DarkAkuma's
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This is a project I've been working on, off and on for the past week. I was going to wait and post about it later. But it seems someone had the exact same idea and beat me to the punch over on the Oculus reddit/Dev forums.
As stated in the title, that was my goal. To make a Kokiri Forest experience demo for the Oculus Rift. It was to be my first Rift project.
Here are some screenshots of my work so far.
Last night I fixed my SNESJoy. I then decided to play some Mega Man X with it.
Since I've been messing with streaming, I decided it was a good opportunity to do a impromptu play through of it on twitch like I didn't get done on XMas with Zelda, A Link to the Past.
Again, it was just me playing and chatting through text chat. No mic or anything.
The total air time was just a little over 4 hours, but I took a 30m break once, and stopped to chat some (Starting at 1:57:41 you will see me stop moving for several seconds to type).
I'm an experienced MMX player, but I'm definitely not a pro. So don't expect that much. It wasn't a speedrun or anything. You will notice I stick to the X-Buster a lot, and only resort to boss weapons when I don't feel like dealing with something any further. It's a completionists run. Meaning I got everything including the Hadouken. I tried not to use it to much, as I'm used to using it in my play throughs over the years, but I did put it to some use at the end after I beat the dog and Sigma1 each once without it. That's how I rationalized using the cheesy weapon, because at that point I was getting tired.
Merry Christmas!
Normally for Christmas I like to release a project, an update, or even just some progress news. But given the state of my projects right now, that's just not remotely possible.
But I have an idea! Let' s have a game-a-thon of sorts!
There's something about xmas and Thanksgiving. The temperature, the lighting, the smells. It always takes me back and makes me remember playing various Legend of Zeldas. So I've been thinking, why not play through one of the greatest Zeldas of all time, A Link to the Past! And more, why not share it with others!
Twitch is something I've considered doing for awhile now, but never really looked into as I'm just not quite sure what I'd want to do on it or get out of it. So I cobbled together this plan at the last minute, and I'm not all that prepared. No mic, no fancy effects, and no real motives outside of just sharing some fun. I don't expect this to be to popular of a steam or anything today because I'm unknown in the world of streaming and there's not going to be much going on except me playing through Zelda ALttP, and maybe doing some text chatting. But I hope those of you who do watch can find some enjoyment!
DarkAkuma's Christmas Twitch Stream
It's now been 3 weeks since I posted a very important post over on the Z-Net website. One were I absolutely require feedback from people. Average readers may not notice, but I put a lot of thought and work into the post. I did so in an effort to draw in that much needed feedback. But sadly that effort seems to have been wasted, much like I to often feel about the Z-Nets themselves. The amount and quality of responses has fallen well below my minimum hopes. So I'm left to once again consider if I even want to continue with the projects.
To me Z-Net I has been a huge failure. I of course created it to fill in the loss of zbattle. Within the year before zbattle disappeared I saw the user count in the 50-100s range. But try as I might, ZNI could never break 25. I also tried harder to create a community. One I could communicate with was necessary, so I focused on English speakers. For that reason and for increasing the odds of pleasant interactions among the users. But that failed as well. The forums were rarely posted on. The chat room addition flopped, seeing users rarely chat outside of whining, asking for help with basic things, or just disregarding the 1 rule that's always right in your face when you open the window.
So the Z-Net I project has been one huge disappointment for me, and a giant headache overall. So whatever fun I have coding quickly evaporated when I saw such a lack of users, or users who just misuse, abuse, or ignore everything.
Recently I made a new post on the Z-Net website. The purpose of the post is to get the community involved and started for Z-Net 3.
I absolutely need feedback from people to help decide the direction of the project in many ways, and in particular right now I need to know what emulator people would like the most for Z-Net 3 to support.
So please head on over and share your thoughts! I can't do this without you!
Z-Net Homepage: What Emulator do you want Z-Net 3 to support first?
How could an update with cool new features be even better?
Not having to download and install it!
