didn't try it again for three years.


A lot has changed since you last popped in, here's hoping you stick around for awhile this time!
It sure looks that way. You're an administrator after all? Last I heard there was some sort of blood-feud against you or something like that. Good to see you doing well, though.

Granted, I tend to be in and out myself, but I find it interesting how some of us oldies always tend to find our way back to this forum.
Yeah... it really was my stand-in for high school social life, after all, so I get curious now and then. It's a strange feeling, because it's been so long I don't really feel like I know anyone super well anymore, but I remember little things here and there about people. I used to be a lot more sociable as a teenager I guess.

It's been a bit more quiet than it used to be here but it's a pretty tight group that still posts. It would be great to see you here more often!
I'll probably never post as much as I used to, but I'll look around and maybe pop in now and then. Things seem friendlier than they used to be, which is a good sign. Plus I'll probably have some ZC questions.

Hello, old friend. I don't know if I qualify as a friend, nevertheless I am happy to see you.

I remember you a little as well. It's kind of nice to see old faces around, as it were. Thanks : )

You know that song people associate with New Years' Day, "Auld Lang Syne"? "Should old acquaintance be forgot" and so on? That song's definitely grown on me over time.

Make a 5th quest for the contest. Etc.
Sadly I have to admit I haven't played the 3rd and 4th quests (yet!), or finished the original second quest (although I have been poking at that recently- I got through level 3, but the only items I've found are the two boomerangs and the whistle, plus of course stuff in stores... if they get progessively more devilish, I can only imagine what a 5th quest would be like).

Actually, I've been taking an interest in how much more support for a LTTP/Link's Awakening (especially the latter) hybrid sort of game there is now, what with the Roc's Feather and sideview rooms and that kinda thing (I am yeaaaars behind on the updates though). And I've heard tell of scripts for the cane of somaria and a lifting power glove, though I've yet to try running them (need to read up on how combining scripts works). Cool stuff.

I might wind up with something presentation-worthy (I have a pet project I'm working on), but it probably won't be a 5th quest entry- I don't think I really know what I'm doing for such a thing.

Thanks again for the friendly replies : ) it's encouraging. I'll try to be less of an embarrassment than I used to be.

[Glenn the Great]

You're an administrator after all? Last I heard there was some sort of blood-feud against you or something like that. Good to see you doing well, though.

Yeah, I am, who'd a thunk?

I'll be the first to admit that I was a little off my rocker back in the day. Late adolescence mood swings and all that.
Putting my mind toward graduating from college and then holding down an office job for the past 5 years has really helped me chill out.
But even so, reports of my craziness were greatly exaggerated (well at least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it!)
I'm trying to be less of an embarrassment than I used to be as well. The current mood of the place is much more amenable for that, I would say.

Things have been fairly quiet, but I don't think anyone would dispute that we've been seeing a significant up-tick in activity over the past couple of months.
I'm hoping that you and some of the other oldbies will start hanging around and posting more. I know that sometimes it's hard for people to find things worth saying on a forum in this Web 2.0 world of ours, but any chatter is better than none :)

[Gleeok]

I remember you. Although after I joined was around the time you left IIRC. So... Welcome back!

[ShadowTiger]

Hoooly crap, it's Mitsukara! Such a pleasant surprise! I can definitely see some of the extent of your enthusiasm for 2.5, considering the technical nature of the posts made in the scripting forum at PZC. Such a fun journey, scripting can be. Damn skippy.

Glad to see you're alive and well. Please continue to be as such.

[Mitsukara]

I'll do my best! Dying is one of my least favorite pastimes.

[Zim]

That story looks like someone might've framed your ex-boyfriend. Newspapers aren't always a reliable source of information.. and a "scanned" newspaper?

Anyway, nice to meet you Jennifer, I'm Zim.

I helped write a lot of script for ZC.. It's all pretty great, and worth checking out, but the scrolling stuff only works optimally on a pc or laptop like those 4 core i7 Toshibas.

Welcome back to AGN!

[Mitsukara]

. . .

Well, entertaining for a moment, for factuality's sake, the technically not disproven possibility of a well-forged newspaper article that fooled all of us here at AGN 10 years ago (the person who died was former forum member balzac, and it was reported by Amber and Ibis_god_of_Magicks), the facts are that he ceased internet activity at that time (and never returned to contact anyone), both friends seemed heavily distraught, including mention that there was terrible fire damage to Amber's family's house, and that the general assumption is that the story is correct, and very sad. There might be something in the archives about it; it was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in July 2003. I was 14 and.... yeah. It was an emotional time, let's put it that way. : (

(that said, I did attempt a google search for the article or any mention of his death, including the town name Milford and the timeframe of July 2003, and had trouble finding any relavent results, so, yeah.)

But off that topic.... there's new scrolling stuff in ZC? I'm only familiar with the chunky NES scrolling or the very-old "Smooth Scrolling" quest rule that basically acts the same way (screen by screen) except prettier. Is there another form of scrolling I'm unaware of? There was a topic about trying to figure out how to do LTTP-style scrolling over on PureZC, but it sounded like it was still in the theoretical stages.

