ToME Wiki
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This is for old discussion that is no longer relevant. Much of this is from before Bubblegum Crisis was playable at all. This page will probably be purged within the next release or two, to be replaced with newer discussion, as it eventually becomes outdated.
Pre V050 discussion
NeilStevens: Oh my goodness... I want my own orbital lasers! And Adama, played by Takayama Minami (well, if you're including Crash).
BucketMan: Heh. I'm thrilled that anybody other than me has seen this anime. It was my favorite for a lot of years. Yes, orbital lasers will be in the game. The plan is that by destroying boomers and bringing back parts, you'll be able to research new technologies over time and integrate them into your hardsuits. So, yes...the player should theoretically be able to rain death upon Tokyo with a Particle Beam satelite.
Probably no Crash references, though. We'll see. NeilStevens: As long as you aren't doing 2040, I'm happy, heh.
DarkGod: Three dimensional Mega-Tokyo map I'm curious to see this one
BucketMan: I just need to do some cleanup, and should have a version 0.1 up this weekend. It started as just a concept test, but once I realized I could actually do what I had in mind...there just had to be a module that did it. I don't want to get everyone too excited, and then disappointed when they actually see it, but yes, the map is three dimensional, and people are probably going to have nightmares trying to learn how to get from point A to point B. At least, that's my goal.
BucketMan: Well, we're a week late and things aren't quite as grandiose as I had planned. I had the highway system functioning in three layers, but it was all flag based, and the system had to scan and redraw mimics on the entire map every time the player changed z-axis levels. Which was fine...until I started working with a full sized town map. Then things got very slow. As in, two seconds every time you walked on an onramp. So, I completedly redesigned it, two or three times, and now map sections are handled in chunks. The highway system is still flags, but since it doiesn't have to worry about the areas, it's still acceptably fast, though there's still a noticeable delay on onramps. And, unfortunately the new system is so painfully slow to code that I dropped the third level of the z-axis, and simplified the plans tremendously.
In any case, all there is to do at present is wander around Tokyo and play with the party system. V0.1.2 doesn't need to be grandiose. Enjoy. :P
IngeborgNorden: When you get the kinks out of the 3-D mapping system, I just might need it for Norseband: the World Tree really ought to be part of my game cosmology, with Asgard above the main wilderness and Hel below it. (Unlike a certain other Nordic roguelike, however, mine probably won't include falling down the Tree/being pushed off the rainbow as causes of death. ;-))
BucketMan: Out of curiosity, which 'kinks' need to be resolved? Please feel free to use any and all of it, but it might not be the easiest thing to adapt. I didn't really build it to be portable. I've been toying with the idea of making a map generator that builds random bridges and overlays for dungeons, but again...it's not likely to be an easily portable 'subsystem.' To phrase my question differently, ths system is basically functional now, what's missing from it that's stopping you from using it as is?
IngeborgNorden: The entrance to Asgard (my biggest problem there) should move to random locations on the wilderness map as real rainbows do; checking for a new location every few thousand turns would have to be coded in. (I wouldn't have that entrance vanish altogether until the final battle, though--or have it appear over a place the character couldn't fly to reach.)
DarkGod: You mentionned a bug in the engine preventing you to work on this module, which is it ?
BucketMan: Bug81, which appears to have been resolved in CVS. (Stores were fixed in alpha17, but dungeons were not. I need to be able to execute MOVE_POST_DEST functions at both store and dungeon entrances). Also, while it's not stopping development, it would be very nice to have some of the sound system issues resolved. In particular, bugs 82 (no .OGG files under windows) 87 (sound stop hook doesn't process when music ends) and 91 (ambient music can't be made to auto-repeat). Again, these aren't stopping development, but BGC is necessarily very sound intensive, since the Replicants are, after all, a rock band.
Of course, I am on vacation in Japan at the moment (Tokyo, ironically) so work is unlikely to be done any any of my modules until I return home.
BucketMan: A few days ago I realized it's been a year since V0.1.2, so I started working on it again. Fortunately development for this is way faster than Dragonball T. Not quite as fast as Zombie Horror, but progress is good. In the past week we've added:
- Functional random quests
- The subways are running
- Hardsuits are configurable
- Telephones and voicemail are working
- The highway map problem has been resolved
Next we need functional systems for combat, salvage, and purchase orders for parts. After that I think we may be ready for a release. Though there are still some major hurdles after that. The big wildcard is the hacking system. I'd really like make it like decking from the Genesis Shadowrun game, but it would require the ability to create a functional timer that would create a delay that would be constant regardless of computer speed. Without real time, it basically just becomes multiple choice questions, which really isn't what I'm going for. A few other issues, but those are the big ones. And I imagine there will need to be loads of minutia.
Just thought I'd post an update.
Sirrocco: Yay update! It is good to know that you yet live. I'm not sure I like the idea of sprouting time-critical bits in a roguelike. If you need a clock though, LUA has a time function. (try http://www.lua.org/pil/22.1.html for a quick run-down.) You should be able to check the time prior to an action, check the time afterwards, and subtract.
