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| W. I. P. |
| Note: This page has not been updated in ages. However it remains as a guideline for the past history of the project from its early BlitzBasic roots into its more modern C++ & Allegro version. July 13th, 2003. I've
posted these on the forums already but here we go anyway. Recent things
have been the tweaking of the collision system to allow better levels,
specifically to make it smoother when jumping up through a platform.
Next, I fixed the hyper slashing glitch which could effectively
increase Ryu's attack rate by 50% maybe more. The tiled map system is
in the works along with a system to animate. Various other tweaking has
been going on. The password screen is in. Hm, dunno what else I might
not have mentioned before. So, work continues.
June 27th, 2003. Today I
worked on Katana more, cleaned up the code and such. Things are still
moving along. No idea yet when the next demo will be out.
May 28th, 2003. Lets
see... recent things I've worked on. I'm getting ready to do some fine
tuning of the level collision code to allow smoother levels. I've added
the Fire Wheel and Invincible Fire Wheel. As with the rest of the arts,
they aren't totally complete. I've been touching up Katana's A.I.
tonight, so he's not stupid! :O Before he was very strick and straight
forward, but now he's not so wreckless. I've redone the config screen.
There is now a Main Menu so people can find the Options/Config easier.
The snow weather effect has been added.
Anyway, these aren't all that new, I just never posted about them here till now. Things are picking up pace as of late, to get the first REAL demo of Ninja Gaiden 4 out. All the demos previously released were mainly engine technical demos. April 2, 2003.
It's been awhile since I've touched NG4 that much. Today I cleaned up
the loading screen, hopefully less people will think the game has
frozen
up after it reached 100%. When the game is ready to go, a blinking
green
cursor appears in the top left. If the game has really frozen up it
won't be flickering. Also, I made enter ALWAYS pass the intro, as some
people somehow still manage to get the start key to be unassigned when
the game starts so they "think" they are frozen. Anyway, I also added a
fun little loading progress bar. Oh and some more important news, I've
been optimizing my enemys' collisions and fine tuning them so they work
better than they haev in previous versions. So I'm still working.
March 1, 2003. I spent a
good amount of time today getting pissed off when trying to clean up
the
graphics loading routines, and getting lots of errors. But ya, anyway,
what I'm doing should cut down on the files you see in the GFX folder.
That's about all for today.
Feb 22, 2003. I've worked more on ryu, and added ducking and hanging art attacks. Feb 19, 2003. Alexmax requested before, since the PC he
was using was rather old, a frameskip. I've added a frameskip function. Basically, if the game won't
run
at 60 FPS for you, normally the gameplay will go slow as it must render ever single frame. However,
if you turn the frameskip on, it will skip updating the screen a certain amount of frames. This means
the game will progress faster, but your video won't be as smooth. Now after testing this, I
recommend not going beyond frameskip 3, maybe 4. When you get to frameskip 8 its just
scary. Now, each
frameskip you have, is worth about 5 frames. So frameskip 1 will make the game render about 55 frames
per
second. 2, 50 frames per second. 3, 45. 4, 40. 5, 35. 6, 30. 7, 25. 8, 20. 20 Frames is enough to
play the game, although you'll be at a disadvantage.
Now, as I said, this won't speed up the game entirely. It
will only allow the game to skip updating the
video which will allow the game to progress faster.
Feb 16, 2003. As I
said on the forum, I have fixed up the editor a bit.
Feb 4, 2003. A
Scanlines blitter for 640x480 has been completed. It will be in the
next
release.
Feb 4, 2003. I have
successfully implemented a 2X Scale Blit for running in 640x480. I
never
got any reports of 320x240 not working or causing problems.... But
it'll
be there just incase. Just beware, the image "might" look off slightly.
Also, it WILL take more power (from the graphics card I believe) to
Scale the image like this. I've also been working on allowing 400x300
and 512x384, incase for some reason those work yet 320x240 doesn't.
Feb 3, 2003. I've been busy making a new Config program which I had someone test and give me their opinion and it seems to be alot better than the previous one in the way of actually having an interface and not being an automated script. It's also got a nice starfield effect and music to keep you interested. Also, I'm working on supporting higher resolutions. Right now 320x240, 400x300, 512x384, and 640x480 in non-modified blits. This means that if you run in 640x480, the actual game screen will only be 320x240 pixels big. I'm going to try to do another stretch blit, and get it tested. The stretch blit may require a good Video Card to run at a decent frame rate. Feb 1, 2003. After nearly a month of seemingly unactive, I made another release. I fixed a video memory leak that I hadn't know about till I implemented a VRAM usage counter. I kept checking my code thinking I must have made an error in my usage counter, however I decided next to try some other fun things, and sure enough, the leak was gone. It would be kind of sad to have not caught, because then the longer you play it, the more memory it uses, although if you have a 64MB card, likely myself, you wouldn't notice for along while. Maybe not ever... but those with 4MB cards would have quite soon. I also fixed up the code for exiting the game, as Guardian reported he couldn't close the game without Control+Alt+Delete and then his system would freeze. Now, at the title screen escape will close the game. Also in the game, Alt+X will close the game. There is also a prompt of Are you Sure? Yes/No incase you accidentally hit escape or Alt+X. Also this is the first demo with paralexing backgrounds that I added some time ago. Jan 5, 2003. I fixed some errors and crashes that happened due to the implementing of Vertical Scrolling not being tested before release enough to catch the bugs. Jan 4, 2003. Vertical Scrolling was done. As I recall, I spent my entire day getting it to work right. However I'm glad I got it out of the way. I had also fixed up alot of other code in the intro making things smoother. Dec 2002. I made alot of progress during december. By the end of it scrolling and most of ryu's handling code had be established quite well. Enemys were started, items were in. Alot of the game was going well. Dec 4, 2002. Ryu was given the ability to hang on certain objects. Dec 2, 2002. The first demo of Ryu running around was out. Late Nov of 2002, Ninja Gaiden 4 was starting to be developed by me (MottZilla). Back then (from looking at my backup of Nov. 28) I was still getting the editor and map format together. |
