Out of the woodwork

[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.

[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, 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: show

const int M_NORMAL = 0;const int M_MOVINGTOPOS = 1;
const int M_SOLIDATPOS = 2;


ffc script FollowLink{
void run(){
int orig = this->Data;
int lastDir;
int MovementState;
int CurrentScreen;
int idle;
while(true){
int x = Link->X; int y = Link->Y-16;
if(Link->Dir == DIR_UP||Link->Dir == DIR_DOWN) y -= Link->Dir*32-29;
else x -= (Link->Dir-2)*32-16;

if(CurrentScreen != Game->GetCurScreen()) MovementState = NormalPlacement(this,x,y);
if(MovementState == M_NORMAL){
if(lastDir != Link->Dir) MovementState = MoveToPosition(this,x,y);
else MovementState = NormalPlacement(this,x,y);
}else if(MovementState == M_MOVINGTOPOS) MovementState = WhileMoving(this,x,y,idle);
else if(MovementState == M_SOLIDATPOS) MovementState = CheckPos(this,x,y);

SetGraphics(this,orig);
CurrentScreen = Game->GetCurScreen();
idle = (idle+1)%6;
lastDir = Link->Dir;
Waitframe();
}
}
int NormalPlacement(ffc this,int x,int y){
this->X = x; this->Y = y;
return M_NORMAL;
}
int MoveToPosition(ffc this,int x,int y){
int speed = Distance(x,y,this->X,this->Y)/8;
if(speed < 0.5) return M_NORMAL;
else if(speed < 1.2) speed *= 2;
FFCToPoint(this,x,y,speed);
return M_MOVINGTOPOS;
}
int WhileMoving(ffc this,int x,int y,int idle){
if(Abs(this->X-x) < 3 && Abs(this->Y-y) < 3){
this->Vx = 0; this->Vy = 0;
return M_NORMAL;
}

if(idle == 0) return MoveToPosition(this,x,y);
return M_MOVINGTOPOS;
}
int CheckPos(ffc this,int x,int y){
if(Solid(this,x,y)) return M_SOLIDATPOS;
return MoveToPosition(this,x,y);
}
bool Solid(ffc this,int x,int y){
if(Screen->isSolid(x+8,y+8)){
this->Vx = 0; this->Vy = 0;
return true;
}
}
void SetGraphics(ffc this,int orig){
int moving;
if(Link->InputUp || Link->InputDown || Link->InputLeft || Link->InputRight
|| this->Vx != 0 || this->Vy != 0) moving = 4;
this->Data = orig+moving+Link->Dir;
}
int FFCToPoint(ffc f,int x,int y,int speed){
if(speed == 0) return -1;
int dx = x-f->X; int dy = y-f->Y;
int dis = Abs(dx) + Abs(dy);
int d = dis/speed;
f->Vx = dx/d; f->Vy = dy/d;
return d;
}
}

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.