NeilStevens: Best not to link to Lua 5 resources when T-Engine has a modified Lua 4 in it.
Sirrocco: Okay. My error. Was not tracking closely enough on the version. Still, there should be a time function in Lua 4 as well, and the trick should still work, no? ...or is it that thoroughly modified?
As a side note, if you're looking for "things move at speed x", you should be able to have it run a calibration cycle when they load into the matrix-equivalent, by burning a few hundred cycles, running a time check, and multiplying appropriately.
BucketMan: Unfortunately I'm running into all sorts of problems trying to pull this off. The most inconvenient at the moment is that all the commands I'm aware of to display something on the screen are buffered, so while I can execute code while waiting for user input, changes to the display aren't actually made until the player presses a key. Which sort of defeats the whole point of the interface. For now, everything relating to hacking is on the back burner.
Sirrocco: what about what you did with the dragonball wishes? ...or is that some segregated "this is a video" subsystem that would be entirely useless for the purpose?
BucketMan: Hmm. Good call. That uses an engine function I hadnt looked at. I'm looking at the code now, and this looks very promising:
term.putch(a - 1, y, c, 32)
term.xtra(TERM_XTRA_DELAY, 1)
term.redraw_section(a - 1, y, a, y)
I'll need to experiement with it, but those commands sort of look like they might do exactly what I need. Thank you.
BucketMan: Does anyone have an insight on the term.xtra line above? Its usage, and the comments in the engine code imply that it creates a delay in milliseconds equal to the second value, but after playing with it for a while I don't seem to be able to get it to do anything. Even setting values in the thousands, I don't notice any differerence with or without the code.
BucketMan: Meanwhile, the list of things to be done before the next release is steadily shrinking. If all goes well, we should have a a more or less playable release towards the end of this upcoming weekend.
ZizzoTheInfinite: Linna's last name is Yamazaki, according to IMDB.
BucketMan Excellent. Thank you.
Sirrocco: also accoring to http://anime.wikia.com/wiki/BGC/Bubblegum_Crisis_Tokyo_2040 - which may have other random useful bits of information for you.
BucketMan: I have the full, original OAV on DVD, but for some reason Linna's last name seems to have never been mentioned in it, and I don't read kanji well enough to be able to pull it out of the credits. As for 2040, I'm a bit hesitant to incoporate anything from it into the game. Of the few people I've spoken to who have seen both the original and 2040, every single one of them has hated 2040 with a passion. You'll notice Neil's comment near the top of the page. Personally I've only seen the first episode, and I was mostly indifferent to it. My impression is that it probably stands fairly well on its own if you haven't seen the original, but some of the character changes are kind of annoying. Sylia, in particular, seems to have gone from wise, friendly, do-gooder with an interesting background and some twists (that I was planning on specifically incorporating into the storyline of the game) to a raving, slutty, billionnaire psycho-bitch. I don't particularly like what they did with Linna or Leon, either. Anyway, I've just realized that youtube apparently has every episode for both the original and 2040, so maybe I'll watch a few more episodes and see how I like it. Here are the playlists if anyone else is interested:
Bubblegum Crisis OAV (Japanese, with english subtitles, yay!)
Bubblegum Crisis 2040 (English dubbed, unfortunately)
NeilStevens: I'm deleting this page and banning you all if 2040 is the source material for the game.
BucketMan: Heh. Well, that takes care of that then. :P Out of curiosity, how bad does it get? I made it to episode five last night before I had to turn it off in disgust. The first two episodes of the original were really only ok at best, but it just kept getting better, until the last episode which is probably one of my favorite single episodes from any anime, ever. 2040 also started out ok, but it seems to be be going steadily downhill with each episode. The lousy chemistry amongst the team and the butchering of the character personalities mostly just annoyed me at first...but by episode five they're really starting to be grating. Nene seems to be the only character who isn't polar opposite of who she used to be. And it's not just the Knight Sabers. It's everybody. Leon, Daley, the mechanic, Chairman Quincy, Mason...if Largo ever shows up I'm half expecting him to be like Trelane from the original Star Trek. What they've done with the boomers is really weird, too. Every fight seems like they've taken the boomer that assimilated tinsel city in the original and put him on a lot of really bad drugs. I can see the similarities...but the direction they've taken things in 2040 so far really hasn't been much fun to watch.
NeilStevens: I never watched 2040. I refuse, you confirm my worst fears about the remake, heh. That's the thing about remakes: If the people making them had talent and creativity, they'd be making something original. And yeah, the original wasn't perfect (witness the how Priss was supposed to die in episode 6, and after her 'death' basically doesn't show in the plot anymore, presumably only kept alive in order to allow for a TV show), but the slow start was inevitable. The first two episodes set up all the exposition for the rest of the plot through episode 7. It's easy for a series to pick up once it's freed from expositional duties, heh.