Gamerdude

Funnily enough, I checked for a thread at some point on my birthday but didn't see one, but didn't think to look in a thread with such a title, haha. Thanks guys, I appreciate. Been a busy few weeks...people like extending my birthday festivities apparently . Epic post though Overbound, love it . We'll see where Emerald Ties goes...works is slowing down a bit soon (hopefully).

Part of you deep down inside wants to though Glad to hear your birthday was glorious, Ristar!

Just wanted to give a big happy birthday to that sexy music guy, Ristar! Hope you're having a great one!

I just wanted to chime in here really quick with a random tidbit. I cannot emphasize enough how expensive collision checks are compared to just about anything else, especially if you're using the "Handle background collisions even out of window" option. I'm embarrassed that I didn't see/realize the magnitude of this sooner than I did. To use an example from Emerald Ties. I just found that a major cause to our performance woes was performing collision checks for item box movement as the first action in the event condition list. Our conditions originally looked something like this: + Item Box is overlapping backdrop + Internal flag 0 is on + Internal flag 1 is off + (NEGATE) X("Item Box"), Y Top("Item Box") is an obstacle We had a bunch of events like this helping to control hitting item boxes from underneath to make them fall to the ground (controlling gravity of the box, stopping on the ground, etc). By rearranging the condition list to the following I was able to increase the performance of the game considerably: + Internal flag 0 is on + Internal flag 1 is off + Item Box is overlapping backdrop + (NEGATE) X("Item Box"), Y Top("Item Box") is an obstacle Obviously the magnitude of a change like this is directly dependent on how many of the objects being checked are in the frame. With something that's plentiful, like item boxes, this becomes an issue rather quickly. To measure the impact I changed the frame rate in MMF to 250. Before adding this change of ordering, my computer averaged 155FPS (sounds high, but my computer is a beast). After making the above change, I saw an increase to an average of 206FPS. That is huge. TLDR: Whenever possible, perform checks for collisions/against the collision mask as late in your event list as possible especially if you're using "Handle background collisions even out of window". Use other means to narrow down the object selection process first. I realize that maybe most here probably already knew this, however maybe this will prove useful to someone coming to this topic for the first time.

I prefer Frosted Shredded Wheat, myself. Reese Peanut Butter Crunch is a close second. (REESE?! FOR BREAKFAST?!)

I'm an application developer at a financial institution...woo! Don't worry, still a 99%er so you don't have to hunt me down!

Happy birthday man, I hope you're well .

Please don't necro-post, this is a 6 year old thread. I'm locking this thread.

Emerald Ties is in need of a BG artist! Blyde, our dedicated sprite artist, is very busy with fulfilling all of our other sprite needs (badniks, gimmicks, characters, etc), and with only so many hours in a day cannot keep up with both that and creating background sets. For those of you unfamiliar with Emerald Ties I've included screenshots below from our current demo that we'll be showing at SAGE. I've also linked to the most recent (if you can call it recent >_>) demo from SAGE 2008. Keep in mind that the soon to be released game demo is much more polished and a lot has changed internally since this older one . Skip to the bottom TLDR section if you wish to for-go all the history and stuff! SAGE 2008 Demo To give a little history, the game started back in 2006 and was called Emerald Ties: Crossing Fates. We had a very good run when the game saw it's first SAGE, which was either 2006 or 2007. People seemed to have a great time with the game in general, but also with the online time attack leaderboards . Initial development was speedy, but as it was started only a year before I started college, things slowed down significantly after college started. Adding to the troubles was the fact that we never had our own dedicated background artist. We would generally have to resort to using someone else's left over BGs, asking someone working on another game to make one for us, or taking time away from someone else's work to try creating one ourselves. Obviously none of these solutions ended very well. This has always been the largest plague on Emerald Ties. The project was put on hiatus in 2008 after work had all but stopped. Lack of BG creation was one of the more frustrating points that caused progress to halt. Naoshi, Blyde, Rael, and myself have recently picked up working on Emerald Ties again at the start of this year, however due to personal reasons Rael could not continue work shortly into our revival. As SAGE closes in and we try to tie up some loose ends before the event hits, I wanted to reach out to the community and see if anyone would be interested in joining our team. We are a pretty laid back, but passionate group. We are all busy with our normal lives as well, so this isn't a team moving at breakneck speed. That being said, we put our due time in and finish things when they need to get done/know others are waiting on us. Current team members: Myself - Engine/Level Design/Misc. non-artistic things Naoshi - Level Design/BG Blyde - Sprites/BG assistance TLDR: What we're looking for is a motivated individual to create BGs/level tiles/level art (whatever you care to call it ) for Emerald Ties. We use "Genesis" style backgrounds, but while we lean towards the "Genesis" style, we strive to have our BGs be original. Plainly put, we don't like to recolor/rehash what's already been done. If you're interested and think you could meet our needs, please send me a PM or IM me (emeraldcaladbolg). If you have a sample of something you've done in the past, that would be greatly preferred. This way we can see what you're capable of and seeing if your style will be a good match for the game. Lastly, this should go without saying but I'll mention it anyway, please only express interest if you're legitimately interested in working on this project and have the skills to do so.

