Added Kisume (also known as “bucket loli”) to create.swf, along with new eyes and a new mouth. Here’s the updates made by Thefre this week:
-Fixed scaling problem with mutant clones.
-Added the ability to take screenshots with the S key.
-Added the ability to remove arms and shoes.
-Comic Panel and various danmaku objects added.
-Clicking on nothing will now untarget and close menus.
-Manipulator tool can be brought up by pressing M. This tool can manipulate toys as well as everything else.
-Fixed Mysterious Gap so that you can’t target something else while something is falling into it.
-Cluttered stages won’t cause slow downs during pong game anymore.
-Added power up sound at 5.00 power.
Screenshots? This is epic.
Oh, the “Screenshot” option isn’t like… saving a screenshot of what you have on the screen. It’s just making a copy of it and placing it on the stage, so it can be resized. Saving screenshots will still have to be done the old way, with print-screen.
A shout-out to Thefre: WHY ARE YOU SO AWESOME?!
I need to re-learn create.swf. Again. It will be a labor of love~
Thats what I meant KirbyM, it’s still awesome.
No comic update this week from me, since the features I implemented were mostly fixes and stuff to set up for what is to come next week.
Screenshots are basically a beta function at the moment, I plan to do a lot more with them. Same goes for manipulator tool. So, yes, another week or so of create.swf time before I go fix more pong stuff. I may even rework the pong engine, since the current one seems to have some strange bugs that I can’t seem to figure out.
Oh, and I never got to implement clusters or mess with the help file. This may come this week as well. Hopefully I’ll get a lot more done this week than last week.
I was actually expecting Parsee, but Kisume is cool!
I think it’d be interesting to also be able to remove the body. That way, we could create Yukkuris*! Or possibly remove the head too! Ooh, creepy…
Are you not supposed to flip the screenshots around? I tried doing it and it disappeared.
Awesome update, keep it going!
*Yukkuris are those Touhou heads that say “Take it easy!” all the time.
I wanna rotate objects :(
The screenshot’s pivot point is at it’s very top left, you can see this if you use the manipulator tool. It means if you flip it just where it is, it’ll flip off the screen where you wouldn’t see it. I’ll be working on getting that fixed this week.
asiaclonk:
You hold ctrl, then click on the object.
Thefre:
Thanks.
i can’t put reimu behind the counter =S
Needs hanging rope so we can have Alice try to kill herself again.
Because suicide is funny, right?
@Immac: Putting Reimu behind the counter is a matter of saying “Send to Front” and such to either Reimu or the counter object..
@Thefre: Hmm… the flip of the character is reset if you put it in the clone capsule and tinker too much. Ah well, with F as a shortcut, this isn’t a big issue anymore.
Taking screenshots and making them objects is an awesome awesome idea~ This combines very nicely with the comic panel and TV objects.
I see individual bullets are now all there. I now await the recolouring feature for the long-term and the “danmaku cluster” feature in the short-term. Oh and the “cloning and mass-deleting objects” stuff.
@Immac: There’s a MikoMart Counter in the objects menu. In the screenshot, I basically just placed the counter object over the counter in the MikoMart background and put Reimu in the layer under it.
@Psieye: You can now mass delete/shrink various types of stuff using the stage options in the main menu (A new feature I guess we forgot to mention).
Moar awesome! I just might be ready to produce my first create.swf comic now … :D
wow…Kisume and that things with points! and orbs!…how funny is turn this!
is good,for example,form your own spellcard patterns…
Ahhhhh, mass-deletion by type~ Excellence~~~
Oh, some point you’ll need to update Help Me Eirin – at least, write the new keyboard shortcuts from this and last week. Everything else people can figure out eventually from messing around but keyboard shortcuts are harder to intuitively stumble across.
SO. MUCH. CREATE SWF…
We need all the dolls so I can make a spoof of Marisa Stole The Precious Thing in create.swf. :P
Here’s some suggestions, though …
– Being able to manually set the scale of objects and screenshots and whatnot. And rename them, too. A general “properties” menu, I guess.
