Jack[RCDF, along with the One Week Mapping Contest hosted by Kaias, has brought you yet another amazing RPG! Join the unnamed protagonist as you discover your past...

Discover the secret of the interwebs, using only the trusty tools you have and discover. Bring fame to the galaxy with your epicness, such that other galaxies look at you in awe and wish they could be like the galaxy that has you in it!

AUTHOR NOTE:
Press TAB to see your current inventory. Press Q to change server (near the red grill entrances on the side of the wall).
I plan on changing the entire ending, adding more items and enemies, sprucing up the bosses to make them more interesting, add a better menu system, add abilities, add more servers, make it a longer map, make everything more obvious etc.

DLDB link: http://www.staredit.net/?file=2663
Mediafire link (version with sound): http://www.mediafire.com/?vd3ng5e3ztnn3fp

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So awesome

Would be cooler if it was actual lines of code and not gibberish.

"Duel with epic bosses."

Quote from Oh_Man

Would be cooler if it was actual lines of code and not gibberish.

Not a bad idea. Originally I was going to have matrix style green rain and make the map more corny but opted for a more serious style, and didn't have time to format the text at all. Making it code from the map's Oreo Triggers file would be sorta poetic I think

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"Duel with epic bosses."

Best bosses in the entire contest but yeah I'm going to spruce them up a bit, make them more interesting. This is a combination showcase and production thread in many ways because there should be many more versions to come.

You'll be workin on this bad boy for the RPG event, right?

Yer you should definitely give the bosses spells, probably in its own arena.

I still think your map would be better suited to tile screen style like Fallen Memories. Easy to implement especially at this early stage.

Quote from Oh_Man

You'll be workin on this bad boy for the RPG event, right?

Yer you should definitely give the bosses spells, probably in its own arena.

I still think your map would be better suited to tile screen style like Fallen Memories. Easy to implement especially at this early stage.

I dunno, I see tile screen style as a bit of a gimmick. Like, it's sort of interesting but generally I find it annoying more than useful. I can see how it would play out though and it's not a horrible idea, so we'll see.

Yes, I'm working on this for the numerous upcoming and ongoing contests. I'm currently adding in more of the previously planned items and doing some polishing on text formatting and the like. The only items I won't complete at this stage are the debuggers (or rather, their effects) as they're basically going to be weapon addons that do cool stuff like splash damage. I'm considering rewriting a lot of the Oreo code to use classes to make it easier to add more items but at this stage it probably isn't worth it; I'll save that for my other RPG.

After items and polishing, I'll be adding in more enemy units and making the range work better so that you can never attack units outside of your range. I'll also make the vHP system look nicer when you shoot stuff, and might add a sound effect for shooting if I can find a good sounding one or make it myself. Probably I'll do the debuggers and abilities at this stage too.

After THAT, I'll rework the bosses and add in a couple more servers, and start thinking about what to do for the ending to make it less corny and rushed and random. Currently it's just sort of tacked on and doesn't feel right to me, but it's a little hard to think of something conclusive for a hacker, unless I continue something to do with the dad going missing and go Tron style virtual reality dad sucked into cyberspace.

The map will basically be complete then, and much more engaging to play than it currently is.

So... this uses EUD's? Hence, I can't play it on my mac?

You can play it on mac if he set up his EUD's properly

Quote from Jack[RCDF

I dunno, I see tile screen style as a bit of a gimmick. Like, it's sort of interesting but generally I find it annoying more than useful.

It's a stylistic choice, and can vastly improve the feel of a game. Imagine Legend of Zelda without it. Not as good.

It gave me the funniest bug.

It crashed in SP so I tried hosting it multiplayer USEAST. I host it, it gives a black screen for 10 sec, then shows me in the game... stuck at 40 download. Lol. Then when I hit Start it started with me still at 40. Then I could read briefing, but when the 2nd Start button was hit, SC Crashed o.o

Note: with sound version

Yer see here is the thing. Your terrain was bland, and the monster spawns were sparsely placed. This gave an overall 'empty' feeling to the experience as you traversed large sections of terrain with relatively nothing populating it.

Having the tile screens eliminates that emptiness problem, and it is a lot easier to do extended terrain because you don't have to worry about blending it back into isometric, you can just cut it off at the edges of the tile. You can also control monster spawns and behaviour much more tightly, choosing what unit type spawns at what tile and in what quantity and difficulty.

Lastly, it fits the lore. Moving to each separate tile would represent moving to different servers. You could even have quick grey-blue-white fade text showing something like "entering IP address or server name or what not." In addition, it fits spawning individual 'trojans' or 'anti-viruses' for each specific server. You could set up the coding that trojans can 'follow' you between servers, but this would probably be a pain to implement. It would be much easier to kill everything at the tile you were just at and spawn fresh enemies at your current tile location.

