raocow's talkhaus

So, it's no secret that work on A2XT has slowed to a crawl since MAGLX2.

With the SMBX2.0 beta release imminent, though, some people are looking back towards A2XT episode 2, and wondering what's happening.

So, here is a proposed plan for getting development up and running, to get the final stretch done for release.

STEP ONE
Update to SMBX 2.0, beta 3.

The current hacked exe is completely broken (more on this later). It's also not portable. Now that 2.0 can do everything we needed the hacked exe for, we no longer actually need it. Instead, when 2.0b3 is released, I will be porting everything over to that.

At this point, the LunaLua version will be LOCKED DOWN. Unless a feature is added that is necessary for A2XT later, no updates to LunaLua will be made after this point. This means we can be sure that, when things work, they will work at release.

STEP TWO
Convert all graphics to .png, and neaten the resources folders.

Graphics are currently in .gif format, but since they would now be packaged as part of an episode, there's no reason for this. By converting to .png, we could save a lot of filesize. There are also some odd changes that have been made to other resources folders (high quality audio being replaced with MIDI, despite that not saving much in terms of size), and I will also be stripping out any resources that haven't changed from default.

I will also need some help at this step, as every single level will need to be re-tested and fixed, to be sure that everything works in the new version.

STEP THREE
Move to github.

The OneDrive system has failed abysmally. Unsanctioned changes have been made with no way to revert them, at one point the entire exe was corrupted and will no longer launch. There are also all sorts of syncing issues.

For SMBX2.0 development, a git repository was used. This is a common solution for game development projects, and works incredibly well.

Of course, many people here won't know how to use git, but I will also be making a step-by-step tutorial on setting up SourceTree, in order to have access to the A2XT data.

This will give us a much more controlled way of accessing data, and will allow us to revert any problematic changes, and see what caused them.

STEP FOUR
Build Cinematx and finalise systems such as towns and shops

A lot of this is on RockytheChao, as he's the developer of Cinematx. Currently Cinematx is very broken, and the plan is to use it for towns and cutscenes, so it should at least reach a point where it works, even if it's not fully featured.

As for finalising systems, we have an idea of what will go into towns (Leek Sanctuaries, Quests, Minigames, Item Shops, Costume Shop, Catllama Stables etc.), and plan to keep these consistent between towns. Currently however, there is no blueprint for any of these except the Leek Sanctuary, so these are currently just a gap in town development. Finalising what these will look like and how they will work will allow towns to be made.

STEP FIVE
Build towns, remaining levels, bosses, cutscenes, hub, maps etc.

This is the step that most people will come into. At this point, all the systems should be in place, and it should just be a case of building the environments, and we should be done. Once all the basics are in place, this should be very easy, as changes to underlying systems such as CinematX won't be taking place and changing things, potentially breaking things made here.

Of course, people are welcome to make any of these at any point, but with a reminder that they will need revisiting at this step in order to ensure they still work.

STEP SIX
Testing and rebalancing.

By this point, the game content should be complete. Then, a final bout of testing, rebalancing levels, adding or removing raocoins from levels to balance shops, etc.

Once this is all done, the game will be complete, balanced and ready to go. Any final polishing can happen here, but no major changes.

STEP SEVEN
Send raocow the game.

By this point, the game is done and ready to go, so we can send it to raocow without any problems.


That should be everything. Every project, large or small, needs a gameplan. One of the issues with A2XT so far has been a lack of an organisational plan. When it's just "making levels", that's not really an issue, but once it gets to the stage of compiling those levels into a game, organisation is key.

Hopefully this should provide a goal for us to aim towards, and help people understand what actually is happening on the project.

Sounds lovely. Once things are open to testing and changes, someone remind me and I'll probably hop back in.

This should probably be stickied.
I'm on board with this and will probably fix up my levels and town once we get to those steps.

I unfortunately don't have fancy mod privileges for sticky-ing purposes.

I thought it was a good idea to make sure everyone is on the same page, and it may well be useful for future reference.

Hoeloe wrote:STEP ONE
Update to SMBX 2.0, beta 3... [and] LOCK... [EVERYTHING] DOWN.

Hooray!

STEP TWO
Convert all graphics to .png, and neaten the resources folders.

