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February 5, 10:05 AM
Lionel Castle
Judge's Chambers

February 5, 10:05 AM, Bremondt Freitberg (Prosecutor) alleges that Reis Duelar, in the form of a dragon, is guilty of "Grand Theft Holy Stone", demanding the plaintiff be locked up in Prosecutor Freitberg's Private Prison.

February 5, 10:10 AM, the prosecution presents the "Aquarius Holy Stone" into the Court Record.

February 5, 10:12 AM, Prosecutor Freitberg pushes a motion for the judge to immediately sentence the defendant to imprisonment due to a lack of any clear opposition from the defendant. In response to this, the defendant pleads: "RAWR!"

February 5, 10:15 AM, Judge Alazlam begins sentencing Reis Duelar, taking the RAWR defense into account. Until...

February 5, 10:16 AM, Beowulf Cadmus heroically storms into the room, shouting, "HOLD IT!"

February 5, 10:18 AM, Beowulf Cadmus presents a motion to the judge. The motion is for Defense Attorney Cadmus to represent the defendant, Reis Duelar. The defendant is heard to comment: "Rawr."

February 5, 10:20 AM, Defense Attorney Cadmus joins the defendant's bench.

February 5, 10:25 AM, Prosecutor Freitberg, noticeably perturbed, calls his first witness, Aliste Rosenheim, a member of the Gryphon Knights.

February 5, 10:27 AM, Aliste Rosenheim testifies that he witnessed Reis Duelar stealing the Aquarius Holy Stone. The defendant is heard to say: "RAWR!"

February 5, 10:30 AM, Prosecutor Freitberg claims that this statement is incontrovertible proof of the defendant's guilt.

February 5, 10:31 AM, Beowulf Cadmus is heard to scream: "OBJECTION! Cancer!" The witness is noted to begin to sweat profusely.

February 5, 10:32 AM, Prosecutor Freitberg retorts with an "OBJECTION!" to the objection.

February 5, 10:35 AM, Defense Attorney Cadmus proceeds to explain Aliste Rosenheim's medical condition and the man's honor-obsessed desire to face off against his former captain, Beowulf Cadmus! Prosecutor Freitberg is observed to pull at his own mustache in anger.

February 5, 10:40 AM, the witness refuses to admit to the defense's allegations, claiming instead that his former captain was in on the theft, smuggly claiming that it was his word against the former captain's.

February 5, 10:42 AM, Defense Attorney Cadmus is witnessed to again scream: "OBJECTION! Cancer!"

February 5, 10:43 AM, Defense Attorney Cadmus moves the "Cancer Holy Stone" into the Court Record.

February 5, 10:44 AM, it is observed that the new evidence begins to react with Reis Duelar, returning her to human being form.

February 5, 10:47 AM, Reis Duelar takes the stand. The first witness and the prosecution are observed to sweat profusely and ostentatiously pull at their facial hair respectively.

February 5, 10:50 AM, Reis Duelar testifies that the evidence against her was actually an heirloom given to her by her grandmother as a birthday present years ago. She goes on to insinuate that Prosecutor Freitberg is "just obsessed with me."

February 5, 10:52 AM, Prosecutor Freitberg is observed to pull at his facial hair until his body splits into two, revealing himself to be the dark dragon, Syneugh!

February 5, 10:55 AM, Beowulf Cadmus faces the prosecution's bench and shocks both the prosecutor and Aliste into submission.

February 5, 11:00 AM, Judge Alazlam declares the defendant, Reis Duelar, not guilty.

February 5, 11:02 AM, Beowulf Cadmus and Reis Duelar being to exit the judge's chambers. Until...

February 5, 11:05 AM, the caretaker of the Nevleska Temple is observed dragging a smouldering pile of robotics into the judge's chambers. He is further observed to allege that Beowulf Cadmus and an accomplice, Ramza Beoulve, are both equally guilty of "Willful Destruction of Temple Property".

February 6, 9:00 AM, Beowulf Cadmus and Ramza Beoulve enter lock-up with the criminal mercenary, Goffard Gaffgarion. It is observed to be a very long 30-day sentence for both Beowulf Cadmus and Ramza Beoulve.

OGG format (can be created from WAV files using a program called Audacity). Hardcoded sound effects can be added via the sprite animator program on a given composited frame. Event-based sound effects can be added in an event context in the game where your game can listen for a specific event to be fired (say, "swing") and play an appropriate sound effect (with reference to type of weapon swung, result of hit/miss/evade/broken, etc). But, the files have to be OGG files; that's what the engine has a bufferer/mixer for.

Today on Sailor Moon, we meet a mysterious new transfer student, but, the night before, there were really bright lights in the sky! Could the new transfer student actually be an alien from the Nega-verse? What's a girl to do when she has to choose between a quiet school life and fighting evil? Can the Sailor Scouts get to the bottom of this? Stick around! See what happens when Sailor Moon returns~!

