Well, G, start coding!
(I see a challenge in this)

You're telling me?
You really might want to read last night's #msxdev logs. We had discussions about RPG's and speeding up MBWAVE. I'll mail 'em to you if you want.

haha, cool. sure mail the logs.. infact can't you put'm online somewhere?
neh, I was merely makin' a little joke (since you seem to be the most fanatic coder around here these days.. u know)
(yeah, you can actually mail me the logs.. if they're interesting)

Uhm, GuyveR800, I'd be interested in those logs.

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neh, I was merely makin' a little joke (since you seem to be the most fanatic coder around here these days.. u know)

Maybe, but I also have quite a lot of plans, and while an RPG engine is part of that, the extra work involved in actually designing such a game causes me to keep pushing back work on that.
Current plans are (in somewhat chronological order):
- finishing guru logic
- work on the new tniASM (rewriting it again for even more flexibility)
- develop MoonSound/MSX-MUSIC/MSX-AUDIO/PSG/SFG-05 music/sfx editor/player.
- work on GEM and my new emulator (exciting!)
- unspecced shoot'em-up and castlevania/metroid type games

I prolly forgot something...
Anyway, enough to get me through the coming years... Some stuff is Gfx9000, some stuff will be turboR or Z380, we'll see when the time comes...

The advantage of these days compared to the late-scene days in which, indeed, quite some initiatives to create cool large games (RPGs) failed is that we can now benefit from cross-development by using our PC to do level-editing, tile-designing etc. etc. etc. I never thought I'd say this, but Blitzbasic does come in handy here. (Of course there's always C or Qbasic too ). Bottomline is: not all parts of developing an RPG have to be done on MSX anymore. An Z80 ASM coder not having to worry about creating a level editor in ASM is quite an advantage, for instance.

Yep, TIME is always the biggest enemy for creative minds.. sigh.

my to-do list (which will prolly never happen);
- Finish the new upgraded kernel (new boot, new replayer functions)
- Oracle replayer (finally..gheh)
- Fubsy (hmmm, big maybe)
- eventually picking up Nosferatu again. Still bothers me we never finished it!

thaz about it. it's already to much cuz this is only MSX related....

You could even consider creating a GFX9000 RPG engine which has quite a lot of advantages

1 - Easier to code
2 - You don't have to pixel GFX on an MSX with 16 color limitations, but can create GFX with more colors, on PC. (Non-MSX scene Graphicians anyone?)

The downside is, of course, that not every MSX user owns a GFX9000, but as they are still available for an affordable price and multiple people are working on GFX9000 that should not be a big drawback. The 90s scene didn't botter much about little (or better: the wrong) people owning Music Modules, did they?

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2 - You don't have to pixel GFX on an MSX with 16 color limitations, but can create GFX with more colors, on PC. (Non-MSX scene Graphicians anyone?)

You can create 16-color MSX gfx on a PC as well (screen 5 and such)

But indeed, gfx-wise the engine should be open..

Damn - am I gonna say this - I would even like to help work on creating the graphics for a - serious - new game effort on MSX. Be it 16 or more colors. I remember I had fun drawing that christmas picture too, and that was done on PC too, so there is no problem working on PC. We created a lot of GBC games on PC too, and that has more graphical limitations.

I would however like to point out that it works better to create an engine first, and start doing graphics later (except general stuff like UI and sprites). Tile/level design works much better when the artists can implement and test it themselves.

So really, how serious are we ?

[edit]
If people will decide that supporting non-standard MSX2 hardware my first go would be a harddrive. Since - from an artist point of view - the limitations of video memory and the long loading times if you enter new areas always was the large bottleneck of creating larger and more detailed tilesets. For an RPG the surroundings are quite important, so the more detail you can put into it the better. I guess a harddrive would be handy if you want to do that, to prevent long loading times (since you will be loading more often than usual).

Or am I talking bulshit?

And erm...animating tiles, animating sprites, seperate battle scenes (DS6) or real time (Ys)? Oh man...the ideas!

