Hark, a small update:
A little bit of fine tuning, as per better summoning ai, changes to the necromancers and grey ghosts, and an addition of #friends to various teams such that crazy's new map works as intended.
Click Here

I think this maybe belongs as mrOpenUnstable

Update: saves now work properly.

Plans for tomorrow:
move orcs to their own team, such that the druids wont heal them.
Maybe add some enemies.
Start working on wizard bars, if the current wizard bar is good enough.
Do lots of homework/cleaning/cooking! Whoo Thanksgiving weekend!

(Will put up a new cast folder and perhaps the whole shebang tmw, probably updating the really big map)

Lol. I have similar plans!

Cool. I look forward to testing it.

It's somewhat odd seeing you saying you're looking forward to testing MR, steve.

Quite. I hope the addition of enemies happens. I just love enemies! ;)

Wizard bars = not started,
new enemies: 2.5(#evilTvs, and #tvBox have the gfx loaded, but no data)
bug fixes: done.
Orcs = on dedicated orc team, asides from the black orc, who is still a monster.
Estimated upload time: 9 minutes.

sorry, that's #evilTv, not #evilTvs...

Link:here!

Oh man. I wanna upload these gfx and program them in so bad. I will get Director!

It's somewhat odd to be saying it - but pleasantly odd.

I will download and test this in a few minutes.

Is the undead dragon new in this release? I don't remember seeing it before.

yep!

Or rather, new as in having finished drawing, then animating it yesterday! I should really finish that last skeleton, at which point I think the skeleton team could be considered "complete" (unless another summoner becomes needed to get the bigger skeletons out)

Undead dragon? Wow. Isn't there the General skeleton you have to do Note?

That would be the last skeleton left, I think.

Good stuff!

Ummmm...the download doesn't seem to start for me. Could you possibly share the file on a different site? Perhaps, Zshare?

Sure thing!
http://www.zshare.net/download/81475836d67ed8f9/

Thanks!

I like the Speedy Kung Fu men. Their walk is little annoying though but they are still nice. Ummmm...are the evil TV's not supposed to be working? Every time I put them into the map in the editor, I don't see it in the real game.

The undead dragons are cool. Different from what I imagined. The projectiles are a little odd to me but they are still cool.

"#evilTvs, and #tvBox have the gfx loaded, but no data"

yeah... those projectiles were a thirty second kinda thing. They should be replaced in some way or another.

Oh sorry. I forgot that. Well, great job!

If you happen to draw up a better projectile, sometime, likely on the weekend, I'll update it with it included. (I have not actually looked at the speedy kung fu guy's in action)

I might make a projectile but I am still thinking of how it should look like.

High up on my todo list: add the minimap to the pregame loading(wherever it is that loads the first room, and such)

I don't get it. Sorry.

Sorry, its a note to self. The point is such that the game won't freeze up on clearing the first room.

Oh. That sometimes happens to me.

I can't play a single map. Please fix it quick Note. Thanks.

hmm. Try this semi-update?
http://www.zshare.net/download/81513667e63e0d85/

I'd upload it to another mirror, but it took around 10 min last time I tried to upload a full folder to mediashare. I think the problem that you are coming up with is in the dojo, which I fixed yesterday. You should probably be able to open simple maps though, that don't include such things.
Could you elaborate on what the problem is exactly? Does the game say anything when an error happens?

http://www.mediafire.com/?np1i26bxolao32m

Some bug fixes, and balancing, lowered leveling effects and the like.

Downloading, I will do a proper release announcement when I get time.

