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[Kamani]

I’ll try it out (but what is Ninite?).

Okay. Will do. Thanks.

Neat. Looking forward to seeing them.

[IndigoFenix]

Ninite is an automatic downloader/installer/upgrader that basically handles everything you need for getting certain common free programs.  Highly recommended, it's always the first site I go when I get a new computer.

[Kamani]

Ah, okay. Makes sense. I haven’t got a new computer in like 7 years, so... don’t really know too much about that, but it sounds useful.

Edit: I went to fix the Lusuria credits and add the flash effect, but when I went to fix it, the credits didn't appear. I initially thought it was the flash effect, but I removed that and still nothing appeared. I seem to recall this happening once before, but it worked in-between then and now, so I really don't know what's wrong. This may be a glitch, or I might have just messed something up.

Edit: Additional question: Which formats of sound files does BoundWorlds support?

Edit: Seeing as the town is no longer going to come in the middle of the dungeon, I'll be doing that next.

Edit: If someone doesn't have a website, it probably shouldn't be possible to click on them (creating an about:blank page) when making credits. Won't normally matter, but when using a compilation, you might not have a page.

Edit: Getting to the point where you can recognize tiles you see online/in games from other places is an odd experience.

Edit: Never considered the difficulty game designers go through to make every door inexplicably face south without making places look terribly unnatural. Would be kind of silly to see a game large city converted into real life buildings.

Edit: Normally towns are entered from one of the four directions (especially north, east, and west). This one is entered from the center. Advantages of everything working based on magic portals, I suppose. Lorewise, the town was built around the gate, which is used to obtain materials that wouldn't be found in a desert. Security used to be a problem, but these days, with the gate magic created by Hydragyre and Franz (the town is warned twenty four hours before the player arrives) and the fact that the entire desert is sentient, that isn't really an issue. The entire desert being sentient also means that the town is comfortably warm instead of painfully hot, despite it being in the middle of a desert (although I suppose technically the desert has no center, seeing as it spends an entire world, which is, in theory, a sphere. Or maybe all points are the middle?). I wonder if this counts as overthinking it... Ah well, if extraneous information isn't shoved into the player's face, the amount that exists isn't really significant.
Edit: The gate is also why the houses are in such different style. The houses initially built were made with area materials, and thus they look one way (the adobe tileset buildings), but some new houses were built with new materials (everything else).

Edit: Annoyingly enough, if anyone looks too closely, the tileset repeats are not quite in line, meaning that things jump around a bit. I probably should have considered that more before building 90% of the town... Bad planning, all things considered.

Edit: Logically speaking, the design of this town makes no real sense at all... Well, I suppose when you get to work with magic based logic, you can skip a lot of the standard rules in these kind of instances.

[IndigoFenix]

Sometimes, it's best not to think too hard about geometry. I've seen some interesting things written about how the dungeon artwork in 2d Zelda games makes zero logical sense if you start thinking about it.  Walls are drawn as though seen from above, but always visually tapering out towards the floor regardless of which direction they are facing, and most sprites are drawn as if seen from the side, front or back.  No camera position on a 3d environment could ever look like this, but for gameplay and story purposes it works: it easily indicates which direction walls and sprites are facing and allows sprites to be identifiable and expressive in ways that a realistic top down view would find much more difficult.  In games, feeling good and not being confusing is more important than making sense.  (Though I would like to have a bit of fun with it when possible, like the doors facing south tradition thing).

BoundWorlds can handle mp3, wav and ogg sound files. If there are others you'd like to use I can probably add them.

I'll check out what's up with the bugs.

[Kamani]

Fair enough. I won’t worry too much about it. Although, now that I think about it, it’s kind of silly how it can look completely normal, when, with a bit of thought, it actually makes such little sense.

Okay. Thanks. No need to add any types or anything, I am just going to be recording a bit of music once I get some equipment, and I’d rather not save it as a different type and have to mess with converters if I decide to use any for BoundWorlds.

Thanks.