So even the backgrounds?

Does this mean that all the background graphics can have transparencies and holes in them, even those that were meant to be entirely solid i.e. those with no background-#m files (where # represents a number)?

I will also need some help at this step, as every single level will need to be re-tested and fixed, to be sure that everything works in the new version.

They all need QA testing anyway, so that's not a problem.

Either way, I'm all on board with this plan.

Except Step Four looks like a huge hurdle. There's other people helping Rockythechao right?

ztarwuff wrote: So even the backgrounds?

Does this mean that all the background graphics can have transparencies and holes in them, even those that were meant to be entirely solid i.e. those with no background-#m files (where # represents a number)?

Yep, that's exactly what it means. I won't be touching anything in people's level files, just the default graphics. It means that those awkward -m files won't exist in the default graphics files.

Except Step Four looks like a huge hurdle. There's other people helping Rockythechao right?

To some degree. Ultimately, he's the best versed with CinematX and its inner workings, but other people on Discodehaus are helping where possible.

So, I feel this is worth saying.

It's been announced that SMBX 2.0 Beta 3 will be released tomorrow, however, it will not be ready to port A2XT over yet. There are a couple of features required for A2XT to function sensibly that don't exist in Beta 3, but hopefully a fix for those will be made shortly after the release.

I thought it would be worth letting people know this, so they don't start wondering why the port isn't happening yet.

So how are we going to be updating our own levels now that everything's been ported over to github?

I just noticed I'd compressed the hell out of one of the animated backgrounds. The artefacts I ended up creating are causing a whole lot of unnecessary flickering, so I'm currently redoing the entire thing.

ztarwuff wrote:So how are we going to be updating our own levels now that everything's been ported over to github?

I just noticed I'd compressed the hell out of one of the animated backgrounds. The artefacts I ended up creating are causing a whole lot of unnecessary flickering, so I'm currently redoing the entire thing.

I'll be putting up a detailed tutorial of how to use Sourcetree, which is what I'd recommend for accessing the github. Rather than just dragging files into a directory, it acts as a manager to keep track of changes, and organise any conflicts. Ideally, conflicts won't happen except between the few people working on the base episode (rather than individual levels), but it helps us to manage that more easily, and allows changes to be rolled back if necessary.

Hoeloe wrote:I'll be putting up a detailed tutorial of how to use Sourcetree, which is what I'd recommend for accessing the github. Rather than just dragging files into a directory, it acts as a manager to keep track of changes, and organise any conflicts. Ideally, conflicts won't happen except between the few people working on the base episode (rather than individual levels), but it helps us to manage that more easily, and allows changes to be rolled back if necessary.

It might also be a good idea to check out Gitkraken, it's a similar technology made in electron and it's ported to even more platforms. I've used it before for a professional project, it's really good.

Jayoshi wrote:

Hoeloe wrote:I'll be putting up a detailed tutorial of how to use Sourcetree, which is what I'd recommend for accessing the github. Rather than just dragging files into a directory, it acts as a manager to keep track of changes, and organise any conflicts. Ideally, conflicts won't happen except between the few people working on the base episode (rather than individual levels), but it helps us to manage that more easily, and allows changes to be rolled back if necessary.

It might also be a good idea to check out Gitkraken, it's a similar technology made in electron and it's ported to even more platforms. I've used it before for a professional project, it's really good.

There are a number of git clients around, and any will work. The reason I picked SourceTree is because it simplifies a lot of the actions, is easy to learn, and importantly is one I've used before so can teach it more easily. If you want to post one for GitKraken, please do.

Here's a thirty minute webinar I found by the creators of Gitkraken. I found that there's a few things it didn't seem to explain, which I'll cover here:

• The video lists how to clone a git project from a repo from your github account, though you can actually clone any repo. All you have to do is copy the URL from the github page, (there's a button dedicated to cloning near the top, which will give you the link you need) and in Gitkraken you can use the "URL" section to clone the repo.
• The developer is using atom, which is designed to work with git specifically. In atom, files which have been changed from the latest commit you're working on will be highlighted, which is especially useful for knowing when you haven't staged yet. I recommend using a source code editor with this sort of git integration, which will be a MASSIVE help down the road. Atom in particular doesn't have such good Lua support built in, (code doesn't fold, for example) so it may or may not be the best thing to use. I'll be on the lookout for a good Lua editor with git support.