I'd vote for CF .. they're less cumbersome than having that HD laying around with that noisy PSU..

It's however also interesting to notice that playing from a CD-rom (msx with some scsi CD player) could also be an option. In all cases I put a curse on DD disks





*cough* hum.. sometimes CF cards can crash *cough*

secret of mana, secret of mana!

As for CF/HD, they are exactly the same dude ^^;
And euh, HD's crash sometimes too.

Well before deciding what technology is required (CF/HD/GFX9000), shouldn't the specs of what the engine should provide be specified ? What's necessary and what's just "nice to have" ?

I mean you have to be reasonable also, who would want to spend YEARS coding an engine that can do pretty much anything if only a dozen persons or so can eventually see it because noone has the equipment to play it ?

SD Snatcher wasn't great because it had the best animation, multi-layer scrolling or see thru GFX, etc. It was cool for it's story line, the atmosfear. Same goes for Zelda. Simple gameplay, fun story line, great playability, it's all that matters.

And as a personal opinion, I'd rather see a new Zelda like in screen 5 that's fun to play and can be done in a reasonable amount of time than a huge mega RPG for GFX9000 with all special FX and that will see the daylight in 5 years or so (if it does).

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Well before deciding what technology is required (CF/HD/GFX9000), shouldn't the specs of what the engine should provide be specified ? What's necessary and what's just "nice to have" ?

True, but for the matter I am pointing out it really doesn't matter. The engine specs have little to do with: "are we going to limit use of graphics to prevent loading new graphical data every 5 screens or do we allow more tilesets to add detail, which means it can only be played without loading annoyance from a harddrive?"

And Wolf_ I think CD-Rom is rather slow for streaming too, although i have no clue how fast it is at all so I might be wrong

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I mean you have to be reasonable also, who would want to spend YEARS coding an engine that can do pretty much anything if only a dozen persons or so can eventually see it because noone has the equipment to play it ?

I have no problem making it for a normal MSX2 (screen 5) and support MoonSound and older soundchips. Although the latter might have technical implications for the replayer :?

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SD Snatcher wasn't great because it had the best animation, multi-layer scrolling or see thru GFX, etc. It was cool for it's story line, the atmosfear. Same goes for Zelda. Simple gameplay, fun story line, great playability, it's all that matters.

Oh absolutely, but that does not mean that improving on graphical detail is not interesting! Looking for the middle road here. Graphics wise I would choose Xak over SD-Snatcher since it had a lot of animation, changing character sprites depending on your equipment etc. I always liked that!

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And as a personal opinion, I'd rather see a new Zelda like in screen 5 that's fun to play and can be done in a reasonable amount of time than a huge mega RPG for GFX9000 with all special FX and that will see the daylight in 5 years or so (if it does).

well you are not going to design and finish an RPG within this year if you think that Creating graphics for GFX9000 will actually go faster than for Screen 5 mind you, the less limitations, the faster you can work. But as I said, looking for the middle road here!

I could probably reuse some tile map creating tools that we made for GBC/GBA...so that artists can just create a large map on PC consisting of 10 Screen 5 screens, the tool than calculates how many unique tiles there are, and creates tilemaps. Hmmm, could be interesting indeed

ok..

In terms of storage medium: you can choose between CD-rom (I guess), CF or HD. Since we can buy a CF reader these days easily, that one is not the bottleneck.

gfx..: msx2 is handy for emulators, and ppl with an MSX2 but without a gfx9000.
However, since the gfx9000 has a mode like screen5, but with a better palette, I'd say that any sc5 game can be 'played back' on a gfx9000 with slightly better colors ..

music: OPL4, a bit tricky to get these days, simply because sunrise requires at least 25 ppl who want one before a new serie will be made ..

So, all the 'new' hardware can still be bought these days.. therefore I'd say that hardware *except for perhaps a new opl4* is not the problem.

Anyway, indeed the gamedesign, artwork, story is very important. And it's actually the major condition why I would ever make a game anyway.