Anyway, nice to meet you as well. ZC is quite impressive nowadays, so anyone who worked on it I'd say did a pretty good job it looks like. It's the most stable and feature-laden update I've seen since... well, admittedly I stopped keeping track during the 2.10 years. But yeah, good stuff. And thank you for the welcome!

[SUCCESSOR]

I remember you a little as well.

That's understandable. Sometime around 2004+ I started to become reclusive, arrogant, and aggressive. I think I might have contracted rabies. I remember chatting and IMing with you and DarkDude waaay back in the day. I also for some reason remember that you were the last person to register before I registered this account.

[Binx]

Hi, I'm Lineas, and my job here is to.... do absolutely nothing important. I'm just a random person who remembered he had an account, saw there was finally a stable 2.5 release and decided to insert myself into this awesome community. So... yeah, have fun, welcome back and.... I'd say hit me up with any questions, but I'm pretty sure the many people you ALREADY know here could do better at it.

But I've got a pretty good imagination, so if you ever need story ideas or "weird items that have strange functions" ideas or something, I'm good for that :)

P.S. I'm pretty sure we already sorta met on PureZC. You caught on to scripting a whole hell of a lot faster than I did.

[Zim]

Yeah, there's scrolling LttP style. The only thing I didn't get done was the hookshot.
If someone were to look at the scripts and use the H() and I() bools it would be easily doable though. When H() or I() are false, and Link->Dir==whatever, go normally, when false, change Z[0] or Z[1] and keep the head of the hookshot where it is and it'd be all set up. I just freaked out and sort of broke my system.
If you look at my quest discussion thread Zim.qst in Quest Discussion there's a link to the file there. Levels are created the same way as usual, there's just a few alterations of the script code per level needed, and the rest is done automatically.
Basically, the user just needs to tell the script what floor the person is on, and whether or not it uses overhead, sideview, or none.
I think I actually made it so that the sideview automatically enables sideview scrolling based on the flag..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnY1CjPdUFM is a sideview demo. There's a bunch of other demo videos on YouTube with tags Zim Zelda Classic.

There's also a dungeon completed, minus a few bugs and one non-passable room, the one with the warp. I'd recommend erasing the blocks or something if you'd like to play through it.
The quest is unpassworded too for your quest making or alteration. I'm not going to be making another quest with this until next year probably.

I was hoping a future build of ZC could implement these functions via windows, but I don't do the dev stuff for C++ or the windows aspects of it (yet).
Oh yeah, and the pc or laptop has to be top-notch basically for it to work right at a decent speed, like I mentioned before.

&& I didn't recall reading someone or people actually died in said mentioned incident.. Sorry to hear that.

[Tim]

Welcome back. You likely don't remember me since I wasn't such an avid poster in the past... but if you played a little Shattered Earth, you might. Still waiting on SE's epic comeback...

[Mitsukara]

&& I didn't recall reading someone or people actually died in said mentioned incident.. Sorry to hear that.
It's okay; I apologize that I wasn't clearer in my first post. No worries.

I will definitely have to try your quest! I'm not sure how easy/wise it would be for me to try to make my own quest using yours as a template, but I'll have to think about it; LTTP scrolling is a tempting proposition.

More than that, though, I'm interested in getting some of the custom items people have scripted to work- but unfortunately I don't know what I'm doing combining global scripts just yet, and some of the scripts don't seem to compile even on their own as-is anymore... I get the impression that subsequent builds of ZC have rendered formerly-working custom scripts non-working. It's all rather tricky. Mostly though, I'm pretty tempted with the notion of Pegasus Boots, Link lifting stuff with the power glove, a manually-used shield item, and some other stuff like that.

I've figured out enough of what I'm doing with scripting to alter a few existing scripts into doing new things I wanted them to, like different sizes of enlarged enemies on given screens or making an NPC follower that floats above Link rather than on the ground behind, and I know some basic stuff (always include "import "std.zh""), but some of this stuff gets pretty complicated.

But, well, it's tempting. I'll take a look at your quest as well, it seems like a fun experiment at least.

P.S. I previously forgot to say I had heard of there being basic Link's Awakening-style sidescrolling physics- which is darn cool by the way, thanks! But the LTTP non-screen-by-screen type experimentation is news to me. (also, I hadn't heard of wall-clinging, like in the video...?)

[SUCCESSOR]

It's okay; I apologize that I wasn't clearer in my first post. No worries.

I will definitely have to try your quest! I'm not sure how easy/wise it would be for me to try to make my own quest using yours as a template, but I'll have to think about it; LTTP scrolling is a tempting proposition.

More than that, though, I'm interested in getting some of the custom items people have scripted to work- but unfortunately I don't know what I'm doing combining global scripts just yet, and some of the scripts don't seem to compile even on their own as-is anymore... I get the impression that subsequent builds of ZC have rendered formerly-working custom scripts non-working. It's all rather tricky. Mostly though, I'm pretty tempted with the notion of Pegasus Boots, Link lifting stuff with the power glove, a manually-used shield item, and some other stuff like that.