Here's a thirty minute webinar I found by the creators of Gitkraken. I found that there's a few things it didn't seem to explain, which I'll cover here:

• The video lists how to clone a git project from a repo from your github account, though you can actually clone any repo. All you have to do is copy the URL from the github page, (there's a button dedicated to cloning near the top, which will give you the link you need) and in Gitkraken you can use the "URL" section to clone the repo.
• The developer is using atom, (I think, anyway) which is designed to work with git specifically. In atom, files which have been changed from the latest commit you're working on will be highlighted, which is especially useful for knowing when you haven't staged yet. I recommend using a source code editor with this sort of git integration, which will be a MASSIVE help down the road. Atom in particular doesn't have such good Lua support built in, (code doesn't fold, for example) so it may or may not be the best thing to use. I'll be on the lookout for a good Lua editor with git support.

After a binge rewatch of raocow's LP of A2XT Ep 1, I realized I'd dropped the ball in terms of helping to test content for Ep 2 - and wanted to rectify that. So I've reviewed this thread to catch up on current status, and I see the following from Hoeloe two months ago:

Hoeloe wrote:It's been announced that SMBX 2.0 Beta 3 will be released tomorrow, however, it will not be ready to port A2XT over yet. There are a couple of features required for A2XT to function sensibly that don't exist in Beta 3, but hopefully a fix for those will be made shortly after the release.

I thought it would be worth letting people know this, so they don't start wondering why the port isn't happening yet.

Anyone know where things stand on this front? I understand this is a required "first step" for further work on the project to ramp back up. Thanks!

Voltgloss wrote:After a binge rewatch of raocow's LP of A2XT Ep 1, I realized I'd dropped the ball in terms of helping to test content for Ep 2 - and wanted to rectify that. So I've reviewed this thread to catch up on current status, and I see the following from Hoeloe two months ago:

Hoeloe wrote:It's been announced that SMBX 2.0 Beta 3 will be released tomorrow, however, it will not be ready to port A2XT over yet. There are a couple of features required for A2XT to function sensibly that don't exist in Beta 3, but hopefully a fix for those will be made shortly after the release.

I thought it would be worth letting people know this, so they don't start wondering why the port isn't happening yet.

Anyone know where things stand on this front? I understand this is a required "first step" for further work on the project to ramp back up. Thanks!

Are you in discodehaus? Could be helpful for development. Still been waiting on 2.0 update first.

It's been a long while, but this can finally start!

Using a private internal build of 2.0 beta 4, things can begin to be ported over. Please do not push anything to the OneDrive from now on - data is being pulled from there and anything added now might get missed. Instead, hold onto your updates and either send them to me privately, or post them to the github when that is ready to go (which may not be for a little while yet).

In the meantime, GitKraken has now created a series of tutorials, which I haven't watched 100% yet but they seem to cover the usage well enough. However, some of them are... cringeworthy, to say the least, since they try to appeal to a awkward humour demographic.

I'm still up to helping and testing when we start getting builds of the game.

Any word on progress with this project?

Things are starting to look a bit Totalitarian on my side of the pond. I'm worried my government will pass laws that will effectively hobble my access to github.

Considering Hoeloe is from the UK himself that does seem pretty worrying, though from speaking with him it sounds like the legislation isn't likely to pass and in the event that services like Github do get blocked over there he has a contingency plan.

We're still waiting on a few SMBX2 Beta 4 things before we finalize the repo, but in the meantime we've been doing what we can to update and organize a lot of the old code into separate A2XT-specific APIs -- or outright replace it with more recent tech -- to unify UI and gameplay systems and make everything easier to manage.

On my part, the bulk of the cutscene/town tech is done. As of last night, all of cinematX's major exclusive functionality has finally been replaced by newer, better, specialized helper libraries. Here's a couple videos demonstrating the latest of these, cameraman.lua:



There's still some work needed to bridge all the libraries together, plus a few minor features I need to redo as A2XT-specific "tweak" scripts. But we should have most, if not all, of Step 4 done by the time the A2XT repo goes live.

also please don't take the voice clips from the second video as how we plan to implement that stuff in episode 2, we're still aiming for single grunts and sighs and shouts and whatnot a la pre-breath of the wild zelda

Rockythechao wrote: ↑6 years ago Considering Hoeloe is from the UK himself that does seem pretty worrying, though from speaking with him it sounds like the legislation isn't likely to pass and in the event that services like Github do get blocked over there he has a contingency plan.