Looking back at all of my Z-Net projects, zbattle, Kaillera and others, I find it kind of strange what common feature so many other programs have that they all lack. The feature I'm talking about is "Automatic Updating".
Think about it. The purpose of these programs has been to make tedious and somewhat complicated tasks simple and mostly automated. So why should installing new releases be any different? Sure, with a good installer, installing a update requires little more then mindlessly pressing a "Next" button over and over, but there's room for improvement.
Without Automatic Updates users need to know a update is available on the website, go there, find the link, download it, run the installer, spam left mouse click a half dozen times, and run the newly installed program.
All that can simply be replaced with "See the program inform you an update is available, then proceed to download, install and run the update itself". That can require no user interaction at all. Or at the most a "Yes/No" prompt asking the user if he wants to install the update.
I ended my last project related post stating that I might take a break. And that's just what I've done! This year I've ground away time and effort across 3 projects, ZNI, Z-Band, and ZN3. 4 if you count that I scrapped a version of ZN3 restarted it. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that I needed this break.
I've recently decided though that I'm at least a little interested in resuming work on ZN3, and that I'd test the waters and see just how interested I can get. I came to find though that I left it off at a difficult point. Generally when I resume a shelved project, I start with minor things to ease myself into it. But with ZN3 I have a huge task I have to tackle. A completely new feature not seen before in my previous projects, and a LOT of considerations and decisions to be made in relation to it. (I won't reveal the feature just now. I don't like to do that until at least the feature is mostly done.) This has caused me to realize my need for more organized planning.
With past projects, planning was easy. ZNI mimics the design of zbattle with some ZN2/ZN1 knowledge mixed in, ZN2 refines the design of ZN1 with additional emu support, ZN1, well was a mess, but I was still learning basics back then. Other projects of mine through out the years were either simple, had another program to be based off of, or in the case of Z-Band was developed little by little over years. ZN3 however has a different feel, despite on the surface having previous projects for me to base it off of. I'm really trying not to get locked into any previous design elements. And I'm trying to bring as much new as I can to it's design. But still I also have several other previous Z-Net that can be seen as of having compiled data for me to learn from. So it's helpful to analyze every aspect of them and how to use that analysis when moving forward with ZN3.
The analysis of that data as a whole is something I haven't done before. Even just considering ZNI, that's a lot to think about. Thus far I've been moving forward with vague ideas, and a gist of what I've learned from ZNI and ZN2. And I can no longer do that. I've decided I need to start outlining my thoughts on ZN3's design in print. Like in a text file. That's something I've done for years with a single feature at a time as I've deemed necessary. It's very helpful. But now I think I need to do it for the whole project. I need to write something thorough and something I can read to easily understand choices I've made, years later when looking at the project. I've looked at aspects of ZNI and wondered why I chose to do something the way I had, and while the answer may be in my brain it's a waste of time spent trying to remember it. The design document is kind of like why you comment code. Be kind and helpful to you're future self and others who may work on the project.
And that's what I'm doing now. Writing my design doc, analyzing design elements from previous projects, and trying to figure out the best choices to move forward considering all the data I can get. This is kind of boring, but much needed. At the moment I have puzzles on my plate to solve. Hopefully I can soon thoroughly consider all the related details, make some decisions, and start moving forward with actual coding work.
I just got done watching the live stream event for EverQuest Next. As a huge fan of early EQ1, my hopes were high. Sadly my faith was low due to every MMO since then, including post 2003 EQ1 being a huge disappointment. I've learned not to expect much from MMOs since I was massively disappointed with Vanguard, which was slated to be the spiritual successor to early EQ1. That ended up just being a poor clone of World of Warcraft, as it resembled that far more then EQ1.