I have made one tiny change to the version I have - there was some extra code in the teamMaster that I have commented out because I didn't like the effect it had on my solidiers. It looks like this:

 
on findTarget me, theObj
 
  objLoc = theObj.getLoc()
 
  
 
  pRequestingObj = theObj -- to help with debugging
 
  
 
  character = theObj.getActorType()
 
  if character <> #characterEnergyRollOverMaster then
 
    nothing
 
  end if
 
  
 
  
 
  hatedTeams = me.calcTargetTeamsByAllegiance(theObj)
 
  
 
  closestTarget = g.structMaster.getStruct(#teamTarget)
 
  
 
  
 
  targetCriteria = theObj.getAttack().targetCriteria
 
  -- if targetCriteria = #lowestHealth then
 
  -- dist is used to hold the health value
 
  
 
  targetRoles = theObj.getAttack().targetRoles
 
  
 
  
 
  -- look through hated teams
 
  repeat with priorityTeams in hatedTeams
 
    repeat with nTeam in priorityTeams
 

 
      -- Changeed by Steve 2010-10-08
 
      -- not sure what the purpose of this is (something to with spellcasters perhaps?)
 
      -- but it's making my soldiers run around like headless chickens!
 
      --if random(5) > 2 then
 
        closestInTeam = me.findTargetInTeam(nTeam, objLoc, targetCriteria, targetRoles)
 
      --else
 
      --  closestInTeam = me.findRandomTargetInTeam(nTeam, objLoc, targetCriteria, targetRoles)
 
      --end if
 
      if closestInTeam.dist < closestTarget.dist then
 
        if closestInTeam.priorityRank <= closestTarget.priorityRank then
 
          closestTarget = closestInTeam
 
        end if
 
      end if
 
    end repeat
 
    
 
    -- only look in lower priority teams if we have found nothing
 
    if closestTarget.obj <> #none then
 
      exit repeat
 
    end if
 
    
 
  end repeat
 
  
 
  return closestTarget
 
end
 

As you can see you (or I, and I've forgotten) are randomly returning a random enemy rather than the closest, in the findTarget function. This has the effect of causing melee units to have a stab at this, and a poke at that, and never finish anything!

It could also have the effect of causing healers to heal units that are not injured, or at least not the most injured (I haven't confirmed this however).

So if you put that code in, what was the purpose? Maybe we can find a better way to achieve the effect you were looking for. If it was me, then I don't know what I was doing, just slap me and we'll say no more about it!

yeah, I'm fine without having that, however, before you make an announcement, I now have a proper mr28! With a new enemy, and spell!

I did fix the problem with the healers in that, and I think it could probably be changed such that melee attacks don't look at it, the intended effect was to speed up target selection a bit, and to make it such that things would attack the spellcasters and summoners now and then, so you aren't entirely safe hiding behind your army.

Its freezing in here:
I've got the slow down bullets working nicely, however, there are some issues with glowing, which I don't plan on fixing.(I know little to nothing about that section of code)(The real solution to the problems is likely pretty complicated, with a lot of info being passed between the energy, colour transform and freeze mods, along with some new colour change functionality(probably) ... such that things start at glowing teal when they are frozen, then glow red or white over top of that. (it might also be really easy)

So downloading after school today.

Ummm...just to point out a few problems.
I think I saw the ice golem run away from me a couple of times but I am not sure that this happens all the time. I will continue checking some other time.

When an enemy is almost dead, it flashes red right? When it is in that state it cannot be frozen.

Also I don't think the enemies walk slower when they are frozen.

I might be wrong though.

Right I'm on the wrong computer for this, switching...

I can't download it.
Every time I click the link it just reloads the page.

This sucks.

Right I'm going to set ♪ up with an ftp account so he can upload his stuff straight to tmb.

♪, do you know how to use fileZilla?

Psh! Filezilla is for wimps. Real men use the FTP cli program.

I use core ftp now and then.
Its likely about the same, I would assume?

Hopefully, you can now find what you are looking for at: http://themetalbox.com/note/mr28_arctic_removed random ai.zip

...unless I need to name things differently.

http://themetalbox.com/note/mr28_arctic_removed random ai.zip

...yep, I need to name differently.

This should be what you are looking for.

