Fixing MR2

10th Jan 2007

Now I know that technically, this should be in an MR2 blog rather than this one, but I don't have an MR2 blog and it does have to do with MR3.

A few people have pointed out that the end of MR2 should be changed to lead into MR3, now that it's finished. That's quite right and I spent the afternoon attempting to do just that. (I spent the morning in the bug database.)

-- begin rant

Working on MR2 is not a pleasant experience. Especially trying to alter the end sequence animation, which was built on Director's timeline. (For comparison, MR3 has a scripting language for cut scenes.) The anim at the end of MR2 is over 10,000 frames long; Director's graphical timeline tool doesn't cope too well with this. One of the things I needed to do was to change the number of frames a behaviour was active for. Everytime I tried to change it Director crashed. You get a message saying

"A fatal error has occured, Director will quit now".

Fantastic. Once it's quit, you get to load it again, and then load your program once again. That doesn't sound too bad does it? Well, MR2 takes about 2mins to load in due to Director's desire to draw every cast when it loads in. (I arranged MR3 differently to avoid this problem.) Now 2mins isn't too bad when you only have to load the program once, but when it crashes every time you try something it gets pretty aggravating.

Eventually I got past that and found another problem. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that it was caused by me accidently dragging a behaviour (I don't use those any more) onto a sprite instead of a frame script.

All in all I spent an afternoon to make some changes that would have taken 5 mins in MR3. DOH!

-- end rant

I'll upload the new MR2 tomorrow.

Merlin 3 1.04 - bug fixes

9th Jan 2007

I have fixed a few more bugs in MR3 today.

Please see the version info on the MR3 page for full details. As usual, this won't affect your save game.

Thanks!

Merlin 3 1.03 - fixes bugged

8th Jan 2007

In v1.02 I managed to introduce a new (more serious) bug by fixing one. Isn't that great? ;)

Anyway thanks to W_G_Masters I worked out what had happened, deleted the previous fix and found a better way to fix the original bug.

I also fixed a couple of other bugs. Check out the version history on the MR3 page for full details.

As with previous bug fixes, this shouldn't affect any games you saved with version 1.02.

Merlin 3 1.02 - bug fixes

4th Jan 2007

I fixed the two worst bugs in MR3, namely the king following you around, and the game not ending when you clear the final screen (the one with the Ochre Wizard on).

There were a few other changes too, as you can see from the version history on the MR3 page.

MR3 v1.01 Bug Fixes

23rd Dec 2006

Version 1.00 didn't last long! Oh well. There was a rather annoying bug on the screen where you collect the Army Summon spell. It could cause the game to crash so I just had to fix it.

I also took the opportunity to fix some spellin mistaks (© Feory), while I was at it.

If you're half way through playing, don't worry, these changes won't affect your save game.

MR3 is here!

22nd Dec 2006

At last it's here!

I would just like to take this opportunity to thank once again the whole TMB community who kept me going when I felt like giving up, who made this website a fun place to hang out while the game was being made, and who in some cases directly contributed to it.

In particular:
evilishies and
MR ROX! for music
Sketch for additional graphics
Carefree_Butterfly for managing the bug database

And to:
Darren,
MR ROX!,
osel and
Carefree_Butterfly for their excellent MR based stories and
megaman4ever and
bw26 who made some excellent MR fangames. All of which kept us all entertained.

And to all the other members of TMB for their feedback, suggestions, and general interest.

It's been a long time coming but it's finally finished. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Have fun! Merry Christmas!

Preparing for launch

21st Dec 2006

I did some last minute bug testing and playtesting today and then started preparing for launch. The offline version of this site now has MR3 on it, and I'll upload everything tomorrow.

Hopefully it'll all go smoothly and I'll also have time to do the Friday Update as normal too.

It all kicks off tomorrow! Frankly, I can't wait! :)

MR3 T-Shirt Launched

20th Dec 2006

I launched the MR3 Launch T-Shirt today. There's only going to be 20 and they'll only be on sale until the 27th.

The link is:
http://www.cafepress.com/themetalbox


After that, I updated the credits for MR3 one last time and started processing some of the bugs in the DB to see if there are any last minute super bugs that need fixing before the final game is released. So far, the ones I've seen are either not showstoppers (they don't impact the game that heavily) or are crashes but with not enough information to investigate them, which is unfortunate but understandable.

I have fixed one bug that caused a crash during my own play testing, so you never know, they might all be reports of that one. I'll continue looking at that tomorrow, and then I plan on releasing the game on Friday.

Designed the New T-Shirt

19th Dec 2006

I spent today designing the new t-shirt ready for the launch of MR3. As I said to the mailing list yesterday, the existing products in the metal box shop will be taken down to focus attention on the MR3 launch t-shirt. Only a limited number of these will be sold.

The final design is quite simple, and I have to say I'm quite pleased with it. It's definitely the sort of thing I would wear myself. And best of all it's on a dark background. This is a relatively new thing on cafepress (they've been doing it for about a year now).

I'm happy to say that some people have taken the opportunity to grab some of the old designs while they are still available. If you've ever thought you might get one "later", my advice is to grab one now because I'll need to remove them sometime tomorrow.

The link is:
http://www.cafepress.com/themetalbox

Scripts, playtesting

18th Dec 2006

I'm into the polishing up phase now. I added a couple of last-minute scripts and playtested the complete level a couple of times. I still found a couple of bugs, which I fixed. One of them was that the Kong Fu Chicken couldn't come out of his dwelling, if the dwelling was pushed upwards against some trees. I don't know I did come across that one before now.

It's all coming along. I sent an email to the mailing list too.