Welcome to the Developers' Diary. Here, team members will frequently post updates on
what they are working on whether it be a new item or a whole new animation.
DLTC Developers' Diary
Monday, August 15th, 2005
Resumed work
The rumours about resumed work are true. But still,
don't expect anything and soon. Organizing work on this scale is quite
tough for a disorganized group like us. This isn't a simple NPC romance.
There are 5 joinable NPCs so far planned or done. More than 20 quests and about 2 chapters of story (the demo had one chapter).
With the absence of Max, it is quite a big task to do, as everyone of us has other things to do.
posted by avenger | 10869 Comments
Monday, October 11th, 2004
Progress
I've added myself to the DLTC team. And I made myself a Dev Diary account - dont tell Max!
Currently a log of bug-fixing is going on, the list of open bugs grows
smaller every day. We're also working on feedback suggestions based on
the Demo. Of course, we're expanding the game too, new areas, new quests
and so on.
What I'm doing...
I'm currently working on the final encounter for the
game. Without giving too much away, I think it's going to be pretty
impressive. Lots of alternative paths, a unique villain, multiple
endings, and tens of thousands of words of dialogue are all on the list.
posted by SimDing0 | 7965 Comments
Saturday, May 1st, 2004
Randomness
Despite the diary being relatively empty, I'm
actually doing stuff around here... Working on a rather important area
at the moment. Progress is slow in large part because we lack artists.
MaxG is busy with school or something, so the load falls on me. Anyway,
we decided to take a new approach to coding this monster. We FINALLY
have a coherent plot worked out, so we're making the ending first, then
extending the game at our will. This, should in theory, let us finish
the main stuff quickly and open up the world to modding... and if all
goes well, that would increase the game size dramatically.
Anyway, I just bought the third volume of the Kingpriest Trilogy today, so I guess I've gotta go read that.
posted by Max | 5420 Comments
Saturday, November 22nd, 2003
My Evening
I have been writing commoner dialog. Lots of commoner
dialog. I calculated that this should take me approximately 2/5 of a
year of constant work to complete, although I suspect it can be cut down
with a little thought.
Even so, anyone playing DLTC in the future had better TALK TO COMMONERS
and APPRECIATE THEIR AMAZING DIALOG else there will be SERIOUS TROUBLE.
:)
posted by SimDing0 | 1624 Comments
Sunday, October 19th, 2003
Demo is off and running...
You saw the news page. The night before release, I
was up until 3:15 bug-crunching and preparing the installer. Of course,
lethargic the next morning, I uploaded the demo in its entirety and
found out that the installer was nicely broken. Release delayed for two
hours while I fix it and reupload. So I'm uploading, yeah... 98%
finishes and my ISP cuts me off. Lousy pile of crap. We finally got a
working copy of the demo up the third time. Tested it, made sure it
didn't immediately make the end-user's computer explode, then went on a
media blitz.
Now that it's out, I'm a little anxious. A few bugs and minor issues,
but nothing major enough to put a hamper on the project. There will
probably be a small patch released for people who've already downloaded
the demo--the demo file itself will also be update so people won't have
to get both v100 and the update.
I'm going to wait a few more days before putting up any official
patches, but if you want some things that are readily available, check
the Tech Support forum.
posted by Max | 5777 Comments
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2003
An update...
As an update to yesterday's (or was it the day
before's?) post, I should add that the script actually didn't work at
all (although it was a successful random number generator), and Max
spent ages fixing it. Oh well.
posted by SimDing0 | 785 Comments
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2003
Sim did some work!
So yesterday I did a bit (a very little bit) of work
on removing the old summonning limit and implementing a new feature
which causes the limit to be based on total party intelligence and
wisdom.
This required some addition and comparison in scripts, something the IE
is not particularly good at. I felt safe in the knowledge that it
probably wouldn't work properly, largely because nothing I do ever works
properly.
I was, therefore, most surprised when the script I wrote worked first time!
Max went on to point out a fatal flaw in the entire system, but I don't
care about that. My script looked cool. Someone'll fix it at some point.
Maybe.
posted by SimDing0 | 4930 Comments
Monday, August 18th, 2003
Pogretry!
It's official... DLTC now includes poetry (or what
Max likes to call "pogretry", for reasons best left untouched). Suck on
that, Solaufein!
Preparing...
Right, so I gave myself a crash course on NSIS script
last night, stayed up until 3 a.m., and came up with the Glory of Istar
installer tonight. Finally, after all those inhouse betas, stuff can be
installed automatically. Thanks to Avenger's xppatcher, we can also
check for proper versions and patch the game's starting XP without any
hassle for the end user. And thanks to the developers of Tispack and
OggDec, I was able to add some hefty compression onto the largest files
in Glory of Istar. Whereas the demo download would be clocking in at 131
MB without the compression, it's now a healthy 89 MB with it, even if
it takes a minute or two longer to install on the hard drive. I expect
it to remain at this size, or possibly even get slightly smaller (there
are some excess files), for the demo. Note that testing is not over, and
won't be over until we're not finding any more bugs and feel that it is
ready to be released. We are, however, moving, as I'm sure our beta
testers might tell you.
On the topic of the demo, I'm not making any promises, but I've been
trying to make plans to host it on its own dedicated server (which I
would be paying a fairly hefty amount per month for). This would mean
that we wouldn't necessarily have to beg for other services to host it
and download speeds would be decent. Of course, this is assuming that
the entire world doesn't find out about DLTC... in which case I'd have
to spread the downloads out a bit more. As I said before, though,
there's no promises just yet.
posted by Max | 2946 Comments