Kokiri Forest - Release

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Here it is! My re-creation of the Kokiri Forest from "The Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time", in Unity 4.2.2, and built specifically for the Oculus Rift!

This re-creation aimed for attention to detail, and should be quite a complete visual experience. It's not a game. There's no interaction at all. Nor are there NPCs or story. It's just a walk around demo.

I've created builds for Windows x86, Windows x64, Mac OSX x86, and Linux x86 + x64. But I can only account for the Windows versions as working and looking as intended.

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Kokiri Forest - Update 1

Saturday, January 18, 2014

I'm happy to say that after a brief time of questioning my continuation on this little project, I resumed work on it.

I now have it at a point where only polish work is left to be done. Compared to my old screenshots, what are the major differences?

All the objects are now in. Bushes, signs, rocks, truth stones, and even some Hearts and Rupees.

Fences now are visible from both sides and have proper colliders, meaning you can't walk through them, and can stand on top of them.

The ladder to Link's house, and the vines leading to the Lost Woods can now be climbed. My ladder code isn't great, but it's all I could come up with right now and gets the job done.

The Sky looks more true to how it looks in the real game.

The waterfall and river now animates and very closely resembles how it looks in the real game.

The worn away paths are now in and look close to how they do in the real game. I'd like to work on these more though.

The ground texture looks closer to how it does in the real game.

There's been a lot of misc tweaking of texture alignment/tiling. Rave's version showed what the scene looks like with little work fixing that stuff up, and my old screenshots showed vast improvements over that. But there was still more fine tuning to be done.

The cameras size/height has been set to around Young Links size. I went with this rather than Adult Link as this is a recreation of the Kokiri Forest of the past. And a child's size should help you get lost in the experience. Also, think about it, its a village of little Elves. It's designed for people of that height. The height of the signs are a good example.

The Hearts and Rupees now spin, and do so in a way close to the real game.

I added a particle effect system for the area. The particles are very similar to the real game, but not as exact as other things are. I think most would agree they're close enough.

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Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Monday, January 13, 2014

It seems the father of MMOs is at it again!

Just when I had thrown in the towel, and given up ever again seeing a MMO I could enjoy – thanks to SOE's huge disappointment with EverQuestNotNext. Along comes Brad McQuaid. Fresh off a layoff from SOE after a unexpected return to the EverQuest 1 team. Deciding that enough time had passed since his failure of the spiritual sequel to EQ1, Vanguard, he's now ready to renter the MMO scene once again in a leadership role in development of a brand new game. That game is:

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Zelda's Kokiri Village in Unity

Saturday, January 11, 2014

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.

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Mega Man X Playthrough

Friday, December 27, 2013

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.

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Merry Christmas

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

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
 

UPDATE: I played for 1 and half hours. I decided to stop there as no one was watching, and my hands were starting to hurt. I planned to play using my SNESJoy, but at the last minute it decided to break. I played through to the Sanctuary with my wireless pad, but it annoyed me with its button sticking, missing, delays, and having to use a analog stick. I switched to the keyboard after, and while I was able to get as far as I did, it was uncomfortable and caused me to play worse then I should.

I may finish the play through on new years eve if people want. And if I can get my SNES pad working.

For now, if you want, you can find the first part of my play through here.

Rethinking the future of Z-Net... again...

Saturday, December 14, 2013

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.

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Z-Net 3: Feedback Needed

Friday, November 22, 2013

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?

Z-Net 3: An Update on Updating!

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

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.

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News: Status Update

Thursday, October 17, 2013

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.