Edit: Unlike Lusuria, Unnamed Desert Town (I need a name for it...) is going to contain mostly humans. Not entirely, because most of the town are travelers, but unlike Lusuria, it isn't a place where people mostly ended up because they had nowhere else to go. Most people in the town are natives, and though some people have ended up transformed, a majority of the town has not trasformed. In other words, time to head back to Charas Project (btw, in the media resources tab, it is written charasproject.net, but it is actually charas-project.net, so the link sends you to a dead page). Now I just have to decide if the average character should be short or tall...

[IndigoFenix]

I thought of the idea of having characters with different art styles as basically being different "races", possibly with different opinions or prejudices about each other, like the Liberated Pixelians calling Charans blocky, or both calling the player and other 32x32 sprites short.  A silly idea perhaps, but it gives a canon excuse for world builders to not be excessively concerned about mixing styles...

Oddly I wasn't able to reproduce the credits bug, it seems to work fine for me.  I should mention that credits are only really loaded when the world is loaded so credit reels in new worlds might not work at first, but that shouldn't have been an issue in Lusuria...

[Kamani]

Oh, no, the idea makes sense. But in a world mostly occupied by one “race” (not because of prejudice or anything, just because the town is primarily people native to the world, and the world is entirely one terrain, thus making things a bit more homogeneous (although a small but nonzero part of the town has become transformed because of the gate). Despite this, the town actually took the transforming thing pretty well, possibly because monsters are relatively rare in the desert (because of Hiekka).

Huh. I don’t know then. I’ll try it out again and see if I bump into it again.

[IndigoFenix]

I've made some updates to handling turning values, now sprites can be given a turn value without making them control like Asteroids ships, instead they will turn toward the direction they are going.  You can optionally select the "Rotate Control" checkbox to make them work like Asteroids ships, where left and right rotate the sprite, up accelerates it, and down accelerates it backwards.

I have also added _face_target as a variable, which can be easily turned on and off, and sprites can be set to automatically face their target by default or not.  Since the default for this is OFF wheras before the default was on, this may mess up some existing enemies, especially those that use projectiles.  You'll probably want to run down the list and turn on Face Target for existing enemy sprites.  It's under the AI Behaviors tab.

[Kamani]

Okay. Makes sense.

Should come in handy. I’ll make sure nothing broke for my monsters next time I’m on.

Edit: For flash effects: Is _room supposed to target all of the sprites in a room and not the room? I thought _room targeted the whole room, but when I was testing my shocker spider lightning, it targeted only every sprite in the room rather than the room.

I wonder if I should remove the spheres from my monsters package... They're not very good, so they're pretty much just clutter as is.

All of my monsters are updated to fit with the face target changes. Thanks for the heads up on that by the way.

Edit: Hmm, can't quite get my characters to look right in Charas.
Side note: Why do the light skin parts in Charas greatly exceed the number of darker skin parts (in face parts, it's like 10-1 or worse)? It's annoying, as well as a less than great sign... I'd prefer to make sure not literally every single human character appears to be of the same set of ethnicities for no explicable reason.

Edit: I am going to be getting back into the busy 2/3rds or so of the year, so I’m going to have to start working on my project at different times of the day. This is going to take me some getting used to, so I might not be working on my project as much for the next little while.

[IndigoFenix]

Flash effects should target the whole room.  There might be oddities with different composite options, I'll have to check the exact circumstance.

The spheres are a bit weird. Something can be done with them once better support for ghostly enemies is implemented, but I don't think they need that many variations at any rate (it's possible to use custom variables to make different variations of a single class).

The issue with skin color in Charas... Well, there's no real consensus color options in Charas (since each part is made by different people) and adding every variation for every color would be a tremendous number of variations. It's pretty easy to edit the file to change the pallete once you've downloaded it.

Using Paint.NET, you can use the magic wand globally with zero tolerance to select all pixels of a particular color, then use the color filler to change all of those pixels to the color of your choice.  Most Charas parts only use 3 colors for skin shades so changing it should be simple.

Don't worry about it.  At any rate, I'm going to be starting on my own world once I've got some more sprites drawn up.

