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Bugzilla + feature progress

 
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Chronoas




Joined: 18 Sep 2008
Posts: 37

PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 11:07 am    Post subject: Bugzilla + feature progress Reply with quote

Are you guys still using Bugzilla to track bugs/features? I had been using it to follow progress on the updates, but it doesn't seem to have been updated for a while. I wasn't able to even find a Callipygous tracking bug.

Was also wondering how close are we to having the 32767 experience limit be removed (alternately, the custom experience formulas finished)? Very much looking forward to it, and with the feature to view the formula already in the creator, it feels so tantalizing close!

Lastly, just wanted to say my thanks that the tag limit was increased. That was the other thing I was looking forward to greatly, and so glad that it finally happened. (Been considering abusing tags, menus, and textboxes to make dialogue trees, and between that and the other stuff for the game, I could see myself burning through 1000 tags eventually. :p)
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer




Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Posts: 2526
Location: Hamster Republic (Southern California Enclave)

PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 12:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Technically we are still using bugzilla, but I would really love to ditch it in favor of something else. Keeping bugzilla up-to-date with security patches is really a huge pain.

A better place to follow development progress would be to subsrcribe to the developer mailing list. In addition to bugzilla mail, you will also see subversion commit mail there too, as well as occasional design discussion.

We have been working kinda slowly in the past few months, mostly due to both TMC and I being busy with a lot of other things (including making our own games) but we have not given up on a Callipygous release sometime soon-ish

When you ask about the 32767 experience limit, are you talking about the limit on how much you can earn from a single enemy?

I am glad to hear you are getting good use out of more tags. Yay for tags! :)
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Chronoas




Joined: 18 Sep 2008
Posts: 37

PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 1:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah. I've always been a fan of the trope of a boss battle (if you're the appropriate level) giving you enough XP to level up. Always feels like a really nice reward after a tough boss battle. Unfortunately, it isn't really possible to do it beyond level 36 (even less if you're splitting the XP), since the amount to hit next level exceeds 32767 with the default formula. Considering I want to balance my RPG such that, by the time you reach the final boss, you should have a party of level 70-ish, you can see my problem.

I know it's POSSIBLE to give an experience reward with scripting after the fact, but it's kind of an ugly solution since you're not receiving an end-of-battle notification of leveling up nor what new abilities you may have learned. I've considered making additional invisible, untargetable enemies out to 8 that simply give additional reward, but it kind of screws up spawning and the like, and it still only gives me 65534 XP (32767*8/4 heroes), which would still only get me as far as level 39.

Thus, I've been eagerly awaiting the removal of the limit. Alternatively, custom experience formulas, which would allow me to change the formula so that you never need more than 32767 to hit next level. Alternatively, battle-scripting, such that I could likely have a script IN the battle that gives the XP and you get the appropriate reward screen. Of course, of those 3 options, I have an assumption of which will happen first. :p
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
Location: Matakana

PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 4:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Also, we decided to stop using tracking bugs for releases. And we almost always post plans for new features for the 'Plans' page, on the mailing list, or just don't post it anywhere publicly. Other people sometimes post feature requests on Bugzilla though; it's fine to do so. I'm also a bit lazy about filing bugs in Bugzilla.

Quote:
I know it's POSSIBLE to give an experience reward with scripting after the fact, but it's kind of an ugly solution since you're not receiving an end-of-battle notification of leveling up nor what new abilities you may have learned.


Actually, there is a fairly clean solution. 'Scripts:Custom experience to level formula' uses arcane tricks to let you customise the experience amount, and it works perfectly unless someone would level twice from a single level (according to either the old or new xp curves) in which case the levelup annoucements at the end of the battle will be wrong. So in your case it could be a problem.

However, you could use it as a stopgap until we actually make the formula customiseable, which happens to be one thing I'm hoping to get done for Callipygous. This is not a promise. No refunds or exchanges.

I'd definitely like to remove the 32767 limits on enemy stats but I don't think that's happening too soon.
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Chronoas




Joined: 18 Sep 2008
Posts: 37

PostPosted: Fri May 09, 2014 10:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Haha, no worries, I never expect promises when it comes to development. Just wanted to know if there was a chance of one of these coming soon.

Yeah, that was another solution I saw, but wasn't a fan of for the reason you mentioned. Leveling up multiple times, especially with how I want to do boss rewards, is a very possible occurrence.

Honestly though, it's no big deal for me right now; I still got a lot of core game elements (and a LOT of graphics) to finish before I become real concerned with the stat and level balancing. I just tend to plan things out ahead of time, and that's one of the hitches I ran into.


As an aside, in all the years I've used OHR, it always struck me as weird design that the default formula, from lvl 55 onward, requires a million XP for each level, but you can only give a maximum of 32767 from a single creature. For 4 characters (reasonable party size at level 55 and beyond), fighting a single creature of max XP, you'd have to kill roughly 1831 of that creature to go from 55 to 70. Talk about grindy RPGs! And I haven't even got anywhere to go from there for boss rewards! Ha ha ha!

Now, to be fair, if we're fighting 8 enemies (though, admittedly, a lot less common occurrence) with max XP rewards, it'll take a mere 228 battles for 15 levels, which is entirely tolerable. A mere 15 battles (roughly) per level. Still weird though, because I still got nowhere to go for boss battle rewards.