What's a Techokami? Seriously though, happy belated . Thanks for all your help too!

Happy birthday! Hope you're doing well and having a good day today!

I didn't know . I guess I fall into the category outside of most everyone . Awesome site though, love it.

I saw this article early this morning, quiet a good read. I used WinAMP for a long time...don't quite remember when I stopped using it. Aside from playing music, I used to use it for SAGE casting, good times .

Happy birthday!

Yeah, CSS isn't going away any time soon. Well, yes, but I'm speaking of things like this: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_form_target.asp The target attribute is not deprecated (stack overflow thread discussing that here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4828740/non-deprecated-equivalent-of-form-target), even though W3 Schools say it is. This can cause a lot of confusion and searching for unnecessary alternative solutions. That's what I mean by you have to be careful with what W3 Schools tells you because they are known to be incorrect on things frequently enough that it's a problem. They are in no way associated with W3C, who sets the HTML standards. But yes, inconsistencies, especially with CSS and JS, exist in this realm. You cannot escape it.

W3 Schools is a good starter reference, but be careful...it's a good reference for most things, but based on a recent web project I was assigned at work, there are a decent number of things that they don't get right, which gets to be frustrating when you're trying to figure out why something doesn't work as you intend. For a CSS reference that is wonderful for understanding the compatibilities between browers, I'd highly recommend: Quirks Mode CSS. They have pretty good examples as well. I've honestly not read a HTML/CSS book in a very long time, so I wouldn't be able to comfortably recommend one. However, if you have a specific question about an issue you're having, I'd be glad to help you figure it out. I enjoy web design. While I'm not that great at the actual design elements, I like working on web pages .

Yes. A lot of things were changed to be this way. However, qualifiers are not supported in global events, so not everything can be moved (particularly the collision system), but even still it makes things much easier to change .

I was talking with Naoshi about this last night, and like I said to him, I never really noticed . I got so used to it just rotating that I forgot that's not how it was in the classic games, so I guess it never bothered me. That said though, I think it's a good idea, and I've already changed the engine to reflect it. I recently started using global events for a majority of the engine stuff and it's made making changes much easier in most cases. .

Ristar is a musical champion . I'm totally stoked about having him on board to help!

Odd that the file wouldn't play. I know I tested it before I posted it...maybe I'll convert it to mp3 and rehost when I get home. In the meantime, thanks Blazefire. Edit: Haha serves me right for testing only in chrome. Doesn't work in Firefox on my work computer here's a direct link to the ogg: http://etcf.thisisourcorner.net/music/SparklingSeaside_clip.ogg. I right click saved the link from Firefo and saved it as all fils without the htm extension and could play it in vlc. If you mean the rolling animation, then no, we haven't. Its actually not something that i remember being brought to my personal attention before. Generally speaking I was keeping all the ground animations rotated to maintain consistency, however if this is undesirable to people its not a big deal to change.

We are planning to have a more or less original soundtrack. Ristar is currently helping with some of the zone music. Shadix has also offered his help as well. We are very excited to have both of them working to help us create some great music for the soundtrack . Truth be told I never thought we'd get people interested in making some tunes for us, so personally, I'm ecstatic. We've already got a track or two done from Ristar with more in the works by both of them. Maybe we'll give a preview of some of the music soon to see what we're planning . Screw it, here's a sample from Sparkling Seaside: http://etcf.thisisourcorner.net/music.html (requires an HTML5 capable browser, song should just autoplay in the background).

I believe it's Portuguese. I don't know if it's meaning changes with context, but it literally means shit.

Discussing pirate software is not allowed.I will be locking this thread. Reinstall mmf2. If you have a legitimate copy this will fix your problem.

Precisely. Haha, I almost forgot it was done in MMF1.5, but it was. I remember porting the whole engine to mmf2. Was a pain at the time of release with so many extensions not ported, but it was worth the frustration .

You're correct. There was an engine made by Damizean (same author as Sonic Worlds) before Sonic Worlds. I suppose this was almost his beta engine, although maybe he could comment. It was very minimalistic at its roots, just basic movement was included if I recall correctly. His old engine is used as a base, however it's been extensively modified.