– A “duplicate object” function (separate from the danmaku system), say if you wanted to have Sakuya throwing a bunch of knives in the same direction, or an army of boxing-Chens, or whatever.
– Once the “danmaku” system is added, will flipping danmaku them they could “point” both inward and outward be an option? By setting the radius as a negative number, perhaps? (You know, now that I’ve typed this out, it seems a lot more obvious than the others …)
– Some more “smiles with closed mouth” mouths. Maybe specifically a “JUST AS PLANNED!” expression … :3
Oh right, I forgot — here’s some SFX from Portal if you want to include ’em for Yukari’s gaps in Pong … ;3
How do you make the font bigger?
@Setsi: Holding shift and dragging a bubble will make both bubble and text larger, this is currently the only way to make font bigger. Holding ctrl shift will scale just the bubble, but holding just shift will scale both.
Speaking of bubbles, there are new bubble types. Another new feature we forgot to mention. I’ve decided to work on a new comic for this week’s update after all, I’ll post it sometime later tonight.
@Psieye:
I had already tried that
@KirbyM:
Thnks
Setsi: The bubbles also have an options menu; you can set the scale of the bubble separately from that of “the whole thing.”
Now add a basic networked RPG battle system and a modified jirc window onto this and we can have DUELSSSSS
its time to d-d-d-duel
Er … I think I found a bug. I think if you have “no arms” set on a character in Pong, it … randomly cycles through the possible arms behind ’em. Try it on Kisume. :O
*changes to a body that doesn’t hide everything* … yeah, same with feet, too …
Oh yeah, now I remembered what else I wanted to suggest! Sort the individual parts by name, not just the Presets. MUCH easier to find stuff that way … n.n;
Now that I actually accomplished it, for some reason I want the win screen for Gap Pong to be “Congratulations! You pissed off Yukari!”
I noticed a bug about the mini-display next to the character name at the bottom. Sometimes, I see random parts on the character which aren’t supposed to be there.
For example, I loaded a preset Yukari and in the mini-display I see a Yukari with the Gundam box.
Weird O_o
Touhou Battle Network. Use spellcards in the right order to cast advanced magic! If someone is willing to run and maintain a socket server, I may be able to pull off such a feat, however, I don’t have my own socket server, nor the knowledge of how to set one up. Though you might be interested that, besides the create.swf, I am designing a touhou flash RPG, but that has little to do with what’s going on here.
Anyway, comic time. Again, as with all my create.swf comics, these were made with unedited screencaps from the create.swf(even more so now with the comic panel objects). The Hunt of Kisume!
If you’d like tips for making comics, feel free to ask. In general, I screencap all the similar scenes first, and then go back and make the scenes that involve a different location later (sort of like how you would shoot movies). This helps reduce time required to make strips as you’re not constantly rebuilding sets.
About the bugs:
I totally forgot about the pong. I’ll have to fix that. Also, about the random accessory thing on the preview. I’ve noticed it too, but I have no clue when it started or why it’s doing it. If you have any clues as to what might be the cause, let me know.
About sorting parts by name. Sorting them by name would completely screw over DNA sequences. Well, I’ll try and find a way around it. It probably won’t be pretty though.
Would it be possible to implement a save scene kind of feature? Maybe have something like the DNA that also prints x,y coordinates, rotation, scale and flip.
That “yukari thing” bullet in the objects menu is a kunai.
Oh, hmm, I totally forgot about the DNA sequences … Hmm. Could you make an array, and sort by name instead of number? Or is this nonsense and I’m just too used to PHP and MySQL?
Another idea: changing the color of danmaku bullets! n.n Oh, and making the various powerups (including Bombs, 1ups, graze-dots, stars) available as Items. :3
Another thought about the Pong’s game design, this time thinking with portals! And, uh … it’s kinda hard to deal with, nor is it clear whether you’d even want to. Short version is: the first level, since there’s no WAY you’re going to gain enough powerups at all, “teaches” you to bounce off Ran by focusing. Even when you don’t need to anymore, you still mentally think that focusing is how you bounce off shikigamis.
