All Anime World

That would be great Hiki. We are definetly going to need an artist. I can draw non-people (Objects, landscapes, buildings) well enough, but I suck at drawing people. We still have a lot more we need to work out about the game before we begin the art for it.

I am actually wait for Sakura to drop in and see what she thinks of this little idea.

I don't know how the main character should look, but... Did someone want a catgirl? If someone could share some ideas on how the main character should look I could whip up a proper character design xD

Ok, for the time being I am just going to call her "Daisy" until we decide on her name. It is alot faster to type then "The cat girl" every time.

As for he looks here is what I have for her bio so far:
Age: 15-16
Hair: Long blond
Eye's: Not sure, maybe green? We will have to see what looks best.
Cat features: Ears and a tail. The ears and tail should be the same color as the hair and the ears should look like they are apart of her hair.
Dress style: A cross between lolita and a merchants dress. (We can add a funtion to the game where you can choose the clothes) I am not really sure on the clothes. What do you think would look best?
Other Notes: Daisy is not "well endowed" in fact she is as flat a a board. This will lead into some joke during the story between her and her main rival and male merchant that owns a shop across from her.

Anyone got any other ideas?

The sound engine is almost completed. I put it in a module so that it can be used by any code in the project without having to pass a referance to it. I will post all the functions and what they do later.

Something I had forgotten to ask: how will the game itself be implemented? Hardcoded or scripted or something like that?

I was thinking it would be best to do scripted. That way we could easily reuse the engine for a new game if we wanted to. I was thinking that we would store the script/game storyline data in a data file. That way we only need to change the data file to change the game. This will work for the main part of the game, but I am not sure if it will work for the dungon crawling part of the game.

I would like the data for the story to take the form of an array of objects and the objects to be of this type:

Dim CmdCode as integer
Dim CmdData as object

CmdCode would be a value that indicates what the event is. exmple. 0 = Start backgound music, 1 = change Background image, 2 = display Text...

CmdData is the data that the event will use. example:
CmdCode = 1
CmdData = "ShopInterior.png"

CmdCode = 0
CmdData = "Opening.midi"

CmdCode = 2
CmdData = "I said <B>NO!!!</B>"

I don't know the internals of the engine (would have to see the code), but I'm guessing a hash map would work better than an array, at least on RAM. Also, you would need to add a unique identifier to each of those data snippets. Besides the code, I mean.

One of the reasons that I want to use an array is because then we do not need to worry about unique identifiers. Their array index would be the unique Identifer. The array would also not take up much more ram then a hash table.

I think it will be an array of the data structure

Struct EventCmd
{
dim CmdCode as integer
dim CmdData as string
}

This way the data can be easily stored in a file.

Sorry I have been gone for awhile, work has been hell latly. I will try to post the functions for the sound module later today.

Ok, here is what I have for the sound module called "Sound". (Ya, I know. Real creativity in the name.)
All these functions can be accessed from anywhere in the program useing "Sound.functionname()"
There are 3 sound devieces: Background, Voice, and SFx. This allows for 3 seperate sounds to be played and modified at once.

Here are the constence create by the module: (You will see how these are used in the functions) The first sub is only used once. And it is only used when the game is loaded.
Here are the functions that you can use to load and minipulate sounds

LoadSound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer, ByVal FileLocation As String)
SoundThread is one of the three constence that you use to choose which 'sound' you want to load the file into.
FileLocation is the location of the file that you want to load.
This loads a file into the Sound Channel (I am just going to call the there channels from now on) but does not start it.

StartSound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This starts playing a sound that was loaded into the channel

StopSound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This stops a sound that is playing in the channel

PlaySound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer, ByVal FileLocation As String)
This loads and starts a sound in the channel from the file location

LoopSound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This sets it so that any sound in that channel will continue to loop. This is pretty much just used in the Background channel.

StopLoopingSound(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This sets it so the sound in the channel will only play once

Volume controls:

FadeOut(ByVal SoundThread As Integer, ByVal Time As Double)
This cuases the sound in the channel to fade to silent in Time seconds

FadeIn(ByVal SoundThread As Integer, ByVal Time As Double)
This cuases the sound in the channel to fade from silent to its nomal volume in Time seconds

SetVolume(ByVal SoundThread As Integer, ByVal Volume As Integer)
This sets the volume in the channel to Volume, a value between 0 and 100

Mute(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This mutes the sound in the channel, but it continues to play

UnMute(ByVal SoundThread As Integer)
This unmutes the sound in the channel.

That is it. I just relized that I forgot to add Pause but you can already guess what that will look like and how it will act.

Anything else you would like to see?

Well the game is not dead. It just took me longer to tighten up the code so that we get a decent refreash rate.
For any future games we will probably not want to use VB.net as it sucks at fast graphics. But it should work fine for this game, as the main part of the game will involve changes to the screen only every few seconds. But I was able to get ~ 24fps with some simple displays were each frame is different.

I will be releasing the code soon so that we can expande on it. I just have 4 more function I want to add first.