Some questions about AOTB engine

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Yep, here is again...the most wanted thread of this section.
Well, let's go with the questions:

1)Will be possible have a special stand animation that is displayed when the character remain quiet for sometime?
2)Will be possible have an animated main screen?
3)The portrait of the characters are static in the select screen (like actual BOR) or it chance when you select a new character?

That's all for now.

1) Since there is no limit to the length of an animation, you can just incorporate this in the existing animation.
2) No.
3) I assume you mean "does it change". I didn't spend much time on the character selection code yet, but it should be easy enough to implement.

Yep, that's true. But I still like the idea of have both stand animations separates.
Also, with an option to set the time that the program must wait to show that animation.


hehehe...you assume right.

This is more a request than a question:

Had you think include an option to use a 640x480 resolution?

I'm planning do some mods with that resolution (Guilty Gears) so it will be really awesome if you decide to include it.

I'm going do 4 or 5 mods when AOTB engine be released.
Not at same time but eventually.

Nope. While resolution is just another variable in 3D games, 2D games tend to rely on a more or less fixed resolution. At least, AotB does. Ofcourse it's possible to program around that issue, but it would be pointless anyway. At such resolutions you'd have to make a pretty limp mod, or you'd quickly run out of memory (remember that double the resolution means four times the surface area).

Yeah, I know all that already.
I already have all the stuff for make the mod.
I hope you change your mind about it.

Anyway, I must wait until AOTB be released first.

Some more questions:

1)Will be possible switch between back/forward grabs like SOR? (I'm assuming there is a back grab)
2)Will be possible use shot weapons?

See ya.

1, 2: yes, yes.

Don't know if it was asked before the forum crashed, so please excuse me if it was asked before: Will the game support some kind of ingame-cutscenes, with text boxes and characters doing scripted animations?

Features like that are planned, however they have not yet been implemented.

Hello

I'd just like to ask a couple of questions, pleas forgive me if theve been asked before but theas are just some idears I think would be realy good to implement.

1) Will there be the ability to create multiple paths and multiple endings? Like in D&D arcaid. I think this feature would open up a hole new level for moders.

2) Will you be able to create alternet mishion objectives, sutch as finding a hostage (ala SOR3) or gathering all of a sertin item?

3) Will you be able to have a weapon carry on into other stages/not loos them? If the weapons worked like in OpenBOR you could use this to upgrade charecters. Like having a scroll that when piked up gives you a new move and then a level 2 scroll would have NewMove1 + NewMove2.

1) Yes (that has been asked before)
2) No
3) Not at this time, but I may add this later

Hello agen,

First of all, I think it's grate that you are adding in paths to the engen. Of the three things I was asking about it is what I ws most interested in.

Any way I was telling my frend about your project and he wonted to know why the resolution is only 320x240. It honestly never ocured to me before. However he seemes to think that, due to the curent technolagy avalable to most people, there shouldn't be any technical ishues stoping you from making the resolution biger.

But then there was what you said about the memory restrants. The only answer I could come up with was ether it's its nustalga, for the love of classic games, or maybe that it's for ports to a console. Admitadly I do't know mutch about programing in DOS so could you pleas give me some info?

Any way, I don't mind that it's small, I think the screens look grate and if people dismiss it becouse of a small screen res then I don't think thay diserve to play it. However it has peaked my curiosity.

Your writing makes me dizzy.


Using a DOS extender, a DOS program is able to use all the RAM available in your PC, with a maximum of 4 gigabytes. So this is not the problem.


But, as you know already, the game is supposed to be ported to several consoles, such as the Sega Dreamcast. A Dreamcast has 8 MB video RAM and 16 MB system RAM. The current low-res graphics are almost certainly too big to fit in the video RAM already, but with some clever programming it should be possible to swap graphics between video and system RAM, and perhaps even compress and decompress them on the fly.

However, the total combined memory would not suffice for graphics four times the current size.


In a game like Guilty Gear, only 2 (or maybe 4) characters are present at one time, whereas in Age of the Beast, there are many more. Therefore, Guilty Gear can use higher resolutions, whereas Age of the Beast is better off with lower ones.

You miss some points about Guilty Gear for Dreamcast, Roel.
Each player in Guilty Gear has over 1000 frames of animation.
In BOR any character has between 40 and 150 frames of animation.
If this is correct, you can easily have 5-6 characters in each level without memory problems.
Of course, the program need to free the memory in each level (with the exception of the hero characters selected) or the game runout of memory in the next level.

Anyway, I can't sure this is true because I dunno how it works exactly.

The main characters in AotB have about twice as many frames as the ones in BoR. Add to that the fact that there are now more heroes, and that they can carry weapons. Even though the memory is freed after each level, it still remains quite full. Also, the levels in AotB probably use more multilayers than Guilty Gear's.

more???wow.....this keep sounding better and better every day 

Sorry, my english skills arn't the best. Thanks for the info, I think my frend asumed that AotB is being developed for computer only.


Ok cool, that brings me to another question about the engen's features. Will there be suport for.... multi-stpite-paralexing (sorry don't know an official name). This is a gif I maid from one of the beta levels of SoR3 that uses this efect. The charecter sprites don't show up becouse the level was unfinished.



What it alows is for the background to have both depth and objects that have hight. You can see the back ground is maid up of diferant levels of sprites that move at diferant rates. The bushes and clouds give the impreshion of depth while the trees, signs and other stuff give it some atmosfear.

That dusn't mean I think the other paralexing method should be scraped though. I just thought it would be a cool thing to add.


Duse this mean that the weapons are "cliped" on. So if you charecter has sword attacks thay are all the same animation but the weapon graphic is drawn over the charecter. Like on the paperdoll in Dagerfall?

That effect is called "Scroll Parallax".
And yes, you can create that kind of effect in the AOTB engine because AOTB supports as many layers as you want.
There is one thing, all the layers must share the same palete of 256 colors.

I don't see why not.



I wouldn't scrap it if a thousand Disthrons told me to.



No. That would be lame. A weapon is implemented as an item that invokes a character to change into another one.