This should be what you are looking for.

hehehe
Clever thought of the day: if I was to get a shockwave version working, I'd probably now be able to get it to run on this page. I have a feeling that I shouldn't though.

Text-wall of me: happen.
>_

Also, I'm not sure why part of a comment appeared twice. Probably firefox's fault.

You can always upload an HTML page with a shockwave version.

...

We need a shockwave version of MR_open.

hmmm...
It seems as though the file io xtra cannot be used in shockwave.(not shockwave safe, so says the internet)

Guess what!
http://themetalbox.com/note/dir_template.html
Its a start...
I tried getting the full page to work, but, I would need skills with html.

Also features whatever intros/outros I selected.

OH YEAH!

No more downloading. This looks, like, awesome. And the map is awesome too. It doesn't seem too easy either, from the few mins I played.

Yep, good work. Thanks!

Could it be possible to select a map..?!?

Maybe from a dropdown list before the game or something? Or maybe from inside the game, as the maps don't take that much space....?

How come you don't get the Energy Blast at the beginning?? I thought it was tradition.

You do. It's even on the first screen!


This is epic awesome. I can't praise the map enough. I enjoy it and it still offers lotsa challenge for even this veteran.

I'm not sure I can beat the screen with energy mines lol
I spent a while trying different methods of it(while not study for my differential equations midterm tomorrow/today(its tomorrow already!) There are also some pretty difficult ones up towards the top left hand corner, before the lava starts. (having Prestotolin helps quite a lot)

From the stand point of new players, I think it might have a little bit too steep of a learning curve though. (I got a one of my roomies to play it, and he was doing terribly. Continuing to play, but failing)

Also, unofficial bug report to myself: the summons to match the tiles currently, I forgot to change the summoning order.

Furthermore, I really like the effect of summoner's experience gain(along with the altered random summoning ai). The room situation changes quite a lot as time goes on! (or rather, they do up to the point that they reach around level 5, at which point the steady low experience gain stops being enough to level up in a reasonable time)

Hm, I somehow got an archer to my reserve army btw, before getting the army summon at all.

Pressing F without wizards crashes the game.

ESC needs to pause the game.

At the very INSTANT I entered the third screen of the game when I only went upwards, I died.

And the reason I found. Energy blast is overpowered. If you hit with the very center a creature, it takes HUGE damage. I was brazed by one gob mage using it, I took damage which wasn't even noticeable. But it hit me dead on and I lost almost half my HP. Third screen by going to the right.

A little eyestrain might fix it? Even like 5 pixels would help alot.

Man, I almost can't compete with goblins! This is fun!

Ulin screen has a TV? Wut?

Why aren't signs in BGPassive? I don't think they were in MR2.

Cleared screens should be blue if there is army.

Talking about a screen which had two farmers left.

Maybe cyan if you decided to disable that because then you wouldn't know if a screen is beaten?

After a while of idle, the game exited and I suddenly was in the main page of TMB.

When I loaded the game, it showed many screens as not cleared.

I still however had Ulin.

When switching mages with tab, the browser will jump to the next object.

For me, whenever I press tab, the game goes out of focus and the address bar lights up.

Change it to, something like E? Or could they be changable from the weapon selector accessible with Q?

That seems to be alot of problems. You can get the energy blast on the first screen??? Man, I have to look around.

Nah, if a player played the first three games, it should be a cake.

It was fun and a little mazey.

That said, it needs testing and balancing, especially the early goblin mage screens, some of the screens need less spawns, several undead screens were too hard, the tight space killed you sometimes, but that's not a problem really as long as you can get to the other side some other way, ninja stars are hard to see against the bluish green BG of the magical forest, the challenge in the wizard and spell screen was huge, but overall: It needs to be easier and more balanced. Or at least, there should be some easier areas and it get harder towards the end.

But that amount of mages in the beginning was too much for even me. I had to retry since I was so surprised! Plus, considering some go into the fight with only punch. Atleast the 3x3 or 4-reachable-screens(like a diagonal line, 2*(4+3+2+1)) area from beginning should be much easier. Ulin should be two or three screens further away.

