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Bleh

OkalyDDude@yahoo.com
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59768319
OkalyDDude
OkalyDDude
OkalyDDude@hotmail.com

: : OkalyDDude, when do think Okaly D Dink will be released? It looks to be an amazing game, and I wish to know when it will be released, or at least when another demo will come out.

: Woah, saw my name!

: Umm...i've done a lot of new stuff in it since that first crap demo, which really had nothing special in it..

: I just haven't done anything recently

: I've got a lot of new ideas i haven't implamented yet, but most of which i know how to do..

: To answer your question...when enough people bother me i suppose..

: I'm a senior, so i'm supposedly loaded down with homework (which i don't do) but really, i just spend my time in my basement, The Lair, with my friends...

: I really should put everything i've done into a demo of sorts..hrm..sounds familiar.. but ya, right now, i basically deleted that fire castle because it was where i wanted a new area, and it sucked, and i've got a lot of new things up, most working pretty well.. A few things, like a few spells, and parts of the status screen, i don't have perfected, and it'll take a while to pick it up, its been a while, but...ya..i should..maybe i'll do that tonight if my friends leave..there's still 2 of em here, who knows... wait wait, one's leaving..and the other is too engrosed in Kingdom Hearts to much care about anything...so maybe i'll take a look

: And another note, you did this quite well:

: For anyone who wants to contact me, either do it via aim or on this board, you'll have to put me in the title for me to look at it most likely  I generally just check out the scripting help ones, leave the childish namecalling to the professionals...

So I went and looked in my folder, and woah, there's this text file i'd saved about my game, i think I wrote it for that beta testing dealy..So i took it, reread it, added some stuff to the end..its pretty long, and it covers a lot about my dmod..

I really hope to at least get something out to you guys, just to prove I did all this if for nothing else But also a lot of it would benefit scripters a lot,and if i ever got around to picking it up again, i'd soon be done with technical crap and could really focus on the layo ut of the game, so I could make it really really fun. At least i think what i've done so far would lead to a fun game So here's that whole long thing:

Author: OkalyDDude

Email: OkalyDDude@hotmail.com

Contact: Aim: OkalyDDude Icq: 59768319

I don't actually have the dmod uploaded at this point...nor in any kind of playable phase...just kinda testing this system here...

So what i'll do, since i've just come back from vacation, is haul ass on it. Yes, lots of ass will be hauled. But before i release the demo to the DN, i'll put it up here and tell people to get crackin on it.

What to expect. (I'll try to be brief, but fail)

Status Screen

This is the big thing. Basically, you hit S and it brings up this big screen with all sorts of stuff. We'll start on the left. 5 slots, Head, Neck, Body, Hands, Feet. Head neck body and feet are for armor, hands for weapons. Basically, there'll be a lot of armors and weapons and i felt that storing them here rather than your inventory is easier. How do i store them you ask? Magic. And by that i mean SuperVariables, thanks to redink. I can have all the weapons and armor i'll ever need, and no armor will be in your inventory, and only 2 weapons at a time, with a hotkey to switch them (another diablo rip!). If maybe it should be more, when you test it tell me.

Then there is the belt items and stuff like that. It shows the belt you have (I'll get to those later) and how many of what item you have, some not belt items. For instance, it says how many arrows you have, how many keys, as well as the belt ones, bombs potions and scrolls.

Then there's a neat grid to show what crystals you have.

Under that is the spells. It has a picture of the spell, then the level and mana cost. Not sure if mana cost will fluctuate with level, or if i'll eventually dump mana and go back to the traditional, depends on feedback.

A little on the belt. Basically, instead of having all the bombs scrolls and potions in your inventory, i keep the dirty buggers out! Yes, that means your inventory is almost completely for random items. All you do is hit B and (I might freeze the game, might not, depending on feedback) then choose potion bomb or scroll, then which you want to use. There will be up to 9 types of each of these (God bless supervariables) and different belts let you carry different amounts, the first of course being 1 of each, and the God-Belt being 9. It's quite nifty, you'll like it.

About potions, scrolls, bombs. Right now for potions i have an alchemist, and i'll maybe do something like this for bombs and scrolls (update, i did do something like the alchemist for bombs and scrolls!), and you can buy the most basic potions, but for others you have to do stuff. For instance, to make a Greater Heal potion you need 1 mushroom, 1 flower and 1 vial of pilbug blood. The mushroom and flower are the kind of thing you pick up all over the place. You simply get them and bring them to the alchemist like he says. Also blood of monsters is common, you simply buy an empty vial from him and kill a monster and talk to its corpse and select to fill it up.

