I’d like DF’s idea if it didn’t drastically cut the ways I can help out.
Then again, I’d dislike it more if I didn’t know the project wouldn’t be done in the year it’s going to take me to take a couple of programming classes.
(I’ve totally given up on helping with graphics, and my ability to help with sound is very dependent on how we plan on doing the sound.)
Gimme some of that shit you are smoking becaouse your reality seems pretty damn screwed up. And I like that.
Dude. I should smack you in the face with a dildo.
i’ll see if i can rally anyone at college xD
If you still haven’t decided what to do in 2.5 months, remember that I’m… working on something. <_< >_>
I might accidentally fail, though, so carry on and please pretend I’m not… working on something. <_< >_>
I hope you don’t fail Troid. You could save the project.
I wish I knew what he was doing :O_O:
wow, DF, I didn’t think anyone here would suggest something of Microsoft’s for the project >_>
but yeah, I agree with DF, XNA is a better idea, it can support huge games, and I’ve seen XBLA community games with good platforming engines, so why not?
Braid for example.
I’m confused about the dislike of this idea. Which GM version are you talking about, the closed-source engine that has stalled for 6+ months now, or the open-source engine that has stalled for 4+ months?
Daz is presenting a new alternative for the project, and since no one seems to actually want to get up and do anything themselves, I laud his efforts. Having seen the significant changes that SM can have done to it(SMR’s physics engine makes it an entirely new game), I am confident that this idea could work.
The problem with developing any engine from scratch, in any language, is that it’s somewhat complex to develop a generic engine and then mold it into the form that you want it to be in. For a basic 2D game, you have to worry about:
These may seem like relatively easy-to-do things on paper, but creating efficient systems is not particularly easy. As games grow more complex, collision detection and physics become extremely wonky to deal with. All sorts of slopes and whatnot, it’s not fun.
Hacking up SM offers the following benefits:
What is there to do, then? Level design, modifying the physics engine to reflect the desired solution, creating/modifying the graphics and sounds. This is all about making the material and putting it into a premade engine. This is just a matter of reworking how stuff looks to make it work.
The most difficult part of this is going to be the ASM portion. I doubt anyone but a sparse few know ASM at all, which is a massive bottleneck.
Well, Jathys said he’d help, and we all know he’s damn good with ASM. 
Only thing I’m worried about is whether or not the background → foreground boostball halfpipes idea can be implemented with ASM. On second thought, there is also a lot of scanning things which I can’t really see happening.
It’s really easy to learn how ASM works, though, especially if you’re already a coder. I’ve coded a little bit in it before, but only a little.
So we ditch the scan visor. 2D Metroid has never had it before, and it was really clunky and hard to use in the existing P2D attempts, after all. The boostball won’t be a problem at all, I’m positive.
Prime - Scan Visor = FAILURE
it kills the game. Not to mention changes a lot of the boss fights, and modifies lots of the puzzles to major easy.
… How the hell does it do any of that? All the scan visor does is give hints for puzzles, so it would actually make them harder. And it’s not like scanning bosses does anything but give tips … O_o
Scanning in P2D felt akward and cluncky, the only way I think it could be used easily is if you had mouse aiming (which IMO is better suited for a Prime remake anyways as it allows for percision shooting). But even so, in a fangame I really doubt people are going to even use the scan visor, because since it’s not an official Metroid game, it’s really just a waste of time reading all of the content on there because you really don’t get anything out of it. The scan visor is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but doesn’t always work out. Even in my game Project Dread I used to have a Scan Mode where you could use the mouse to get information on enemies and objects, but even though it worked I ditched it because overall it was a useless feature and nobody would use it.
And you did that based solely on how you would react, or perhaps you and a few random people, rather than based on how most other people would react.
Personally, when I’m checking out fan fiction, I read it.
Scanning should be in P2D. The information may be old, but it’s also something that, without it, the game loses a lot of its spirit.
I wonder how much the x-ray visor can be adjusted. If you can move while using it, and then have it detect a certain blocktype (which would be able to hold some custom pointer to the log data), then the scan visor would work. I don’t know what kind of work would go into that, or if it’s even possible, but yeah.
Spiderball and boost ball blahblah, that stuff isn’t trivial, but it should be doable, Daz said Jathys had a spiderball implementation done, and boost ball wouldn’t be too much harder to do, I think.
It just doesn’t seem natural at all, if anything the scanning on P2D seemed forced and tacked on. When trying to play the game, I felt it just completely halted the gameplay since you had to stop what you were doing just to scan a random item to unlock the gates. Like, couldn’t there have been an easier way to do this? In Metroid Prime it worked nicely because of the 3D environment and control scheme. With a 2D platformer where you can only aim 8 directions it doesn’t work too well at all. It hurts the flow of the game and I’m sure others will agree with me on that.
My point is that if you make this an exact translation from 3D to 2D, it simply won’t work. for example, the Force Field on the demo you guys released. In the original Prime, the whole point of the gate and scanning / shooting buttons was to show off the control scheme and introduce you to an element which would be used often in the game. No problems there, completely logical. However in the P2D demo, it’s just weird. ‘I’m running but oh no! There’s a gate in my path! Shooting at it doesn’t work, can’t jump around it… So, guess I have to go into Scan Mode. Great, scan mode activated after dicking around with the controls and finding it. Now what? Oh, guess I have scan the gate, just wait a few seconds for me to get Samus’ scan visor in range… Got it! Scanning now… Awesome, gate is online! But wait, I still can’t get through! What? Now I have to shoot these 3 random buttons? With only 8 directions it’s annoying as hell shooting these damn things!’
In Prime you can accomplish this in like 4 seconds. On P2D it’s just a long, aggrivating, and utterly pointless ordeal which just wastes the players time. Maybe scanning wouldn’t be a big problem if it were optional in the game. But most of the time you have to scan something like every single room to advance. It can be a great feature to have for people like DeP who enjoy reading the fan-material, but not everybody wants to do that and the game shouldn’t force us to.
If you must have the scan visor, why not make it scan objects automatically? It saves control space, isn’t a hassle, keeps the pace up, and keeps the elements of story in the game for those so inclined in reading it. Just have a notification when something has been scanned, and the player has to simply pause to show the information if they want to read it.
“But pausing interrupts the gameplay!”
Metroid Prime essentially DID pause when you scanned something: Everything froze in place until you let go of the scan button. So this is essentially the same thing.