History was made in this post

Screenshots from a side scroller detective rpg that me and my friend have been working on. Opinions?

(edit - now the official screenshot thread +Neo)

Pretty cool; I like the pixelated look of the rooms!

Since this is now the official screenshot thread, I'll add a few o' mine. They show off my new UI system for Sphere games. Also, these screenshots were not taken by pressing F11, but with the in-game variant... 'Insert' (which I guess could be reprogrammed to whatever the coders wants it to be). Right now, it';s for some reason the only way to get screenshots from sphere v1.6

History was made in this post

Screenshots from a side scroller detective rpg that me and my friend have been working on. Opinions?

(edit - now the official screenshot thread +Neo)

Looks freakin' sweet. Any special reason you decided to use Sphere's internal map engine?

For some reason I feel most comfortable with the internal engine.

Why, is there anything major that I'm missing out? 

Not really, but considering how your maps are freeform instead of tile-based, making something custom to fit that format seems what most people prefer instead.

Not telling you to use one or the other, was just curious about it.

I did consider using an image editor to make the maps, which would be good news for furniture placement, but the problem is transparency     , which I don't think I can reproduce without the Editor. Having the sprite walking through the different levels of black transparency gives a really nice 'shadow' effect.

The main advantage of using the built-in map engine over making one of your own is the built-in collision detection when using a Sphere format sprite. If I wasn't so adamant about trying to leverage the built-in offerings of Sphere as much as possible, Artyxx (a shmup) would've been all custom. It still needs work, but at least I didn't have to spend hours writing and testing pixel-perfect collision detection myself (yet; I'll probably have to do it for a web version :/ ).

@Angry_Pirate - great color scheme, very ambient atmosphere! That plus "side-scrolling detective RPG" reminds me a bit of Maniac Mansion...

@Radnen - were you intending on "leaking" Hold the Line 2?

The main advantage of using the built-in map engine over making one of your own is the built-in collision detection when using a Sphere format sprite. If I wasn't so adamant about trying to leverage the built-in offerings of Sphere as much as possible, Artyxx (a shmup) would've been all custom. It still needs work, but at least I didn't have to spend hours writing and testing pixel-perfect collision detection myself (yet; I'll probably have to do it for a web version :/ ).

The map engine can do a lot of the heavy lifting. I tried to make my own isometric map engine in Sphere, but found out that the code, not the rendering was bottlenecking the performance. Really, two for loops that compute tile positions and draw tiles slowed it way down. If I added a call that culled the tiles off screen, the fps took a further hit. The JS was doing it! 

I was only able to get back to normal fps by pre-rendering the map onto a gigantic image, and then blitting that image to screen. But then the overall memory use skyrocketed!

@Radnen - were you intending on "leaking" Hold the Line 2?

Huh... What? How'd that get in there?

Hurray! Hold the Line 2! I really like the first game, I'm excited!

I'm going to now show you guys the greatest feature about my new radlib library and statemanager (with UI controls).

It is a log of debug messages. Add checks throughout your code to find troublesome parts and they will be here. You can log general messages (white) successful events (green), warnings (yellow) or straight-up errors (red). When you double-click a message you get a complete, and accurate call stack. This will show you (for each call)  the file and line of code of the call chain. This, for me, was crucially important to fix all kinds of errors. This is what Sphere needed all along, and if you develop using my library, you get this in a clean and easy to use GUI. And since the errors are logged, you no longer need to view them 1 at a time.

Excuse the language, but fuck that's nice. I need to try RadLib for any potential future Sphere projects.

Excuse the language, but fuck that's nice. I need to try RadLib for any potential future Sphere projects.

I might actually put it on github, and throw up a documentation as well. I'm liking where I'm going with this library right now. Soon, you'll be seeing more of it (now that we have forum!)

When you double-click a message you get a complete, and accurate call stack. This will show you (for each call)  the file and line of code of the call chain.

Do you mind if I use this idea for Arq? (My RPG framework.) It has a console quite a bit like yours, but lacking the awesome stack traces.
Brilliant. This is using the throw trick from the old forums, right?

This is using the throw trick from the old forums, right?

Yes, it is. But some care went into dissecting the stack trace (it's stored as a single string... can you believe it!?) and the line numbers were off by 1, at least for the Sphere versions I use. You can see how at the source on line 204 here.

(edited URL to jump to line number ~neo)

@Radnen - you can bookmark line numbers on GitHub by adding #Lx to the URL, where x is the line number without zero-padding.

Also, that stack trace is WAY better than the stack trace method I used to use (same technique, but not nearly as in-depth; I think I was the second one to use it, and I probably copied Tung's or kamatsu's work or something).