About mana. I kind of like the idea that you can cast spells at a given speed no matter your level, but just can't cast as many. For this I made a way that you have mana, and the green bar is filled up representatively of how much mana you have. For instance if your max is 10 and you have 10, it'll be full. If you have 5 and your max is 10, it'll be half full. This leads to a small problem, though...shift only works when the bar is full. My solution, use / instead. This means i have a lot of extra keys being used tho. So if you check out my scripts when i release and can think of a way to use shift, please tell me, or if you can get alt to work, because i can't. But basically, more magic means more mana, and there'll be mana potions of course. But once again, depending on feedback i may modify my spells a bit and go back to the old system. But my spells are much better used with mana.

About keys. Since i have quite a few new ones and other people have different keyboards, i would really like it if someone would help me with a little program to rename the files, the key-??.c files so that people can be promted before playing the game as to which keys they would like for each, or just to use my standard. This should resolve some issues of people with different keyboards.

About hugeness. I plan to make it huge. I don't think this dmod would be worth it with all my new stuff if it wasn't, and i just like the idea. And by huge i don't just mean long, lots of plot, i also mean big maps. But not sucky maps. Thats the key. If you test it and its boring to walk in an area, repetative, sucky in any way, i must know, because it must not be like that. But due to this, i will likely have more than one map. In fact thats almost a gauranty. I have Beuc right now (hopefully working on a program that switches maps and stores and reloads the screen data, mosters dead, chests open etc. (Update: GASP! Redink did it! Go redink!) If he can't save that data, i can get around it with just having it whiped like in catacombs. But basically i discovered that if you switch a map while running dink, then move to the next screen, it reads the new map like nothing happened. So if this thing can go with just a slight load time, no work for newb dinkers, that would be great.

Thats obscenely long considering i don't even have the demo up yet, but hey, if you guys have ideas, tell me, i left my icq and aim accounts, but i'm bad about checking mail, so use that first. If some brave soul wants to check out what i have before everyone else, i can whip it up. I hope i covered everything...i bet i didn't, but oh well.

Well, just a few more i just thought of (It'll be short, i swear!)

Items, the only ones that WILL go in your inventory, are just random objects that can be picked up and dropped all the time. For instance, go into somebody's house and you want the broom. Take it. Just talk to it and select to take it. If its reasonable, i'll allow it to be taken. Then if you hit D whenever, it'll drop it on the ground right there, to be picked up again. If you leave the screen, though, it'll dissapear and go back to where it came from.

I'm thinking there might be 'special' items that you can only drop in your house, but there they actually stay, quest items and such that you may want to use later, but ditch for a while. It'll be good.

So you can pick up and drop lots of stuff, there i said it quick like.

And now I leave you...and thats quite long, so i'm gonna save it in case somebody asks me "Hey...uh, whats your dmod gonna be like?"

And now a few more things to tac on since then:

Pushing: I've completely modified the pushing of objects...I thought it was done foolishly, where you push, then sit there while it moves a certain distance. So what i did is make a script that every 1/100 of a second or so moves both the object and dink one pixel in the direction he's moving. There's different speeds for different objects. And what it does is check your animation # (if i remember correctly) so it knows when you stop pushing. I perfected it so there's no issues of hard boxes..at first you could get stuck in it sometimes, no problem now. Also if you push it against a wall or anything with a hardbox, it stops, you just can't push it more. Its good.

A little more on leveling: I want my game to be the kind where you get really godly...and leveling actually matters. So I give people 4 points when they level, to put in str, def, magic, and hp. Thats right. Instead of just getting 3 hp at the level, you get 3 hp whenever you choose hp. This way, someone wants a lot of hp right away, they could probably max it rather quickly. I'm not sure if i'm going to leave elixers of str, def, and magic in, but because of this, i'm not going to have gold hearts..again, based on feedback, could change.

Also items will help in this a lot..i mean, weapons will add a lot to damage eventually, and armor will get to be quite formidable, and some will add to magic, it'll be good, and i hope by the end you'd be doing damage easily in the hundreds, if not thousands...