Long version: A game is a learning experience. Apart from anything else, you’re learning how to play the game. And there’s all kinds of ways the player can learn how to do things, and under what circumstances. They made much of this in the commentary tracks for Portal, in which they were really careful about this kind of thing.
As for how this relates to the Pong game … Basically, the best way to learn is by repetition. And the player’s going to be doing a lot of repeatedly hitting Shift or Z just in time for Ran to hit them, before they get any options, because in stage 1, that’s the only way to block her. (It is literally impossible to gain an Option without cheating before that point, because there’s no grazing in the first stage and you’d need to get Ran past Yukari 20 times, which is about 5 times as much health as Yukari actually has at that stage.)
The problem (if it is one) is that the game has so far taught you, “To block the ball, you need to focus”, and this will still be your instinct even when you don’t need to. In fact, it might even be somewhat detrimental, since if you “shove” the character away, they’ll be moving more or less straight, which is much easier for Yukari and Yuyuko to block. Even if you consciously know you don’t need to focus when you have paddles, you’re still going somewhat against your instincts when you don’t, and this can mess you up slightly. (On the plus side, excessive focusing doesn’t actually really mess you up.)
So … yeah, just some more thoughts I’ve had …
@A/L: Saving scenes is planned, but I won’t actually get started on it’s design until I have fully implemented screenshots and danmaku clusters.
@MarisaMuffin: You have databasing experience? Interested in helping me rig up an online scoreboard sometime in the future?
Anyway, about arrays, they’re already in arrays now, but I guess I have to put them in a different array. It seems kinda redundant, which is why I wanted to look into it some more before I decide on a method.
About changing danmaku colors, this is also planned, but won’t be in till far later stages of development. The bullets use gradients, which makes the color swap method I use for other things unusable. I’ll have to find a new way to work with this.
About the psychological effect of the pong game. I never touched on this topic in the dev notes because I didn’t think anyone would be interested, but I’ll explain a little bit about it now.
I’m an advocate of human adaptability, thus I believe that humans are born capable of adapting to variety of changes in their environment as long as they aren’t too extreme. I feel that many games today are too easy simply because they lack that need to adapt to new circumstances. So, in my game, as simple as pong is, I wanted to introduce a new element to face in each round so that you would have to exercise that brain for each challenge and figure out a new way to conquer them.
There are many ways to win the game, so there isn’t one play style to rule them all. Some may find tapping focus really fast to be the winning strategy, while others will find this only to be distracting.
Though I haven’t seen any portal commentaries, I will agree that a game is a learning experience, and I felt that the most important thing I wanted my pong game to teach is the ability to shift your thinking to face new challenge. If you’ve made it to the final levels of the game, then you’ve accomplished this. Learning how to use paddles is just another challenge, though in a less threatening manner, than introducing knives, or chen, or youmu.
Of course, I didn’t want to force any radical changes in play style, which is why I’m planning on changing the 4 paddle formation. When I designed the game, I designed the final stage first, and then made earlier stages that lead up to it. This way, I can more accurately control when certain challenges are introduced, and how much time you would need to learn how to balance them. Throwing Youmu into the mix before you could get four paddle options would be nuts. Having yukari shoot billions of daggers while you’re still learning how to properly bounce balls would also be irritating.
In the end, I wanted each round to have a certain feeling of threat to it (Well, except for Chen’s introduction, that was more of a comic relief stage). Hm, there’s really been a lot of discussion about the pong aspect of create.swf, maybe I should make a thread about it on my (terribly unupdated) site.
I got an idea,KirbyM.
Have pets.
Like,dogs,cats,etc
Under the objects and such…
Did you make Iku’s dance pose yet?
KirbyM, please make China the default character… just like old times.
Actually I found the pong game quite in enjoyable. Yeah, it changed enough every round to keep me interested. And even Youmu, despite being unexpected, was easy to defect if you put some thought into it. Though I’m keep losing at where Yukari gets serious. Darn the large amount of dagger knives things she throws.
