You should attach that as an uploadable file, just in case the filehost goes down or removes your package.
That is my own web host, so I have full control over it. I put it there because the file was too big for a normal upload on the forums (2.3MB)
If I can bother and if it fits in, I might put it on GitHub later.
Thanks! Today I spent some time to make credits animations from scratch. I'm also putting a Facebook share button for the final score, if I can make it work properly. Plus some tiny tweaks to improve the gameplay.
I should have it ready just in time for Christmas!
Okay, here goes. I'm letting you guys at it first!
--> Teh My Room Adventure FOAR.2 <--
I haven't done a lot of testing, but I've done many playthroughs. Please let me know if there are any visual bugs of otherwise obvious ones!
I've made a tiny version of TMRA as a demonstration of the engine. This can be used to make new games!
I'm putting it out there in case I don't make a graphical interface to make it even easier. Making a room adventure this way doesn't require programming skills or detailed syntax knowledge. It requires having no code phobia, good copy-paste skills and an eye for details. It also requires a web server.
If any of you want to give it a try, I might be able to help you out and host your game.
Here is it:
Teh Room Adventure Starter Pak!
The new version is now fully playable! That sure went faster than expected.
While the gameplay is complete, I haven't yet made the intro, the endings, or the hint function. Once I have, though, and after a bit more testing, this is ready to go online.
Then I'll assess how much work it would be to make a graphical interface for designing the game. Configuring in the code directly could be just as fast, but that is more prone to errors.
I'm attaching an example of the game code. The first image explains what a polygon can do when it's clicked. (The photo field loads a new scene.) The second image is a real example including updates as the game progresses.
]It's almost finished. The only thing missing now is making the endings shiny. I'll do that and look at that polygon bug, and then I'll launch Teh My Room Adventure FOAR.2!
Oh and cross-browser testing. I almost don't want to know how messed up it might be in other browsers, haha.
Fi is a tricky character. It's interesting how the game designers decided to combine technological/scientific elements into the fantasy-esque world. Of course, this is going even further in Breath of the Wild. But it feels a little strange that a goddess would make a very fancy robot. If the divine is technological, is it divine anymore?
Realism would of course demand it. A goddess can still only create something that follows the rules of the universe. Fi is durable and will always stick to her purpose. Given this line of thinking, it makes sense that the mechanism of her speech could be affected, but there is little reason why her pronounciation would be robotic. That assumes limitations of software – but the design of Fi would probably be limited rather by the limitations of physical design, by hardware.
Anyway, I agree with the choice you made, and I think Fi was pulled off well!
Thanks! I looked around for a while, but in the end I found a way to remake the original icons.
The progress today:
- New and transparent arrow icons makes the game look good again
- Only relevant navigation arrows will appear with each scene, the rest will be hidden
- Added all navigation information for all scenes
- Added 20 photos' worth of polygons into the new version, almost a third of the scenes
- Improved the code and file structure. The game engine is kept in separate files from the configurable game data.
Definitely doable. This is fun!
- The item bag is starting to take shape. It can be opened/closed, and it displays the stuff you have picked up. Using and mixing is not yet functional.
- I've added all of the clickable polygons, and will soon start adding complex events and behaviors that change throughout the game.
- Discovered a bug in the polygon checking. Somehow, one point is dragged all the way to the left side of the screen, so the click area becomes too large. Will try to sort this out.
- The item bag is almost fully functional. All that remains is item mixing.
- NEW FEATURE: items are clicked to grab them, and then clicked again where they should be used. Notice the floating fish in the second screenshot!
- Progressive game events are now working. Currently, doing this requires some introduction and programming know-how. Hoping this might be made simpler.
- The new version is working up until getting Dragon Power level 1.
- The game is currently 50 kB of code. The engine itself is less than 20 kB, while the game data makes up the rest.
Unfortunately, I also have a brain phone.
Meanwhile, my desktop has gotten very cluttered. (Also, the motive is a photograph and it's not what you'd expect)
Right now I'm thinking about the civilians in Aleppo...
Welcome, new here! I hope you and cheese like the place
Hope the doctors there know what they're doing and that she gets better!
