Enjoy Demon:

ok guys...we have officially entered the competition...registration was sent yesterday...

we've finished the titlescreen...gfx were designed with Polka (thx Wolf)
dtm.ryan-da-bass-man.com/titlescreen.jpg

But we'll still have to develop our own tile-editor because we need more freedom than polka offers (at this moment) and we need to be able to do pattern-animations etc...

We'll also set-up a site which will show the progress of the project so you can ALL follow it...

greetzzzz !

Don't worry RyJuZo, I am reading on this forum for a while now and noticed that it's always the same few people who seem to have a masters degree in killing motivation... But I also know there are many people like myself who read and don't feel like mixing in the discussion, but that do feel appreciation for what many people around here are doing.

Anyway I am one of the people who will like reading about your project once in a while.

P.S. To all the people claiming that it's bad to tell about the intentions (like the Satisfaction = Quality - Expectatives remark for instance). Let me tell you, the Satisfaction of the programmer lies partially in sharing his/her project ideas and progress with interested people. If you thought the program was being made to Satisfy "you" then you are really seeing things wrong, it's being made to satisfy the programmer ... or is the MSX not a hobby computer anymore?

about pattern-animations, if you need some processing using the vdpenc

(see e.g. http://ragozini.googlepages.com/vdpenc2bis and http://ragozini.googlepages.com/skeleton.rar )

I could do the encoding for you.

My tools are in matlab, so if you do not have it, the best thing is that you give me the animation (any format is fine,
from animated gif to loose frames) and I give you back the tileset and the tiles of the frames.

All I need to know is how many tiles you reserve in total to encode the sequence of frames (from 1 to 256 in each screen 2 bank)

multi: I totally agree with you that from the programmers' point of view it is important to share the motivation, ideas and evolution of each project. The satisfaction equation is to consider the potential customers' point of view.

RyJuZo: congratulations for joining officially the contest. I hope that the MSXdev'08 status page will be updated soon.

Regarding the title screen, all I can say is that it has a totally different style when compared with Knightmare, Maze of Galious and Shalom. No Konami feeling at all. Making an MSX title screen is not as easy as using fancy already made true type fonts.

By the way, the name appears some blur, is it a problem with the JPG encoding or do you pretend to add some antialiasing?

Well, that kind of antialiasing can be done with sprites, but it is quite tricky try to respect the 4 sprites on one line limit...
Other tricks would imply flickering, (see dvick 105 colors demo), that anyway can be an acceptable solution for static titles.

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ok guys...we have officially entered the competition...registration was sent yesterday... we've finished the titlescreen...gfx were designed with Polka (thx Wolf) dtm.ryan-da-bass-man.com/titlescreen.jpg But we'll still have to develop our own tile-editor because we need more freedom than polka offers (at this moment) and we need to be able to do pattern-animations etc... We'll also set-up a site which will show the progress of the project so you can ALL follow it... greetzzzz !

Good work, man!
And please keep up, do not pay attention to some people that express evaluation on your work or ideas before there is nothing to evaluate.

About the beauty of the title screen some genius of tile pattern modes should remember the huge limitations of the msx1 vdp about color usage, before saying anything. I personally prefer a clean and simple title screen instead of a dirty manipulated screen (using sprites for example), in order to give what the msx1 is not able to give normally.

Konami used sprites in several screen titles to include colour richness and animations. Anyway, I would say that sprites are somewhat a normal thing in MSX1 worlds, don't you think so?

I like the idea of a Knightmare sequel that recovers the platform genre, but it if tries to be a faithful game to the series, it should try to follow the saga guidelines and the Konami style. If not, it would be something else, but would lack of the proper atmosphere, despite being an excellent game. I hope that no one would missunderstood my comments and remarks. All that I say is: caution, you're trying to continue one of the most successful MSX sagas ever. Therefore, design should be done carefully and it has to be finished before coding a single line of the game. That's a good practice, isn't it?

*ANY* MSX1 game will be welcome, let me make that clear, and I am looking forward to see this entry finished.

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Konami used sprites in several screen titles to include colour richness and animations. Anyway, I would say that sprites are somewhat a normal thing in MSX1 worlds, don't you think so? I like the idea of a Knightmare sequel that recovers the platform genre, but it if tries to be a faithful game to the series, it should try to follow the saga guidelines and the Konami style. If not, it would be something else, but would lack of the proper atmosphere, despite being an excellent game. I hope that no one would missunderstood my comments and remarks. All that I say is: caution, you're trying to continue one of the most successful MSX sagas ever. Therefore, design should be done carefully and it has to be finished before coding a single line of the game. That's a good practice, isn't it? *ANY* MSX1 game will be welcome, let me make that clear, and I am looking forward to see this entry finished.

Yes we understand completely that we are trying to fill some very BIG shoes... but this is not something we JUST decided to do. We've been busy thinking this game through starting 8 months ago. That's also when we started to build the various tools I mentioned. Same for the game-engine.
We will use EVERY trick in the book to make this game as beautiful as possible...we're talking about overhead-bridges with streaming-water (pattern-animation) with beautiful waterfalls here ....and Popolon walks under it (yes sprites moving under pattern-char)... just an example what the engine already can do !! Ofcourse it's a trick but...nevertheless a beautiful one...
Ohh how I love programming for the MSX...it's so much fun !!

I hope you all will have as much fun playing the game as we have creating it when it's done !!

greetzzz

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about pattern-animations, if you need some processing using the vdpenc (see e.g. http://ragozini.googlepages.com/vdpenc2bis and http://ragozini.googlepages.com/skeleton.rar ) I could do the encoding for you. My tools are in matlab, so if you do not have it, the best thing is that you give me the animation (any format is fine, from animated gif to loose frames) and I give you back the tileset and the tiles of the frames. All I need to know is how many tiles you reserve in total to encode the sequence of frames (from 1 to 256 in each screen 2 bank)

thx man...we will certainly give YOU a call...ehhh ...mail...
you just saved us some more time...

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Ohh how I love programming for the MSX...it's so much fun !!

And that's what it's all about!

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Hey RyJuZo, what do you think about adding your new debugger features to the mainstream emulator?

I'll definitely do it for sure...but for now I need to concentrate on finishing the game...
I only have so much time available (next to my day time job)...

But it's a promise...

greetz...

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multi: I totally agree with you that from the programmers' point of view it is important to share the motivation, ideas and evolution of each project. The satisfaction equation is to consider the potential customers' point of view. RyJuZo: congratulations for joining officially the contest. I hope that the MSXdev'08 status page will be updated soon. Regarding the title screen, all I can say is that it has a totally different style when compared with Knightmare, Maze of Galious and Shalom. No Konami feeling at all. Making an MSX title screen is not as easy as using fancy already made true type fonts. By the way, the name appears some blur, is it a problem with the JPG encoding or do you pretend to add some antialiasing?

yep anti-aliasing with a dark red...

I think we did a pretty good job to give 't the *feeling* of the original KNIGHTMARE...apart from ours not being in Japanese
All ours is missing is the text KONAMI ...but that's just my opinion...

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I'll definitely do it for sure...but for now I need to concentrate on finishing the game... I only have so much time available (next to my day time job)... But it's a promise...

Sounds great. Just let me know when you're ready to do it !

@RyJuZo, my alternative mail is ragozini_remove_this_at_fastwebmail.it
Glad to support you.


PS
if you mail me post me too, you never know with my email