Going into this stream, the things I was hoping for the most were the come back of long missed features and elements of EQ1 that have been lacking in MMOs since. Like a almost pure focus on PvE, focus on grouping to level rather then soloing/quest hubbing, elongated gameplay instead of instant gratification, focused classes (I.E. not classes that should be healers or tanks having DPS specs), non-instanced dungeons, class roles beyond Tank/Healer/DPS, like puller, crowd control and buffers/debuffers. Heck even corpse draggers. Long quests that elicit a more rewarding feeling upon completion, ability to lose EXP as well as having to get back to your corpse providing a better sting when dieing to make you avoid it more, dependency on other players for things like ports, buffs, food, etc. No real money for weapon/armor exchange. The list could go on and on. Some people hated some of those back in the day, but me and many others have come to realize over the years how truly wonderful those were for crafting a quality MMO experience. It's fine for other MMOs to diverge on those here and there. There shouldn't be a single MMO that has to appeal to everyone. MMOs should offer different things, and not just be WoW clone after WoW clone like we've had to endure.
Well with that all said about my mindset and desires going into this event, now that its over.... I'm disappointed. I can't completely write off EQN right now. The fact is, despite what seems to be a majority of the people who even cared about this (older EQ1 fans), they mentioned basically nothing that could even so much as elude to what EQ1 elements we miss are coming back in EQN. The presentation focused purely on new features, that I personally care little about. Features that really don't convey what the game will be like relating to the ways that EQ1 veterans would care about.
But that's all I have to go on for now, so I'll have to talk about those features.
Graphics:
Today I finished up work on getting the Qt code version of ZN3 back to where I stopped off at on the old scrapped version. As far as I can tell right now, everything I accomplished in that version has been covered again. Sadly, along the way I found some design holes that stood out that I still didn't fix. Most revolving around the addon's though. At the moment I'm still using the non-Qt addons. I plan to rewrite them in Qt, but my hope is to also support addons written in other languages.
A goal of ZN3 is to allow people other then me to create addons for use with the program. My primary focus right now is on addons that add netplay launching support for emus and games, but I hope to facilitate others later on in the design of the program.
Now that ZN3 is back to were it was, next I can focus on things such as refining the addons to remove those holes in the design. That could be what I work on next. But thee are several things I need to fix up. Like the avatar support. In both versions of ZN3, avatar support is incomplete. It will display one if you have it, but won't download it if you don't. I've decided to mimic the KVirc AVATAR protocol. Theres no IRC standard for such things, so you kind of have to pick and choose your own. At the moment it's setup to match that AVATAR protocol exactly, but I may modify it. I think I remember finding it lacking something. Anyway, the protocol allows you to either DCC an avatar from a user, or users can specify a URL. I might not support the DCC method at all. I'm not certain yet. At the moment I have no size restrictions set, for dimensions or file size. But I will later. For now though it's nice to see that I can easily resize the dimensions of a pic down. 64x64 pixels is what I'm going with for now, but should be able to be easily adjusted later if needed. As a bonus, I got animated gif avatars working too! Well, at least I can support them. I may remove it later before release. Depends if I feel people would abuse such feature to much or not.
Speaking of animated gifs. I got them working in the chat buffer too! I don't like the code used to do it to well, but it works, and performance hits are minimal, or zero if you minimize the window. Such support would mostly be for animated emoticons. I don't expect them to flood the chat buffer as much as they do for my stress testing. But I should plan for over use as much as possible. The whole emoticon feature is something I've been reluctant to add. Those and colors I've notice people tend to over use when they have access to them. They think their being cool or funny, and instead are just being annoying. Doing things like posting a big wall of emotes. Heck, some of you may have seen me use my rainbow text script. That's a perfect example of how things could be annoying. I'll probably work into the design to allow channel ops/owners to disable use of things like these if they want. And beyond that, they can always have bots that monitor text. I intend for individual rooms to have their own rules that are enforced by their own mods. Not me. Me and any Z-Net mods would just be covering rooms for addons I make, and even then I may try to pass off responsibility to others.