Today I've got:
- A graphical polygon design tool for all the photos
- Polygons can be clicked to trigger navigation, picking up items or activating events
- Scenes are referred to by names, the actual photo may vary depending on what has happened
Editing is done in the backend code atm, including these files so far:
- navigate.php, manages dynamic navigation options in every scene
- pointers.php, manages dynamic mapping from scene name to file name
- One file for each scene defining the polygons and what happens when you click them
- Message box is functional. It pops in and out when needed, chops long messages into pieces, and it can display icons and play sounds too.
It's getting complex. About 400 lines of PHP, 200 lines of Javascript, 100 lines of CSS and 50 lines of HTML. Next up is the item bag!
I'll also need to design some new graphics, most notably the navigation arrows, since all I got are screenshots from Flash. I suck at graphic design, so if anyone's up to the challenge, let me know!
While you're trying to figure this one out, I'm having fun cooking up TMRA without Flash. So far I've got:
- Navigation arrows working when clicked
- Clicking on photo is matched against polygons from a list, to tell if you've clicked something important
- Game progress stored in an encrypted cookie
Not really a proof-of-concept yet, but I'm thinking it might work. The only thing that is tricky is things happening when you hover, like the clicky pointer. Implementing that might leave traces in the source code, which enables cheating!
This is amazing, I really like it. I've watched episode 1 and a bit of the last one so far, and it's like the game had voices all along. Zelda's voice acting is especially good, and Groose was pulled off surprisingly well.
When Time's End has gotten you down, this one helps:
I'm investigating whether a TMRA could be made using just PHP and AJAX. Flash was nice because it had a graphical interface for drawing polygons to click on, but it was also quite cumbersome to make the games that way, because I had spread the code across many separate frames. Plus, installing Flash is not an option.
If I figure out a way, I'll try to design an "engine" that can import game data and photos. I already have a brief walkthrough on how I made the games and structured the data. If that makes it easy, I might make a new one one day.
Well, this one really is from the Proterozoic eon. It's the last one I made, 7 years ago. I've had eight other rooms since then, most of them during some December, but these have passed silently into the night without a new TMRA.
BUT. Yesterday I found a bug in the high score database. It has prevented new scores for six years. Now I fixed it and that means your accomplishments will be remembered.
Since 'tis the season, I might as well plug my own holiday-themed game.
It's something I cooked up ages ago, using photos from my student dorm and what little I knew of Flash scripting. It's a kind of point-and-click game. Some have found it addictive, and it is definitely frustratingly illogical. But if you find the fox on a rock, he will give you hints!
EDIT: New and improved version is up!
There's two things I find that really sets this miles above other video game remixes.
For one, this features actual musicians playing actual instruments. Violin, flute, guitar, trumpet, piano, vocals, of course ocarina, and many others. It's a big collaboration that has taken years, and could never have been cooked up digitally. It's not a full orchestra like Nintendo and others have done before, but I think it is a lot better than that. The musicians are good and they're really capturing the mood of the music, something you don't always get with the orchestral tracks imo.
And most importantly, the composition. It neither copies the melodies nor waters them out. The composer has greatly expanded the soundscape and the emotional range of the music, recreating the story in a darker and richer tone. It's certainly a lot more complex than the originals. Other remixes really try, but I've never heard one that reaches this level of skill.
There's an older Majora's Mask remix album by Theophany. It's from 2012 and it's also on Youtube, although a different channel. I'll leave it to those interested to seek it out. It's more melancholy than this one.
You can also download it here for free or a pay-what-you-want price:
[MEDIA=bandcamp]album_id=4272719918[/MEDIA]
It's Majora's Mask. I'm quite sure Koji Kondo couldn't have done it better himself. It's way more than a remix
Theophany - Time's End II
The idea of holes and antiparticles strikes me as similar to temperature. Only allegorically, but I watched a documentary about the early understanding of cold, and how it was considered to be a separate, physical thing. It wasn't until a hundred years or so ago that we finally understood it to be the absence of something. I can't help but draw a parallel with the way our understanding of quantum particles might evolve.
That's a great way to see it. Drawing parallels has been extremely useful for me in learning physics. It's also a way to transfer knowledge from one field to discover something in another.