Edit: Alternatively , you can use the LPC character generator over here... I need to figure out how to handle credits for character generators such as these.

[Kamani]

Huh. Okay. Odd. Maybe I mistyped something...

I’ll just toss them. They were the first things I made and are no longer needed. If I need better ghostly enemies, I can make new ones later.

That’s fair. I’ll do so.

Same thing with GIMP, conveniently. I’m starting to finally figure out how to actually use it.

Neat! Looking forward to seeing it once it is done.

That one looks niceish, but it has some design I don’t really like, which I seem to recall Chara’s avoids.
Do they have crediting rule guidelines somewhere? I would think Chara’s at least would, since it is a site designed entirely to create characters. Admittedly, they might not anyway, it would just make sense.

[IndigoFenix]

Ugh.

So I looked into Charas-project licensing and it appears that its baseline structure is actually designed for RPG Maker.  An older version, but they still maintain the licensing on their artwork.  Which means using it is not allowed.  I assumed it was open-source.

I really don't like Enterbrain.  While an artist is technically allowed to license their original art for whatever purpose they choose, designing a license in a way that both encourages the free creation of derivative art while also ensuring that they maintain control of all said derivatives is...an annoying way of doing things.

LPC at least is open-source, that I'm certain of.

[Kamani]

Oh. That stinks. I had also thought it was open source. Guess I better change Umbra’s humanoid art...

I won’t argue with you there. This makes twice that it has messed me up.

Well, guess I’m switching to LPC.

Edit: Ugh, I can't really say I'm fond of a lot of the options available on the LPC creator. Maybe I'll have better luck just looking for NPC sprites on OpenGameArt...

Edit: Shoot, Thaum's art is also from Charas. No clue what would make a good replacement for that...
Edit: Until I can find a proper fix, all of the Thaum art is going to be generic.

Edit: Both Umbra and Thaum's art are now good under use rules, although Thaum's art is (hopefully) highly temporary.
Now I just have to find new Thaum art and find art for every single villager in Unnamed Desert Town (Oh gosh, I'm going to need to do this two to three more times, aren't I? Thank gosh I already decided not to put towns in the most of the tier three trials...).

[IndigoFenix]

The main issue with the LPC character creator is that it was made by a large number of people.  So I have to work out exactly how best to credit them.  I might make an extra rule for "Credit groups" in situations such as these.  I guess I'll just make a single placeholder credit tag for now.

I'm getting a bit better at spriting.  It takes a while but I'm rather proud of the results.  Maybe I'll make my own character maker at some point...

I'm also making a few minor changes to the player's default combat abilities (largely to reduce the usefulness of spamming the spring jump as an attack).  Ideally the dash attack should be for dealing damage, holding the dash attack should be for maximizing damage over time but risks counterattack, and the spring jump should be for hitting flying enemies and also for knocking away an enemy (dash + jump has a nice hit followed up by a knockback inflicting jump attack combo).  I'm also adding a spin attack, possibly to replace the spring jump as the ideal means of inflicting knockback when surrounded.

[Kamani]

Ah, makes sense. I didn’t realize that was the case, but I guess it makes more sense with the number of parts they have.

I’ve seen what you’ve posted on random things you drew/shopped/made, and those were good. A character maker would also be cool (although I don’t know how long it would take to make all the parts. Probably a while).

Makes sense. Sounds like good changes. I’ll have to take a look once they’re up.

Edit: I'll have to look for some NPC sprites. I saw some skimming through OpenGameArt, so I'll have to take a look and see if there are any that are good for what I am doing...

Edit: Annoying feelings for finding art: Finding some decent sprites, but every single one is in a different file and they all inexplicably have a blue background instead of no background. At least I can edit them to remove that.

Edit: Oh, just realized I have to make cliff transfer tiles between standard and special color desert tiles. I better do that now.

Edit: Hmm... Not sure how to get these to look quite right. I got the basic transfers down, but now the original tiles aren't fitting together super well. The horizontal edges don't fit super well with the vertical edge pieces, so I'll need to figure out what to do about that before I continue further.