Yeah, admittedly, I'm being too much of a worrywart, but the chance of it happening is too high for my liking. (It's still a tiny chance).

We're still waiting on a few SMBX2 Beta 4 things before we finalize the repo, but in the meantime we've been doing what we can to update and organize a lot of the old code into separate A2XT-specific APIs -- or outright replace it with more recent tech -- to unify UI and gameplay systems and make everything easier to manage.

On my part, the bulk of the cutscene/town tech is done. As of last night, all of cinematX's major exclusive functionality has finally been replaced by newer, better, specialized helper libraries. Here's a couple videos demonstrating the latest of these, cameraman.lua:



There's still some work needed to bridge all the libraries together, plus a few minor features I need to redo as A2XT-specific "tweak" scripts. But we should have most, if not all, of Step 4 done by the time the A2XT repo goes live.

also please don't take the voice clips from the second video as how we plan to implement that stuff in episode 2, we're still aiming for single grunts and sighs and shouts and whatnot a la pre-breath of the wild zelda

Looks good. Have you managed to fix that thing that breaks Willhart's Dark Prince level?

I know Hoeloe and Red have tried but I don't think they made much progress. And as cool the effect was in Dark Prince, in light of Horikawa finally exposing Willhart we're honestly considering just dropping all of his levels. I'd be lying if I said a number of us didn't have some personal bias in the matter, especially Hoeloe and me -- we were two of the people who tried to deal with the guy's stalker crush leading up to the reveal.

It's probably a decision best made by Hoeloe and SAJ together. But I will say that, on top of the personal feelings on the matter, I see removing his levels as an opportunity -- we could replace them with levels that make use of new tech, NPCs, blocks, etc. in SMBX2. In particular I'd like it if we could include

at least one Broadsword level in worlds 6 through 8

for both story and gameplay reasons, I'll elaborate on them if we end up dropping the levels.

While I don't really want to have much say anymore, since I don't do much on this anymore, I'd would support removing his levels from A2XT2, and holding onto them for a potential "talkhaus smbx directors cut of junk levels" thing (like that time raocow played those 2 levels that were cut from a2mt). As cute as the levels were, It's probably for the best, and I'm sure if sham were still around, he'd say the same thing.

Depending on how close you guys are, I could probably get us five levels to replace them.

Also, on the topic of new NPCs/Blocks, you probably wanna make sure those are re-sprited.

SAJewers wrote: ↑6 years ago While I don't really want to have much say anymore, since I don't do much on this anymore, I'd would support removing his levels from A2XT2, and holding onto them for a potential "talkhaus smbx directors cut of junk levels" thing (like that time raocow played those 2 levels that were cut from a2mt). As cute as the levels were, It's probably for the best, and I'm sure if sham were still around, he'd say the same thing.

Depending on how close you guys are, I could probably get us five levels to replace them.

Also, on the topic of new NPCs/Blocks, you probably wanna make sure those are re-sprited.

Effectively my reasoning for supporting removing his levels was because I don't want this project to be associated with Willhart in any way. He's caused a lot of pain to multiple people, and I'd rather not have this project (or any frankly) bringing that back. On top of that, I along with others who have been privvy to the Willhart situation, seem to have a general consensus that total isolation from the talkhaus is best for his own mental health, and dropping his participation from future lets plays is part of that. If it were just any banned member, I wouldn't suggest going this far, but Willhart is a much worse case than your regular forum ban, and I think it needs to be treated as such.

We're getting close but there's still some tech we're waiting on. There are a few levels missing already so I was thinking of putting the word out to get those last few levels along with Willhart replacements when that is ready, giving people a shot at trying some of the beta 4 stuff.

There are plans for some respritings too.

Oh... I see. I wasn't aware of unpleasantness.

Guess that means I'll have to redo my Castle level based on whatever levels you find to replace his.