New TFL thread of TFLness

[Wizardry Dragon]

So the last TFL thread I could find was locked, and as such I made this one. Hopefully I haven't done anything unvirtuous by doing so!

Anyways I hope to push a major release soon but there's a few stumbling blocks, and I thought maybe people here would be interested in helping out. In no particular order:

1] The NPC limit is kind of restrictive in how much I can add to the game, did it get lifted from the normal U7 amount. If not, can someone manage that?

ii] I am in need of people who can either send in fantasy-ish portraits (with releases) I can use for portraits for TFL characters, or who are talented enough artists to make them from scratch.

C] There is no C.

I'm also just going to privately host the CVS I think because every time I go to the SF CVS I have a huge headache with it.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crowley]

Milord, though hast gained a ninth!

[agentorangeguy]

I thought I remember seeing something about being able to make more npcs, perhaps unlimited?

[Dominus]

Judging from Marzo's changelog from 2007-07-01 NPC # shouldn't be restricted anymore. He fixed some things in the later years that limited to 356 NPCs or so.

[Malignant Manor]

I thought the limit was 65535 (0-66536 minus 2 because Avatar takes two slots and party takes a slot). I think usecode functions available are more limited though.

[Wizardry Dragon]

356 used to be the old limit, if its lifted great. Because practically speaking that only gave me about 30 new NPCs to play with. This is why SI used egg NPCs in a lot of places.

Anyways, if anyone has pictures or art it would go a long way, one of the big things bugging me about TFL at the moment is there are a lot of literally faceless NPCs!

Cheers,
Wizardry Dragon

[Crowley]

Does the mod use Serpent Isle- or Black Gate-style character portraits?

[Crysta the Elf]

So.. it isn't dead? Hadn't heard anything from anyone in a long time...

[Wizardry Dragon]

@Crowley: SI-type. We've been slowly replacing the old BG ones as well, with SI-style ones.

@Crysta: I never stopped working on it. Seemed to lose touch with people over time though. I think the only person I've kept communication with is WTF Dragon, but he's not really working on it

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crysta the Elf]

Well i've still wanted to help out where I can.. just like you said not had any communication from anyone really since my PC died back then.

[Wizardry Dragon]

I'd wondered what happened. I guess In Mani Corp didnt work huh?

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crysta the Elf]

I wish it had.. was a month or two before I had another PC, and then was about a year before I got an enclosure for my old hard drive and could get back to what was on it. On the plus side it does still have the last thing I was working on and never got to you, which was blackrock walls for the tower in skara brae.

It kinda dashed my interest in working on anything at the time though.

[Crowley]

I haven't done any SI-style portraits before, but I could try. Are there any non-human characters in need of a portrait? I figure trying to adapt some fantasy art would be an easier start than human faces.

[Wizardry Dragon]

Crowley: A great starting point would be faces for the balrons I have in the game. Shape wise (as in the NPC/monster shape) I figure them as blue winged gargoyles but I really want them to look kind of differentish in some non-specific way to make it clear they're *not* gargoyles. So there's a starting point but some creative freedom to play with it.

Crysta: Well anything you could do or had from before would be great. I have a whole list of odds and ends I'd need, anything in particular you'd like to do?

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crowley]

Hmm, maybe I'll take a clue from its namesake and look around for depictions of the Balrog for something I could use.

[Wizardry Dragon]

There are a few illustrations of Balrons in the Ultima I-IV bestiaries, as well, if you're interested.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crysta the Elf]

Just show me the list of what really needs to get done the most and i'll see what I can do.

[Wizardry Dragon]

There's a few things on my immediate list:

- Some green rugs/chairs
- A heater type shield with the ankh on it
- Wall sections that match the flagstone-ish look of the walls and crennalations.
- Floor segments like the stone floor but that match the flagstone-ish look of the walls and crenallations.
- An injured guard (the one lying as in on a healers bed) that looks like the gold/blue pikeman we have for TFL.
- A modified version of the iron door that has goldish trim.
- A version of the Empath Abbey door thats iron instead of wood with gold trim.
- A flag/banner thing like the standard of valour but with an ankh.
- Clutter items: garbage, broken chests, discarded food packaging.
- Woodcrafting/cutting tools: a plane, file, etc.
- More food items: you can get as exotic as you want with these we're talking about another world after all.
- Stain marks for windows that have been around a while.
- Stone dungeon walls with moss or that kind of look.
- An entirely silverish rapier-type sword. (And for that matter some greater variety of swords: scimitar, cutlass, etc)
- A 1x1 tiling floor that matches the walls/crenallations.
- Some colour variations on the peasant, merchant, and noble types in blue/white themed and green/brown themed.
- A bluish translucent 'crystal wall' segments (normal wall segments but in a translucent bluish crystal) < I tried doing this but translucency with the GIMP pallete is a pain.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

It occured to me that the bit about the matching may be confusing, so hopefully this better illustrates what I'm looking to match floor/wall segments to:



Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

(edit by Dominus:put the png in the img tags)

[Wizardry Dragon]

Posted this in the IRC, may as well post it here. Just a little glimpse of what I'm working on at the moment:



Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Crowley]

Could you send me those crystal walls you've worked on? I could color in the translucent part.

[Wizardry Dragon]

I'm not sure I kept them since for the life of me I couldn't get it to work, but I'll take a look.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Before anyone says something, yes, I'm aware the TFL site is currently unreachable to a lot of people (not everyone, but a lot of the states, which is the majority of our visitors, and possibly other places) We're having difficulties with a router which I am currently in the process of resolving.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Yeah, still down all this time later, I'm aware. I'm going to mirror the site to my second server once I resolve this router stuff. I have backups of the HTML/PHP but not the mysql so it wouldn't help too much.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Crowley: I looked for the graphic on both computers but I can't find it. I probably biffed it when I couldn't get the translucency to work right >.>

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Just a quick crosspost so those are aware:

As posted here: http://www.thefeudallands.ca/?p=197 I have purged a great number (almost 5000) of users from TFL this past night. MOST of them were spam signups. ALL of them were unused.

If you had an old account there and want to sign up, feel free. Feel free to give me a note too, and I'll add you to the whitelist.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon
www.thefeudallands.ca

[Wizardry Dragon]

I'm setting up a git repository for TFL while I post this. Going to have to work out anon access, but otherwise it should be up momentarialy. I'll post details after dinner. And likely put a news post on the TFL site as well.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon

[Wizardry Dragon]

Anyone with git experience that can tell me if there's a way to create an anon-read user for gitolite?

I might just have to use git-daemon but gitolite is more secure.

Marzo: Incidentally, if you give me the pubkey side of a key pair I can give you read/write access to the repo if you would like

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge

[marzo]

Will do, once I finish configuring my new laptop.

[Wizardry Dragon]

You can just drop it to my gmail address (twicescorned@gmail.com) whenever you get the chance.

Cheers,
Peter M Dodge
aka Wizardry Dragon
www.thefeudallands.ca

[Kristo]

Sooooo, what's happening with TFL?
The Forum seems to be down...

Cheers
Kristo