I've figured out enough of what I'm doing with scripting to alter a few existing scripts into doing new things I wanted them to, like different sizes of enlarged enemies on given screens or making an NPC follower that floats above Link rather than on the ground behind, and I know some basic stuff (always include "import "std.zh""), but some of this stuff gets pretty complicated.

But, well, it's tempting. I'll take a look at your quest as well, it seems like a fun experiment at least.

P.S. I previously forgot to say I had heard of there being basic Link's Awakening-style sidescrolling physics- which is darn cool by the way, thanks! But the LTTP non-screen-by-screen type experimentation is news to me. (also, I hadn't heard of wall-clinging, like in the video...?)

If you have an npc follower script make sure the actually FFC isn't over Link or you may run into problems with combos not triggering and such.

Zim has done some cool stuff. There have been several people doing various scrolling scripts. It's good fun and all but there has yet to be a playable game that takes advantage of it(beside cinematic scrolling). It's a tremendous amount of work.

BTW, if after all this time you'd like a different username you can request the change here (http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?94782-Username-Change).

[Mitsukara]

Ah! As a matter of fact, it'd be pretty neat if my account was just Mitsukara. That's what I generally go by on the internets (and even here, it was my name in the chat). I haven't had a screenname change on this account since summer 2001 (which was the only time)...

My NPC follower script is just a minor modification of Joe 123's NPC follower script (http://armageddongames.net/showthread.php?91197-NPC-Follower), so I don't think it would do that, I hope? I altered the X and Y values a little so the NPC remains higher when Link is facing left and right, but not when facing up (so it stays behind him), and also removed a couple of the parts where the NPC follower stops for solid objects (although I didn't remove it all as cleanly as someone more skilled probably could- I think in my version, the NPC follower still checks for solid objects, they just don't stop moving when they bump into them). My script is this, if you're interested:

-=SPOILER=-

I basically wanted to create the impression that the NPC was following Link, but flying at a low altitude. (It's a seagull.) Generally when using it I set the FFC's draw-over flag, too. I've been setting up the FFC individually on each screen rather than using carry-over, because that had other problems and I want to have it not always be there for the rest of the game. I think it's been working out good so far.

The really shiny scripts are the ones I haven't figured out yet though. A lot of finished custom item scripts I've found don't want to compile as-is, or even extra code files they use like ghost.zh or ffcscript.zh don't seem to be parseable by the editor for some reason. I'm pretty confused, but I'd be happy to report particulars of what I'm having trouble with, so (while it'd be sensible to relocate such a discussion to the script forums) any help would be greatly appreciated. I posted a thread on pureZC about it earlier, but I could post another one like it here.

[SUCCESSOR]

Wow, someone got to that name change quick. They didn't document it in the thread though... lazy. :P

I didn't see your pzc thread. I usually lurk in their scripting forums here and there.

EDIT: Speaking of chat, join us in #agn at irc.bladerock.net

[Dark Knight]

Holy shit. I forgot how long your posts tend to be. It's nice to see that you're doing ok. Ever since our little IRC channel fell apart I kind of always wondered what happened to the various visitors we had. About the only people I managed to stay in contact with was Gerudo/Josh and Prr.

[Zim]

The most common problem I ran into before I learned how to script decently was that I wasn't putting the functions where they need to be, and in the right order.
Things like putting a function in the global loop, but not in the global's while loop or void run, at the very end, and then attempting to use those functions inside of other functions that were outside of the global.
Technical difficulties lead to the functions not working at random sometimes, and yes, older scripts do have a tendency to just break sometimes..
Simple workarounds of that entail:
a)rearranging the functions in the scripts
b)renaming variables and booleans into something new that the computer hasn't used yet. For some reason this works sometimes because when the script breaks, and the voids and variables are renamed, the computer stores that information on a completely separate part of the coding, all new lines, instead of attempting to rewrite where it already was, which caused problems due to interior mechanics of the way the computer works.

About your ffc script, since it seems that you would probably desire for this to actually work on multiple screens:
Instead of using the ffc windows on every screen that you would like the script to work on, use a global script that uses the said ffc the script is assigned to, and either
a)Use an integer or boolean to activate/deactivate the script, and do use carryover at all times, just say that if the screen / dmap == whatever to activate or change those.
b)Use the ffc BIRD = Screen->LoadFFC(yourffcnum); BIRD->Script = yourscriptnum, and then change the BIRD->Script to something else on screens that the thing is disabled.

[Rafnul]

Hey Mitsukara. I'm about a month late for this post, but the recent news drew me back here.

I'm glad to hear you're still alive and seem to have found at least some sense of peace in your life. You were, in some sense, one of my only real friends during what was a very dark time for me as well (abusive father, etc.). Getting to know you really opened up my world. You were kind to me when no else was. I wish I had more to say, but really what I have to say is simple. Thank you. For everything. For being you.