But now that I have free tuition from a physics graduate
, behold my QUESTIONS!
It has been pointed out in Stewart's book that the orbit of the earth is not the effect of pulling from the sun, like the lead-ball-on-the-end-of-a-string-being-spun-round imagined in Newtonian physics. Rather, the planet is being deflected off the curvature in space caused by the sun, like the camber of a road. So, naturally, I got thinking about these things: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/X6e1y0WzzeE/maxresdefault.jpg
Why is it that the coin seems to exit the hole at the bottom with greater velocity than it began with? I can only assume it's an optical illusion, because no matter what exotic physics happens, the coin cannot gain kinetic energy unless that energy is provided to it from outside. As the coin makes a lot of noise, if anything it should be losing energy - the effect of gravity over the short vertical distance from the coin slot to the spiral can't add very much.
You're right, the short distance doesn't add much at all. But then, the coin doesn't weigh much at all either! Sound is actually super cheap in energy, and the coin does indeed gain energy from the gravitational field as its moves down the surface.
This is a good example of conservation of energy*. You can draw parallels between an orbit and a pendulum. A pendulum, like in a grandfather clock, swings back and forth. If you keep a close eye on it, you'll realize that its highest speed is at its lowest point. Meanwhile, at the ends of the swing it's not moving at all for a split second. What is going on in the pendulum is that the (small amount of) energy is perpetually being traded between potential energy (being high up in a gravitational field) and kinetic energy (moving fast). So following the parallel to the orbit of the coin, that fast speed it's got at the bottom is actually showing you the potential energy that was contained at the highest point of its path.
However, when I think about it some more, there might indeed be a little illusion at play as well. If it wasn't for the fact that the coin is constrained to a narrow tube, spinning like crazy, then its velocity might seem slower. When it is merely coasting on the top of the surface, we might see that as a slower speed than it really is, in comparison. However, the planets themselves do have higher velocities at the "lowest" points of their orbits. For objects like Sedna, or the hypothesized Planet Nine, this is quite a considerable difference. I would recommend trying out the mobile game Orbit for a relevant demonstration :D
The other question is, when we measure electromagnetic frequency, what is it the frequency OF? A sound wave, for example, is a measure of air pressure relative to a background equilibrium, represented as the x-axis at zero. So, is electromagnetic frequency an oscillation in the 'energy pressure/concentration' relative to some rest state?
In short, the field strength. I will assume first we're talking about the frequency of a loose piece of electromagnetic field, a photon. It will oscillate around the value of the background field, whatever that is!
A digression about the broader perspective: In some interpretations of quantum field theory, there is an electromagnetic field filling the universe. Its default value is zero, and we can know this for sure because any other value would affect particles. That is not to say that is ever is zero, because every single charge in the universe will add its own dimple. Electromagnetism can be seen just like gravity in this regard, as a huge sheet of dents caused by charges instead of masses/energies. The dents can of course go in two directions, because of the +/- nature of electromagnetism. The reach of electromagnetism is infinite, so this field technically has a non-zero value anywhere in space. By and large, though, this is so small you can ignore it. Even though the electromagnetic force is much stronger than gravity, the charges in the universe largely balance each other up (such as in neutral atoms), there just aren't enough free charges to have a cosmic effect.
Going back to the photon, this little electromagnetic lass will dance to her own tune, and if she dances up the stairs and onto a higher dancefloor, her dance will be a "higher" dance, but she won't care about that! Photons are not charged and they will not interact with electromagnetic fields. Only an outside observer will count the floor as well.
Wait, how can the (electric and magnetic) field strengths vary, but the photon have no charge? What confines these fields so they can't reach out and affect anything, and how can we measure the frequency if that's the case? I don't remember any good explanation of this! I will keep looking, though.
* Of course, it's due to a small energy loss that the coin falls down at all, but its behaviour is still very well approximated by conservation laws. Almost all of our laws are approximations when it comes to the behaviour of the real world, where a near infinity of minor effects take place constantly. We understand pretty much all of those minor effects too and we could always make a better fit, that's just a question of utility. Approximations are more powerful than they might sound. But I do want to make the point that physics can be overly simplified compared to the sheer complexity and beauty of reality!