You'd also have to choose if you want moving to tiles to be automatic (as in, you get to the 'edge' of the tile and you are automatically moved across), or manual, as with the current set up with your red grills and having to press Q to change servers. Or you could have a mix of both!


I'm of the firm belief that your map would benefit immensely from this design choice.

3FFA, the 40 percent download thing happens on Windows as well, most likely because of the size of the map. The crash is because of EUDs. I can probably make it support Macs eventually but for now that isn't a priority, sorry

Az/oh_man, I'll see if I have time to test it and see how it plays out. I've used a similiar system before in one of my maps I was making, so it wouldn't be difficult to do, just time consuming. Other things have priority first though.

I've played this and it looks promising, but I quickly ran out of stuff to do and there were a lot of exits (red grills) that didn't work, did I hit the end of the map?
Also what's the strategy for the epic Reaver boss? I can't micro around him because his range means he can always hit me.

Can't you just put like a condition or something that detects whether you are a windows or a mac and set that on each trigger? And such it would be easier to implement that sooner than later o.o or am I incorrect in my understanding of how EUD's work? o.O

Quote from 3FFA

Can't you just put like a condition or something that detects whether you are a windows or a mac and set that on each trigger? And such it would be easier to implement that sooner than later o.o or am I incorrect in my understanding of how EUD's work? o.O

Nah, that's a solid solution. The problem is that mac addresses are undocumented (I heard that most of them are the same offset as the PC addresses, so you'd only need to worry about values being big-endian). I, for one, don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test any EUDs I write for Macs.

Edit: And with endianness, you may end up with EUDs that are practical for PC but not for Mac, and vice versa.

I think 3FFA meant that he should set up the initial EUD triggering that deciphers between Macs and PC's which would be done with switches or death counts and set his existing EUD's with the condition (DC/Switch) of which verified that the player is in fact using a PC. This I would think would be easier to incorporate earlier rather than later as IF and when Jack decides to go back and add Mac friendly EUD's he would already have the system ready to go instead of having to go through all his EUD's and incoporate this on a "finished" product.

Quote from staxx

I think 3FFA meant that he should set up the initial EUD triggering that deciphers between Macs and PC's which would be done with switches or death counts and set his existing EUD's with the condition (DC/Switch) of which verified that the player is in fact using a PC. This I would think would be easier to incorporate earlier rather than later as IF and when Jack decides to go back and add Mac friendly EUD's he would already have the system ready to go instead of having to go through all his EUD's and incoporate this on a "finished" product.

I'd have to disagree with that, then. Whether you start now or later, you're still going to be creating a trigger to check for PC vs Mac, and then adding a switch condition to each EUD trigger. It's the same amount of work, and the time to look for your EUDs is negligible.

My point was that some EUDs that are commonplace for PCs can become impractical to implement on Macs, and if Jack is using those EUDs (which ultimately means he shouldn't support Macs for the map), those extra conditions are just a wasted check (which, to be fair, is also negligible). If he was for-sure going to implement Mac support later, there's no harm in starting now, but there's no real benefit, either.

Also, if you've read Section 5 of my tutorial, you'd know that using a switch would make a whole lot more sense than using a death counter; a DC would work, but it's a bit silly to use one here, in my opinion.

What Roy said.

To expand on that, most of my EUDs are generate with Oreo Triggers and EUDGen, which currently don't support Mac EUDs, and I'm too lazy to manually add in Mac EUDs, as well as don't consider it worth the time and effort it would require. You can probably run the Windows version of SC under WINE on a Mac and it would work correctly.

A lot of the red grills are spawning points; I'll either change them to something else or else add in more servers that they link to so you can visit them, although there probably won't be much story there.

There's no micro on the reaver boss yet, you just tank the damage and shoot him. I think at the moment it almost requires the slightly hidden rootkit that does 3 damage, unless you were very careful with your hitpoints.

To update the map's status, it is now significantly more hard as the item drops don't drop 100% of the time anymore (it's now 7%, although I may adjust that more), and you start with MS-DOS as your OS (only 200 HP max), so you'll need to grind much more to get strong enough to beat the first boss.

K time to go looking for the setting up wine on a 10 year old mac guide I've been too lazy to look for... ._.

edit: nvm I remember now, I tried to set it up before but my mac is a PowerPC mac not a newer intel mac. ._.

According to Wikipedia, you can change to little-endian mode somehow on a PowerPC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes. Might be worth a shot (if you can figure it out).