Actual content on the way.

Posted by on May 14, 2012 4 comments

Yeah yeah just skip the silliness posted earlier if you’re not interested.

There’s going to be a large post on Hellsinker for whenever the translation for that comes out. It’s mostly written I just need to wait until the actual translation is done before putting it out.

Probably going to write some more things about program guts soon, particularly Akatsuki Blitzkampf’s as they are.. well, kind of amazing all things considered. It really is an incredibly strangely designed little game when you get into it.

Also going to try to force myself to at least get one thing out a week. I’m faster than this!

Let’s Play Wizardry: Wedge of Life! Part 12

Posted by on May 14, 2012 No comments

So now we’re railroaded back into town, once again completely unable to do anything except advance the story. This is undoubtedly the most accurate Wizardry experience, a series well known for its forced story scenes. Cough.

I start off by trying to go back to the dungeon again, with predictable results.

"<Meena> That's right. The temple wants to hear our report..."

Sigh.

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Let’s Play Wizardry: Wedge of Life! Part 11

Posted by on May 14, 2012 2 comments

Boss fight time!

Remember how I put two Samurais in the front line of the party? Well, at this point they’ve both leveled up enough to have a full stock of attack skills available for use. Time to see how much they do!

ONE BILLION DAMAGE

Poor dog.

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Let’s Play Wizardry: Wedge of Life! Part 10

Posted by on May 14, 2012 No comments

Okay so I kinda forgot about this for awhile. Got too far ahead of myself and then lost motivation to do the rest. That’s okay, because now I’m ready to plow through the rest of it!

When we last left off, we were at a crossroads with three possible paths. Which one is the correct way?!?

North - Shortcut
East - Winding Path
South - Inbetween

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Something about Framedisplay: The second part

Posted by on May 6, 2012 6 comments

Previously, far too long ago, I went over the first few versions of FrameDisplay, the games they worked for, and the various difficulties that took place in getting them to work in the first place.

The original FrameDisplay was a really simple program hacked together over the course of one night using the combined powers of SDL and caffeine. Obviously the code was hideously ugly and it’s a miracle it continued to work at all as I added game after game. After MBAC I knew I couldn’t keep rewriting huge chunks of it every time I ported it to something new, and it’d be so much better to create a unified program to do everything.

FrameDisplay 2.0, getting closer to MUGEN territory!

So when I went off to make it, I did what I always end up doing: I overbuilt the stupid thing.

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Retrospective: RemiDoki Translation Development

Posted by on April 9, 2012 No comments

Oh man this one took forever. Over a year ago, we decided to translate Blue Mica’s “Ojousama no Dokidoki Daisakusen“, which we had titled “The Mistress’ Heart-Throbbing Adventure.”

And only now have we finally managed to get it released.

But I’m not going to talk about why it took so long.

Just like my previous retrospective articles, this will be about the technical difficulties the game posed.

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How I didn’t clip the sound effects.

Posted by on March 8, 2012 No comments

As a certain recently released fighting game added rollbacks and then completely screwed up the ability to handle sound effects, I think now’s a good time to go over how RollCaster‘s sound engine works.

Before I get in on it, I want to get something out of the way though. This process is not in any way CPU intensive and anyone claiming this sort of thing would be hugely draining on a computer’s resources just so happens to be full of crap.

The case of doing this in a modern game that is being run directly on the native system is often somewhat different from the case of an emulator running an old game, so GGPO itself is not perfectly applicable here. Namely, you have to deal with the sound APIs instead of just saving the state of everything, which is a somewhat more complicated affair.

Alright! So, with that done, let’s phrase the problem here.

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Some blog things.

Posted by on March 3, 2012 2 comments

As Akismet is doing a kickass job of destroying spam, I’m disabling the auth required to post comments. Not like I get all that many comments though.

Been trying to juggle like 5 coding projects, it’s not been working out for writing stuff. Gonna try to pare that down a bit and get rocking again. And yes, Wizardry finale is coming.

I still plan on writing the rest of the Framedisplay stuff soon. Originally I was going to wait until I updated it for Ougon Cross, but as I am not getting that game, well… Yeah, I’ll just write without it.

Also, I think RollCaster is finally complete and doesn’t need any more updates, so I think unless someone finds something I’m done with it.

That’s about it for now. Soon!

Investigating RollCaster’s Timing Issues

Posted by on February 22, 2012 2 comments

After finishing the desync fix I thought I had finally finished. Shortly after, a few Japanese guys tried it out and got back to me that the timing was unstable, causing the frame rate to jitter unnecessarily.

Sure, I thought, it can’t be that hard to fix.

This started a very long process which led me all over the codebase, analyzing every last part of the process involved in it, for over a month. I’m sure nearly everyone who put up with me begging for testing and putting out updates is sick of me by now!

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Investigating RollCaster’s Desyncs

Posted by on February 5, 2012 3 comments

So RollCaster has had a long-standing desync issue. This is a pretty minor thing as far as the Western player base is concerned, since the community don’t have a lot of players and it happens infrequently enough that it’s more a nuisance than anything else. They probably thought I was mad for attempting to fix it.

If I wasn’t before, I sure went mad trying!

I was moderately successful, and I’m not sure it’s even possible to be truly 100% on this one so I’m not going to worry about it too much. Instead I’ll discuss the origin, strategy used for finding it, the results, and a ridiculous case of coincidence that popped up.

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