Ehh … I don’t have any actual databasing experience, beyond throwing together a painfully-basic CMS (I still haven’t gotten around to adding, er, half of the essential components thereof). n.n;
I mean, I could theoretically setup something painfully-basic for a scoreboard, I suppose … no idea how you’d be able to do it in Flash, though …
Ah, well, I can do most of the basics though with MS Access rather than MySQL (I think walfas is run on MySQL). Flash can’t interact with databases directly, so it’s method is really similar to that of html forms. It posts data to a php file, which then sends the data to the database, then it goes the other way around to send a response to the flash again. If I do eventually rig up some database functionality, I might go with the more familiar Access, since I don’t want to screw up the walfas database.
Next order of business. Expect more Meiling next update. She had her part in the origins of v3 as well. When I first pitched the idea to Kirby, I made a small demo where you could spawn bunches of meilings with random hats on. I named it Unlimited Meiling Works!
Some sound requests: Are there any clips of any of touhou girls saying anything? I’m not really interested in long dialogue or anything, just some notable 1-3 second phrases. Or maybe the patchcon voices. It’s not too important since I’m not even sure what I really plan to do with them yet, but can’t put a puzzle together without pieces.
Needs more Eientei backgrounds ._.
I still say it’d be great to be able to directly input scale and rotation … Oh, and that Chen needs to spin about four times as fast in Pong. :3
Also, you use color-swap for other things? Or did you mean not in create.swf? I don’t know anything about flash, so I’m probably being a ⑨ when I say “can’t you just change the colors of the gradient, like in Photoshop where gradients can be set to ‘foreground’ and ‘background’?”
I got the two sound files for the voices from PatchCon. Popie and Kyuh, it may have seemed like there were a lot more, but think the game just randomly changed the pitch and stuff to make it sound slightly different every time they played.
If you want them I’ll upload them to some site and post the download.
There are two instances of color swapping currently in the create.swf. One is for the menu buttons, when you hover over them and click them. The other is for the random color background. They both use actionscript based color changing, which is the only way of changing colors on run time. The only other option is to actually make a bunch of different graphics with different colors on them. Though this is easy, I really want to avoid doing it this way for various reasons:
-It bumps the filesize up a lot more than as based color swapping.
-It will clutter the object menu with a bunch of the same stuff in different colors unless I make a specific function for handling this.
-It’s a lot of work for something that will become obsolete once I do implement the color swap method.
Chen will behave slightly differently next time I update pong.
General properties menu is in the works, as well as an updated bubble menu.
@Ramus: That’d be great! Changing sound pitch seems to be one of those things not available in as2. I wish it were different. I’d have liked to create some sort of mario paint style music generator.
http://rapidshare.com/files/125936566/patchconsfx.zip.html
There you go. Popie and Kyuh.
So, anyone gonna do a live (m)irc chatroom?
C’mon, you know you want too :P
You mean, in create.swf, or the third or fourth significant touhou IRC channel that I’ve heard of?
*hangs around in BondageMaiden* :3
Random idea on the subject of gradients: What about a using a solid color, but with a gradient of *transparency*, overlaid over a solid white bit? Or, uh, do you already know how you’re going to do it and I’m just spouting nonsense? ^^;
There’s a gradient function I can use, I’m just not sure if that would be better than color transforming. I haven’t looked into both of these functions yet so I haven’t determined which is better.
A white overlay may work for some bullets, but not others like the suppository bullet which has an unusual gradient shape. It works the way I have it now because the gradient is the color part, but if I were to make it the other way around, it would end up having weird corner spots. Anyway, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do, it’s just going to take some time before I actually get around to doing it.
About adding IRC capabilities to create.swf. It’s possible, but I haven’t even looked into anything like this before, and I’ve never used IRC before. Thus, it’s not planned, and not likely to be so in any near future. I’m interested in it, but I just don’t have the time to do so at the moment.
More screenshot functionality and danmaku clusters are planned for this week’s release, but after that, I’m not too sure which I want to work on next, so how bout a little poll? Which if the following are you most interested in seeing implemented:
-Color Customization of character parts.
-Updated pong game.
-Customizable XML based interface.
Most anything else is either not mentioned because it’s already planned, implemented, or it requires one of these three to be implemented before it can be in. Let me know your vote.
