Another update

I'm almost done with Wall Market. Like, completely. I've rid the dependency on the power packs and I'm ready to release the code, but there's some silly nagging display thing that's preventing me from being happy with it. I just got a new laptop that runs Windows 10 and that makes the controls look a little weird. Most of them are the same color, but while some are white like the system style dictates, some are the classic Win 95 themed grey color. I'm not sure how this happened.

So now I'm, what, nearly a YEAR behind. :(

Let me tell ya what's been happening that's prevented me from doing further work on this. First of all, I've been working on the 60fps project and gotten a lot of good details for it. That's taken most of my free time that I would have devoted to coding for the next and final WM update or continuing on PrCMDI. I managed to slow the effects to make them not play at 4x speed, but they're still essentially in their 15fps glory. That caused the summons to go all wacky, however. I tracked that down and fixed part of it only to realize that the summons are drawn as models and get redrawn per frame they are told. I still haven't isolated where that drawing comes into play so they tend to disappear. Also, I've got a slew of animation script "fixes" to make some other effects be in the same 15fps mock-up. Unfortunately, the list isn't complete so I don't know how many I still have left to alter. Now, for the main problem I've been having. Last May I got a new HDD for my laptop (which is what I do all this programming and reversing on in case you didn't know). I went from the 650GB that HP packaged with the machine I have to a 1TB I bought from Best Buy. Pretty slick I thought. Well, only sort of. I had to reinstall my OS and all the drivers (of course) and all my programs. When that happened, my video card decided to start retiring. At first it seemed like a driver issue, but replacing the original HDD gave the same errors I was getting before. Well that can't be a software issue then, eh? Over the next several months it just got worse and worse at deciding it didn't want to work. So I finally got a replacement System Board for Christmas (a weird thing on my list to be sure) and lo and behold IT has the same problem! I convinced the people that it was purchased from that I do know what I'm doing with it and asked for a replacement. I'm waiting on it to get to them now and they'll ship me a new one. I'm HOPING that this new board will solve the problem and I'll be able to actually USE my laptop.
ADDENDUM: YAY! I finally got a replacement for the faulty System Board that works! I've been dying to re-play Dead Space 2 and finally can! :D

Sourceforge page

Just created a sourceforge page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/proudclod/

PrC is finished.

I'm done with this hanging over my head. The original PrC is finished and I'm putting it to pasture. You'll note the new links over to the left there. It's no longer an alpha build and the source is right below it. I'm also not storing it at GameFront anymore. They've changed their policies on file storage and it's not as "safe" as mediafire. In any case, the only change is the item drops/steals now work the way they should. There are probably some other things I should do to it, but it works with most of what it does. The AI editing may not be perfect, but that's what the source is for. It never really worked the way I wanted and I've probably been doing it wrong all along. Oh well, PrCMDI will come along eventually to realize my dream so put up with this for now. :) If you don't want to put up with this, then rebuild it! :D On a completely unrelated note, WM just had a birthday/release-day) so I did too. My outstandingly awesome wife got me a present that I really wanted, but didn't want anyone to actually buy for me. :) Did I mention she's awesome? 'Cause she is. OK, she got me the Wii U Wind Waker bundle AND three games! Yeah, awesome!! :) She may have gotten it to shut me up about it though.

I AM still alive

I'm trying to put the final touches on WM and put it out to pasture. Someone a while back suggested that I show previews of the growth curves as represented with HP, MP, stat, and Exp gains. I was exploring that option yesterday when I came to a realization: I wrote HORRIBLE code to handle that. The entire time I was writing WM it was with the assumption that I was controlling everything from the main form and all code should reside there. This has been proven to be a terrible practice for legacy code handling and it just became a God Class. I have proven the folly in God Classes with what I'm now trying to do and, now to make a long story short, will have to completely re-write the whole stat indicator thing. This may mean it takes a LONG time to do as I am increasing losing time to devote to either WM or PrCMDI. It will get done one day. After that, it's xml-based labels and values and I'm done with it. I'll release it with the source and someone else can have a go at it if they want.

Restore Type revisit

Remember way back when I wrote on the Restore Type and not really know what it does. Well, I know what it does now. I can't believe that I hadn't noticed this before. I'm a bit dumb-founded that no one clued me in to this or that I just never saw it or whatever. It determines a small window that comes up in battle that shows HP, MP, or Status of the player characters.
So get this, try to use a Potion in battle and the item menu is so large you can't see your characters' HP. So a small window comes up indicating current & max HP. This is determined by the Restore Type value. The Ether will bring up a similar window with MP and most status curing actions (eg. Hyper) will bring up a window that will cycle statuses that the characters have.

Except now that I know what it is, I don't know what to call it. "Status window"? "Party Detail window"? "Affecting Type Window"? It's just a little vague on what I should call it. I'd like it to be short and sweet to fit as a label in WM & PrC. Anyone have a better suggestion?

EDIT: I'm calling it "Party Condition Sub-menu" or just "Condition Sub-menu". I think that's descriptive enough.

Comments

So I'm apparently getting spammed in the comments sections. Don't think too much of it. I'll mark them as spam when I see them and they'll get deleted. I actually did make a little progress on PrC the other day. I have a working method of assigning actions, animations, and cameras to an enemy. What I REALLY want is a way to make a preview of that for the user. I can display the individual pieces of the models with textures on them, but the animation still doesn't make any sense to me. That and camera scripts aren't wholly understood so I couldn't guarantee that any preview of that would be correct. This would also mean loading up more files in memory. Not a difficult feat, but time consuming. I also thought about adding in action effects, but they are grouped in the exe rather than the archive so that's probably out. It'll be slow going from here on out. I'm still doing bits and pieces of things to it so this project will be alive until I'm done or dead.