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Thread: Zelda Classic - its future. 35+ adults only please

  1. #11
    Gibdo
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    It would be nice to have ZC community strictly for 30+ members. It seems like the world is really coming down. "When the world is running down" by the Police!

  2. #12
    The Timelord
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    Quote Originally Posted by cbailey78 View Post
    It would be nice to have ZC community strictly for 30+ members. It seems like the world is really coming down. "When the world is running down" by the Police!
    Funny, I had once discussed starting a forum only for that audience. While that is clearly not the specific target of openzc.org, but the early 1980s themes both on the site and in the new software, do at east nod back toward that old notion.

    Quote Originally Posted by TheDarkOne View Post
    I still haven’t totally figured out ZQuest, let alone scripting. I did one cool thing, though. I was playing around with one of the remakes of the first quest and hid the fire boomerang somewhere. All I will say is that makes one of the hints you get from the old men mean something a little different.
    Play Origin from DFW.


    There is a lot of constant bickering about the 'future' of ZC. Given that I'm executive producer at this point, the net for our target audience is substantially wider, if for no better reason than to to justify my expenses. I want to target people who like software like Pico-8, hommebrew NES era coders, and provide an alternative for commercialware such as RPGMaker, and something comparable to GM )or better than GM_ for 8-bit or 16-bit style game development.

    Spoiler: show
    What expenses? Just this month alone, I'm about the USD$1,000 that I'm going to need to she out for a completed open assets set. It never ends, and no-one else finances this stuff. I frankly wish that we had community donations, but until we free ourselves of infringing properties, we legally can't do that; an d as in the past three years not one person was willing to work with us on a fully open tileset specifically to meet our needs, we need to pay for artists.


    Perhaps once this is all done, we can set up a donations page to reimburse some expenses, and to pay for stuff such as the not effectively mandatory security keys to register the software so that malware scanners don't blacklist it. That mates, is not cheap.

  3. #13
    Gibdo
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    I just looked at openzc.org and I'm pretty impressed. It's a blessing to have a dedicated website target to that audience like me. I honestly liked the original nes palette that looks more brighter than the fixed palette which these days look so muted.

  4. #14
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    Acually, please clarify: Why do the opinions of people who "Don't play ZC" matter? That's like asking a boomer their opinion on the future of teenagers: it's fucking retarded. If you aren't playing ZC or developing for it, you have nothing to add to the conversation.

  5. #15
    Is this the end?
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    In my view, the underlying reason for this trend is that scripting has made ZQuest inaccessible to new quest makers. It simply takes too much time for an aspiring quest maker to learn how to make a quest that is a "hit".
    Scripting is very off putting to the majority of the people who love ZC especially for newbies. Scripting in my eyes requires a 4 year college education to barely get a hang of it and understanding parts of scripting.
    I know just enough about coding to look like an idiot, and it seemed like every new quest, big or small, relied heavily on ZScript.
    I don't know why it is that scripting is particularly intimidating to people. Maybe it's because it's relatively abstract, a bunch of symbols and codewords rather than images and sounds. Maybe it's because the compiler rejects invalid scripts, whereas even the ugliest sprites work fine. Maybe it's because doing a poor job of it often results in something too broken to convince yourself is okay, so it's hard to recognize progress. Maybe people just aim too high too soon, attempting difficult projects when they're still struggling with the basics. Whatever the reason, there's really nothing special about it. It's a skill that can be learned like any other.

    Sure, most people aren't good at scripting at first. Most people aren't good at game or level design at first. Or mapping. Or screen design. Or writing. Most people's first couple of quests are pretty bad, scripts or no. But they keep working at it, and they get better. Scripting isn't any different. You'll be bad at it at first, but keep working at it, and you'll get better.

    Honestly, I think the simple fact that it's (relatively) new is a big reason long-time users feel this way. ZQuest was so easy to use, and now there's this big, difficult new thing messing it all up. But there's a ton of stuff in ZQuest that's opaque and confusing, and it's always been intimidating and difficult for new users. It was only ever easy to use because you had already gotten used to it.

    In 2.10, how do you make a treasure chest appear after defeating all enemies? In Data > Secret Combos > Misc, click a combo slot and select a Slash (not Slash -> Item) combo, then Ctrl+click the combo and select the Armos -> Item flag, place the corresponding (they're not labelled) misc. flag where you want it, set the Enemies->Secret screen flag, set the room type to Special Item, and set the screen's special item (not the regular item) to the item in the chest. And be sure you do all that on layer 0, because Armos -> Item doesn't work on layers. Want a custom boss? Just set up a dozen or so mostly identical screens connected by a convoluted series of invisible warps triggered by some combination of combo cycling and defeating invisible enemies. If you were able to learn crap like that, you can handle ZScript just fine.



    Quote Originally Posted by Dimentio View Post
    Acually, please clarify: Why do the opinions of people who "Don't play ZC" matter?
    Because they could become people who do play ZC. If there are people in ZC's target audience who aren't using it, why not? What would it take to bring in more users?

  6. #16
    Keese James24's Avatar
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    Just from my personal experience in having learnt to script modestly well, the entire process is an absolute ordeal. If I wasn't so motivated to make my dream quest, i would have given up on it. I just cannot picture an environment where the majority of people are script literate. I guess its not really possible for developers who are so used to scripting to view things from the perspective of someone who doesn't know any scripting.
    James's three laws of quest making:

    1) Quest makers put their tastes and preferences first and everyone else second
    2) The "everyone else second" part can only be implemented if and only if it takes a very short time.
    3) If large amounts of money are being paid for the quest change rule number 1 to "sponsor tastes first and own tastes second" and rule number 2 to "must be implemented even if it takes nearly forever".

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