Also, this brings up another issue, in that the 'to next level' caps at 1000000 for the default formula. What this results in is that, if you want to make your game NOT a grindy chore around the lvl 55 period, you have to give a fairly decent XP reward for those levels of monsters. However, since XP reqs cease to scale with difficulty of monster beyond 55, it then becomes increasingly EASIER to grind levels beyond 55, because you can keep fighting the monsters you fought at level 55 for the same rewards, but you keep getting stronger (and not just a little, but increasingly so, thanks to the stat increase formula). Suddenly, the game has a steady difficulty, and then drops off at high levels cause you can easily grind weaker monsters for a while for the same rewards.

Alternatively, you could make the lvl 55 monsters give less XP and then progressively more for the higher-level monsters, but then you're going to need to kill a LOT of monsters at those mid-levels, and increasingly less at higher levels. Now the game has a weird level progression where it becomes slower and slower to level in the middle, and then faster again at higher levels where the highest rewards are.

Ultimately, you're either turning your difficulty curve or your level progression speed into this weird bell curve where it's toughest around level 50.

*cough* ...Okay, yes, I may be a little obsessively analytical about game design.

I recognize the 32767 XP limitation is from back when OHR was in DOS and you had tons of memory limitations (yay, integers!), but if you don't mind me asking, James/Bob, was there a reason for the unusual 1000000 cap on the XP formula? Was it a memory limitation, or just an attempt at keeping the 'to next level' from getting to ridiculous numbers, or something else?
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Bob the Hamster
OHRRPGCE Developer




Joined: 22 Feb 2003
Posts: 2526
Location: Hamster Republic (Southern California Enclave)

PostPosted: Sat May 10, 2014 11:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I developed the experience formula way back in... I guess it was 1999, I think? Back in the day when I was working by myself and in QuickBasic.

My thought process went like this:

1999 James wrote:
"In Final Fantasy 4 it takes more and more experience for each level, so I better do something similar... so I guess I'll take the amount of experience for the last elevl up, and multiply it by something and then add something? I vaguely remember polynomial curves from high school algebra, so maybe that will work...


So I pulled some numbers out of my ass, and changed them by guess and check with QB PRINT statements until I got something that looked plausible close to what I expected from an RPG. At no point did I ever actually measure the exact XP requirements of any final fantasy or dragon warrior, I just eyeballed it.

In QB's default text mode you can only fit 20-something prints on the screen vertically, so I wouldn't have really even looked at the XP requirement numbers above level 21 or 22

I could tell right away that i was going to need a 32-bit double-word for experience, but it never occurred to me that I might need that for Enemy experience too, and I was stingy with data, so that is where the 32767 limit came from.

Some time later (maybe a few months? I am not sure) It occured to me that I had to worry about the higher levels, and when I checked, I saw that the experience for the higher levels just got really crazy.

Again, I pulled a number out of my ass, and said okay, 1000000 will be the max! (That isn't "One Million", that is me pressing the "1" key, and then hammering the "0" key a few times without actually counting.)

Some time later (more than a year? I don't remember) somebody (I don't remember who) tried to make a game where it was possible to grind up to level 99, and they found it couldn't really be done, so they e-mailed me and complained.

Unfortunately by then the experience system was pretty well baked in, and I had forgotten how it worked, so I didn't fix it, and we have been suffering from my poor judgement ever since! :)
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Chronoas




Joined: 18 Sep 2008
Posts: 37

PostPosted: Sat May 10, 2014 12:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hahaha, that's pretty much what I imagined.

Well, I appreciate the work you guys do, and glad that OHR is still getting improved on 15 years later. Eagerly anticipating when the customizable XP formula is done (and, after looking at the plans page TMC linked, flexible stats, buffs, improved item handling, battle formation improvements, and, of course, battle-scripting Big grin )
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TMC
On the Verge of Insanity




Joined: 05 Apr 2003
Posts: 3240
Location: Matakana

PostPosted: Sat May 10, 2014 12:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A sad tale!

It's so easy to make plans. It's so hard to find time and motivation! Options to customise the xp curve could easily have been added 15 years ago, but we still haven't done it...
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Chronoas




Joined: 18 Sep 2008
Posts: 37

PostPosted: Sat May 10, 2014 1:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, if the customizable formula is more likely to be complete before the limit-break on XP rewards, I think I've figured out my new formula. Graphed on my calculator:

int(20+3.4098*x^2)

It works out to exactly 32767 XP to next level at level 98 :p

Er...99 was max level, right? Or was it 100? Huh?

But yeah, it works out to:

0 - 20
1 - 23
2 - 33
3 - 50
4 - 74
5 - 105
6 - 142
7 - 187
8 - 238
9 - 296
10 - 360
...
48 - 7876
49 - 8206
50 - 8544
51 - 8888
52 - 9240
...
96 - 31444
97 - 32102
98 - 32767

As long as you keep your random battle XP rewards fairly low, it seems like you could balance it. First area, balanced the enemies to hero stats at level 3 or so, and give maybe... 3 XP apiece? With generally 1-3 enemies in formation, 3 to 9 XP, meaning you could level 0 -> 1 in 3-7 battles by himself. By level 5 -> 6, same enemies would require 12-35 battles in same area. In total, 34-102 battles in that one area... Average of 68 battles in that area to just reach level 6. At that point, hopefully too tedious to continue grinding there, and move on with the game...
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