And from BGactive, there should be less parts where you have arrows and they stop even if there's no obstacle in that part of the screen. So that the walls line up in adjacent screens, you know.

Oh, and I encountered a bug where I was able to walk through walls. I did it somehow by moving from a diagonally adjacent screen so that I went inside a wall after it crossed that one other screen I have to pass. Anyway, it happened so fast I didn't really see it, sorry.

I know about a lot of those problems. Some others, I think were there before hand.
I think that as farmers are not actually in your army, they should not get a blue tile? The rest of the map thing is that the extra data is not pert of the save data, thus it reinitialises the minimap. I don't know why you suddenly jump a couple screens, its happened to me twice, but I haven't found the cause, unless you were saying that its by walking through walls?

The getting an archer into your reserve army without needing army summon was your idea in the first place! I think... it was something along those lines... I'll have to go roadmap/be done.

Yeah, I loved the automatic unsummoning, but it did confuse me, since I didn't have a mean of summoning/unsummoning them ;P

IT happened by going diagonally to down and right from the screen diagonally adjacent to the Ulin screen. Neither the upper of leftward screen had arrows going into the Ulin screen instantly from the corner because of the goblin wall. Somehow I went into that screen from a point there were no arrows, and thus got inside the goblin wall. I was able to move freely within the walls and after exiting the room the effect ended. Wasn't able to replicate. Sad that I didn't get a screenshot=/

Which reminded me of another screenshot I forgot to post here, lol.

I made a rectangle around the problems. First being the mini map, and another being an energy blast sprite 'stuck' after I cleared the screen. It was there even after leaving the screen. No movement of it whatsoever.

I definitely know about that one; I've been seeing that one /trying to fix it for ages. I think it happens in mr3 as well. (and by trying to fix it, I really mean that I've seen it several times, know roughly what the problem might be, but haven't gotten around to actually fixing it)

I'll do some updating on the weekend.

Ok, thanks!

Yeah, this was my first playing of MR4 for months even. Well, I just spotted the obvious. The wall glitch was quite cool though=D

Cool glad the ftp is working out (lol to using the cli client - I have used it for testing connections)

I can answer one of megaman4ever comments - the ESC key cannot be used on the exe version, F1 cannot be used inside director, F2 is the first key that works across all three environments. I vote we keep that as the new standard.

I still sometimes hit ESC instead of F2 and quit the game on the exe version. If I have to use one key on exe and another on shockwave I'll go spare!

Instead we should change the older games to F2.

Selecting a map is certainly something I have planned, my first thought was to build it into the game engine itself, but better would be to have the map editor online, save maps to the db, select them from a list, rate them, comment on them etc etc.

How possible is that without using the file xtras?

Check out the MR4 page

http://themetalbox.com/index.php?page=merlin_4

I hope that's ok, I'll adjust the alpha warnings etc later.

If you look in your ftp folder, you'll see a folder called mr4_demo and in there a file called mr4_demo.dcr

This is just your dcr file renamed. So if you want a new version to appear on the mr4 page just replace that file. Of course you are welcome to also continue to use templates if you want to get some feedback on something but don't want it to be the next 'release'.

I'm thinking of ways that you could 'release' a version this way, maybe with special text files with release notes in them or something. I want to make it as little hassle for you as possible.

Very, very good work!

Oh it's easy.

We just send through the number of the map we want to play through the url. (say 7 for example)

The php page that the game is displayed on puts the map number into one of sw variables eg. sw3=7

The game reads in this variable and sends a getNetText request to a special php page on the site called something like getMap.php. To the website it's the same as a browser doing http://themetalbox.com/getMap.php?map=7

The page retrieves the map from the DB and sends it back. (if you put that url into your browser you would just see the map text, same as if you opened a text file)

The game receives the map and saves it into a relevant cast member. Then starts the game 'proper'.