A bit more on how the types of weapons and armor work (i was rather vague before) The way a supervar works is it breaks a nine didget number, such as 100000000 into each diget, so it would give nine variables in the end, the first being 1 and the other 8 beings 0. Now, this leads into a real easy way to do 9 types of armor, with 9 grades to each. The first could be simply def armor, the second def and attack maybe, the third def and magic, and so on, maybe the last 3 digets or so for special armor, plot related, that there'd only be one grade of... but having 9 types of the armor would be really easy to do, it would just be a matter of putting that many in the game Also, when you'd get a new grade of the armor, it would just overwrite the previous...so if you got the second grade of the first one, the global would then be 200000000. It would simply show the second grade of armor under the status screen. Then lets say you found the fourth...but later found the third. It would simply prompt you that the armor you found was worse than what you had, maybe flash it up for you to see, who knows, and then continue to just show you the 4th grade of it... it will all work out, you'll see

Also, this works for weapons. I've got a global for swords, bows, throws, and i think something else..wow i should go look sometime. But basically the same thing applies. Different types and different grades. And the way its set up, you'd never want to have a lower grade, so it wouldn't matter if you couldn't access it..because all the weapons or armor in one type, say the first diget, will be similar, only the upper grade ones will be better in every way than the lower ones..so you'll never wish you could get to the lower ones...unless it was funny or something

Ok, and here's where my computer crahses..i saved more often than i thought...whew...going on

Something i've thought of, and how to do, but not done yet, is a waypoint system (yes another diablo II rip off, bleh, go blow it out your nose) I mean, with a wilderness like i plan, it would only make sense. It'll be huge, but you'd really rather only go through it once exploring it...so if there's 9 waypoints on a map, it would make getting around a lot faster. I like it and it'll be good.

Lets see, anything else to talk about... A little on spell levels i suppose... Something i haven't really done yet, but know how, again...basically though, i'd do em secret of mana style, the number of times you use the spell..of course i'd do it based on the number of times you hit something...so people don't just cast at nothing in town. And as it levels up, maybe it'll cost a different amount of mana...more because it does more, or less as a reward...but likely it'll stay the same, and the spell will get better...for instance, fire, it's like hell fire, only for every level is another time it explodes. So at level 2, hits an enemy twice. And around level 4 or so it'll be hitting the enemy a few times then going on. And I was thinking at level 5 have it split off maybe, at the first contact. And level 10 would be something real special if you got it that high...like split off every time it hit, something real good. And the damage will be dependant on your magic.

My other spells:

Ice will be like the POTA ice, only it doesn't kill them if you hit them..it simply turns them to ice, then you smack em and it does regular damage, but they're imobalized...obviously it'll affect later monsters for less time, and each level it'll get better, then at 5 and 10 it'll change in some way..

Earth is a spike that comes up from the ground where a monster is, doing an amount of damage based on your magic and the spell level..and at level 5 it comes up then some spikes jut out, so it damages twice and the second is a big area, to hit multiple monsters maybe..and level 10 will probably hit every m onster with the level 5 version..

Air I haven't done much with, but it'll be great. The first levels will just be this air current that hits and damages an enemy, then moves the monster with it for until it either hits a wall (which will also damage the enemy) or the current stops, which'll be a distance based on the level etc. changes at level 5 and 10, not sure how

Spirit will be a familiar, pretty easy to do really..probably won't control it at all, so the programming will be simple.. then to use it, just summon it..stays til it dies or maybe a set time, dunno.

Light was fun also. It's going to be a beam of light that bounces off stuff, including enemies. At level 1 it'll just bounce off one wall and simply go into an enemy and hurt it. At level 2 it'll bounce off up to two walls and off 1 enemy too, and so on. Then at level 5 it'll start splitting, so you'll shoot a beam and they'll split and you'll have a few beams coming out, and so on, good fun

Darkness i was going to do a darkness shield...but i seem to remember coming up with a good one, man, i wish i could remember... The original plan was simply something that protected you, raised your def, or made you invulnerable in some way... I coulda sworn i thought of a better spell, who knows...

So thats the spells..though its only 7, and i really want there to be 8, both to look good, and also then you'd start with one, so there would be a reason put points into magic before you get done with the first castle (which will actually be a while, because first there's the link to the past style go to the castle and find out what you can, then explore some more, find the castle..it'll be good

A little bit on status also:

I was thinking about having some status affects, some of which have been done well, like poison, and some more, and obviously have potions to heal them. Some more i thought of might be blindness, which would work kinda like the lanterns, where a lot is dark but what's around you. Also, things could cast slow on you, maybe immobalize you for a time, things like that. Haven't done too much with it yet...

And now this text file is even bloody longer...

Kudos to anyone that read it, hope i didn't leave anything out (though i know i did...)

Until next time, tata

-OkalyDDude

PS - Thinks for thinking of me. Just seeing that i was even thought of at all at the DN made my day..i mean, from what i've actually released, you've got no reason at all to look forward to anything..but maybe reading this will make you want to force me to get it out Like i said, i'm still hoping to work on it, but its not really playable right now, its just like a big testing for all this new stuff..so if i made something to demo, i'd release it..if not..i'll eventually just release it as it is..for scripters to look at and steal from

-OkalyDDude