I prefer part-customization or a Pong update: I’m not sure how much an XML-based interface would help, especially when most of the code is still currently in flash actionscript. It might invite a lot more bugs, despite the extra flexibility.
(Then again, I haven’t used Create.swf for making things as much, so I haven’t experienced much annoyance at that. It does seem like finding specific presets could be annoying, in particular.)
A Lunar city would be nice ;)
Hmm … what would color-customization be like? I mean … I suppose every single shoe-possibility is one. Unless you wanted to make eyes bright red instead of black … Another feature I’m curious about is posing the characters’ arms, posing the head separately from the rest of the body …
As for actual create.swf content (as opposed to “moar featurez”) … More backgrounds, like “Outside Yukari’s house” from the Yuka flash! More SDM stuff, too, such as an “outside that one” thing.
Poll answer:
Colour customisation of character parts and bullets. I don’t care if you re-draw the bullets as a flat-looking single colour shape if that’s what it takes to achieve it.
Snapping objects to other objects or characters to form a ‘group entity’ that moves/resizes/rotates together would also be neat, but is lower priority.
Hmm, bug: when you delete an object while the object’s “edit” menu is open, the edit menu doesn’t disappear until you click on something else.
… Huh, another bug: when you hit “randomize”, everything with the same name as the character you’re randomizing gets randomized. Including characters in a Cloning Capsule or a Fusion Lab capsule (but they aren’t visibly changed until you release them from the capsule) …
I’d prefer a pong update myself.
@MarisaMuffin: Both bugs mentioned will be fixed next update. Rather than randomizing everything with the same name, it simply randomized everything, because I accidentally gave the function the same name as the stage>randomize all function.
As for the color customization for individual parts. I’ll make a small demo sometime this week, but it basically allows you to change Main/Secondary colors on each part to whatever you want.
Stage>Scramble no longer works. Or rather, I guess it was in the middle of being worked on so it would act separately on characters, objects, etc
Kay. I’m guessing that with, say, Ran’s body, you’d be able to change the color of the blue flap-thing as well as the main white outfit?
Third bug … for some reason, when I load the Pong game, the background seems shifted slightly to the left, as seen here and here (note the border of Background and Whitespace with respect to the “settings” in Google Toolbar); when I have the window maximized, Yukar’s name is even off the edge of the background.
Oh, and a minor suggestion: being able to leave pause in Pong by hitting the spacebar, or Z or X …
Create.swf update! Some changes include:
-Fixed stage scramble function, though it still only affects just characters.
-Fixed the problem with menus not closing when things are deleted.
-Fixed the randomize option for individual characters.
-Added options menu for objects and screenshots, you can now numerically set their x/y location, scale, and rotation. This can be accessed by either double clicking them or going to their menu.
-Meiling is now the default character, but wait! There’s more! If you go to the options on main menu, you can specify which character you want to be the default character. Just type their name in as it appears in the preset list.
Alternatively, you can put in some random name, and it’ll spawn a new randomized character with that name.
Even more alternatively, if you add DNA- to the beginning of a DNA string and put that as the default character, you can have the character you made appear every time you open the create.swf. For example:
DNA-3.2:Marauder:76:40:32:13:14:2:4:0:70:50:14
I just noticed the BG shift error earlier, it’s more apparent on widescreens it seems. Hopefully it’ll be fixed by next update.
Yay!
Hmm … could you have an “auto-center” button on the Backgrounds page, which would change the X and Y values of the background? Rather than, uh, having to resize the window in order to center it? ^^;
Oh, btw, I finally made my own comic, including a customized face for … well, see for yourself!
Hello, new here.
Just a small bug I found, not sure if it has been said before, but I didn’t find any post containing it.
When you try to change the text (not the names) in the “Imageboard” background, you will trigger the normal keyboard shortcuts, which is kinda annoying.
Anyway, keep up the good work, KirbyM and Thefre!
Well, after a bit of clean up, I decided to make a create.swf section on my site where I can document changes and such. Here’s the link. You can post feature related comments there.
I don’t remember what else I was going to say. Too many things to do in a day.