Of course, we would have to handle the case where the game can't load the map, or can't make sense of it, but that's the main thrust of it.

The good news is that the game can do getNetText from Director as well, so we don't have to build it as shockwave to test all of it.

I was looking at the copyright link at the bottom of the title screen. It's wrong to say I own the copyright to everything in the game.

I consider that we all own the copyright to our bits, but we give each other licence to use those bits so long we all make our changes public.

Hmm, have to give that some thought as well.

Ok I'm off to bed.

Cool! I'm thinking of generally having two shockwave versions up when I update; currently, the map is quite large, and some people, such as myself, might want to keep their save data going until they beat the version. I'd like to just be replacing the older of the two each week.

Hmm. I can see another problem in megaman4ever's screen-shot; ulin's experience stars overlap with the map(aka, are not bound within the black outline)

I suppose I should write up some good cut scenes for the intros and extros too...
I've got a main() file together now that lets me run the game in shockwave, if you'd like it; its just an altered mr3 one.

Also, megaman4ever: the signs block certain entrances as the areas they lead are empty, and I don't want people running around through the empty screens. There is, like, a spell there, but I only want it accessible after completing the surrounding screens.

Wow. I just can to the coolest bug I have ever seen, and I'm pretty sure its nothing of my own doing at that!

I just loaded it, and after saying the "initializing map" bit, it forgot to start showing the screen, and I slowly refreshed the image by shooting energy blasts around the room!!!
So cool. It actually might be my fault, I did add something to the room initialization code...
It might also be that I used some wrong settings in the shockwave export.

cool, er, I'm not sure what you mean by a main() file. But I'll take a look at it if you'd like me to.

Having two versions sounds like a good idea. Especially if you're updating every week. Every week? cool!

When you're changing it, make sure to increase the version number for the save game. This will prevent old save games from working.

Hmmm. Something just occured to me, if you swap the mr4_demo.dcr for a newer version called the same thing, the player's browser might load the old version from the cache. Well I have a simple way around it, it just requires a bit of code from me and it would also solve the problem of people wanting to play old versions...

I'll get on to that next chance I get.

Just a few weird signs.

Caves of Dourning- Dourning is a word right?
Swamp of Dtup (I forgot the name of the map)
This one is in the screenshot. West Copse.
Is this for the Hobbes' achievement?

The Copse was in MR2 already.


Does it really matter? There are towns and cities with very very weird names, as you should know.

There was caves of Mourning in MR3 and caves of Doom. I'd say someone has done a cut and shut on the two signs.

Swamp of Despair was in MR3, I can't think where the tup part came from.

A copse is a small group of trees often in a depression in otherwise roughly flat and clear area of land.

I did lots of looking to find combinations of signs that fit together. I might need to write some up for the next map, but that's discussion for another suggestion.

Maybe it is the goaz problem all over again?

I think it's quite funny.

First things first(for this weekend): time do solve some bugs!

Guess What!?
I'm done for the week:
The mr4 page now has an updated, more stable demo
It can also be found here: This is the place!

For updating the files for mrOpen, I think I'll change them every second week?(and/or by request)

Sweet!

Next week:
-either work on wizard summoning, or the gmg
-team override

team override will cause all teams that hate aldevar to only attack aldevar(and its friends)
I think I know exactly what to do. I'll put it in a block, like the music and magical limit.

Ninja edit: It seems that your login timed out.

Yay!

I don't mind biweekly updates. I don't get that much time to fiddle with each version anyway.

I love when Note says what he will do next.

Kudos to anyone who can beat this.

(Its uploading now)

Also, I'm gonna start a new thread, So I can have some permalinks to my two sets of updates and the mrOpen dl.

I can't beat it. It doesn't even load. I get the shockwave logo but it won't load at all.

hmmm.... I'll take a look at it when I get homewards.

That is why he said "kudos for who can win" because it is impossible. :)
Anyways, same problem. :(