Well anyway. Since ZN3 is back to were it was, that means it's able to launch netplay games again! But with my recoding I've realized how much refinement of the procedure and protocol I still need to do. During design I find myself asking myself questions a lot. Like "Could this be done better?". Sometimes the rough idea I have vaguely outlined in my head doesn't quite convert as well to the quality I thought it would, right away. There may be aspects I just couldn't visualize until I'm seeing things in front of me.
I don't think there's going to be a lot of additions and advancement for the project in the near future. Instead I'll probably be working on refining and redesigning things until I'm happy.
Below is a updated pic to show where the project is at now. It's not to much different from the last one, visually. So I made certain to show some other bits. Like the Select a Game menu button in action That's the blue button in the message window. The red one pops up a similar list for the options windows, like shown at the bottom. (It's ugly, I know.). All the megamans are a animated gif looping. While in a still pic you can't see animations, it's intended to show off the feature. Compared to the last pic, the numbers next to Emu names in the list are new. They represent how many users are in that room. The blue and red buttons in that window are for adding/deleting friends FYI. And I'm sure someones gong to wonder about it sooner or later. The thing that looks like an dummy advertizement at the bottom of that window, is just that. It's a development place holder for an advertizement. The project and website has costs, and this should help cover them where the website ads alone have failed.
Before moving on much more, I may take a break. I've been grinding away pretty hard at this, so a break might do me some good. I may even try fixing the protocol signing problems with ZNI again.
Since my last post I made some progress on Z-Net 3. It was going quite well and was functional, though unrefined. But I got to a point were I was having trouble figuring out something, and when looking into how others get around the issue I learned of a new (to me) GUI class library. I've been using Win32++, which is a partial clone of MFC just with no licensing BS. But it often proves insufficient leaving me needing to rely on raw WinAPI calls. Such cases slow down and complicate development more then it needs. Without realizing it, I've been needing to find a new class library for awhile. And Qt is that library!
After examining its licensing hurdles, ease of use, and capabilities for a few days I concluded I needed to use it. Even if it meant starting the Z-Net 3 code from scratch yet again. There are to many pro's, and very few con's (if any other then wasting my time on previous work). In my few days of examinations of Qt, I focused on replicating certain aspects of ZN3 in disposable test apps to see if Qt could do what I want, and usually just how easily it could. It met all my requirements except one. That being able to natively access and change the non-client area of frame windows. Thankfully I've done that work already with non-Qt code, and indications seem to point to being able to port my code to work with Qt. So I'll mess with that later, and move forward for now.
At this time the new Z-Net 3, that's now coded in Qt, is maybe 75% of the way back to were it was. Development goes faster when I can use my previous discarded work as a guideline. Though I have made improvements on even that. Whats still lacking is opening of addon options windows (easy), and anything to do with initiating a netplay game itself. These were working in the non-Qt version of ZN3, but I just haven't worked on them yet. Netplay initiation revolves around the output area of the message windows. And I need to rewrite the output code completely. Part of what caused me to find Qt is complexity's in the text output code, and even then I was realizing I needed to completely rewrite what I had. So I've been putting this part off as long as I could.
To explain, netplay initiation revolves around links. With Z-Net I you had buttons to click to do everything. Such a setup isn't very intuitive anymore, and is something I badly wanted to get away from. It's a setup strait from 1995 along with everything else zbattle. Some of those button functions will be located in the Toolbar. But some as links in the chat output area. Links similar to a webpage link in a browser. In the non-Qt Z-Net 3 I got links working, but they were messy and there were limitations. In addition to links, the output area needs to support the display of images. In part to have this client more truly step up as a normal feeling chat client with smileys and other such text->image conversions. But it will also help in other planned ways I won't go into right now. But I can at least say that I intend for Z-Net 3 to be much more visually appealing and interactive than other projects that came before.
In fact, I'll post a screenshot of it right now to demonstrate. But keep in mind, a lot of the UI has been customized just to know that I can and that's it. I plan to do real color and image related layout design as a later step, hopefully involving someone who's better at artwork then myself. However I will say that I do intend for the (default?) color scheme to be darker oriented, at least similar to what I have now.