As long as it displays correctly in the sprite animator, it doesn't matter what format you use (mind the space from bottom edge for the sake of the display illusion). In my opinion, it's easier to have things in parts; the sprite animation tool has a "replace frame" feature in the Edit Selected Frame tool which will easily let you march through setting up the actual display. Basically, you do it one time for one direction, and you can just advance to the next composite frame in the main window, return to your open editing window, replace the existing frames (two wings, one body; 3 total) with the appropriate frames, hit update, and repeat.

Yes, there is work involved with setting up poses ("named sets"), but they should also reflect what you want to do with your game (rather than just being an imitation of the MON format), and, as you can make them be any length, at any speed, including any composite frame, there just isn't a simple way to say "Okay! Apply these!"; that's work associated with creating a format. Also, there's a lot of work I've done already in the engine making things easy for the naming layout I did (phase.sub-phase1.sub-phase2.direction), but, as long as you do something that has some rhyme or reason to it, you can program to that specification. "WalkLikeABossSW", for instance, is maybe a bad idea for a battle animation, but that won't actually stop you from showing that sequence on-screen. It's just that you'd have to program around that, whereas my format, which would render that as "Walk like a Boss.SW", would let you just set the phase of "Walk like a Boss" and not have to worry about constantly setting the direction in-game. Whereas, you may actually want something like "MySuperCoolJumpAroundTheScreenAnimation" to not have a direction. It's lazy, of course, but, if you only ever intend on showing it from one direction, then it's fine; that translates to the "event character" approach, except it's still contained in the format, and you will still need all graphical parts to be part of the image (unless you use named attachments, which is totally possible to have any number of other images attached, like an event character approach).

I know there's some confusion about what it means when someone says "Tethical", but there's basically just an engine at the moment. Can that engine be re-configured to do what you want it to do? Yes. Because it's still in early development, I just mean that there are bound to be instances of code that "thinks" in 512x488 (which is clearly an oversight for a reference implementation) rather than SCREEN_WIDTHxSCREEN_HEIGHT. Is the one custom pretty map the only thing you can load into Tethical? No, and you can load any map you've ripped straight out of FFT (and there are pictures if you look in Tethical's main thread). That awesome sprite on that awesome map demonstrates stepping up, whereas a regular type-1 sprite on a regular FFT map would have you right back looking at 256x244 zoomed to x2 (at least, that's the goal).

One of the things about the engine is that it uses a feature I wrote to mimic the concept of a game state. I've written a bunch of these states so far (for a menu screen, for an introduction video, for one type of battle in the form of the FFT battle system). States are called with configuration variables, meaning you don't have to rewrite any code if the configuration variables have the thing you want to change; you can just set the configuration variable to what you want it to be. Because of this architecture, even if there aren't configuration variables for what you want to change, you can write/edit the state's code to do whatever you want (including providing a configuration variable or just hard-coding a behavior), save it as a different state, and just call this new state instead of the old state (if you have more than one game you're developing/planning on running side by side).

The point is, "Tethical" is not bound to: 512x488, maps with 40x40 tile textures, maps with 20x20 tile textures, using shaders, not using shaders, FFT's battle system, my HUD, the images used by my HUD, one game, etc. However, some of the reference implementation states I've written certainly are. For example, the reference implementation for the battle state is completely linked to FFT's battle system. Whereas, if you don't like the resolution of a particular piece (as an example, Lijj pointed out the difference between the resolutions of the Zodiac signs relative to all the other things onscreen in a different thread) you can change it to suit your needs. In fact, you may only need to change the image (ex: Zodiac signs look too crisp -> keep same image size, use less detail and appropriate pixel doubling/zooming; but, you only have to change the image to accomplish the desired look-and-feel rather than code in this example).

The concept of providing a reference implementation (re: a series a states that can be used to make a continuous game) is so that you can change things easily, rather than me just saying right now, "OKAY! The engine is done. Go make some magic happen!" Because that part is done: music can play, SFX can play, maps can be displayed, sprites can be displayed, effects can be displayed, the database can be used to store information and query for information, events can be tested outside of the game's context, events can be called from a state, the server can be interfaced with, etc. But, that's the engine and not a game using said engine. What you see screenshots of are just glimpses of one implementation. If I like 512x488 and resolution mismatches, it has zero effect on what you can do with the engine, because what states you use (and write) are ultimately up to you.

For example, you may have seen the CoP patch for FFT. There are a whole host of states the original game has that the patch does not need. This is a situation similar to that, except every game created using this engine will use some different set of states and sub-set of configuration variables. In fact, there are features you can even let the player choose that influence this situation even more.

Anyway, long story short, I will help you set it up appropriately when you need it.

Why is the x2 size the standart size?

There's no standard size. There's native engine support for a very basic spritesheet that fits those general dimensions. Alternatively, anything that has a formatting document is supported through a plugin I wrote.

There's also some ugly blur going on there, as well as white pixels going all over the edges of the x2 sized sprites.

Opinions about the quality of the effects aside, those are just post-processing effects ("shaders") I ran to break up the monotony of having everything use the default settings. Specifically, those post-processing effects are used to show that you can do exactly the same thing you can with an emulator (like ePSXe, using the OpenGL plugins and appropriate shaders).

Is it possible to shrink Tethical into x1 size?

You can use a sprite that has an appropriate sprite format (as opposed to the native engine support).

This would allow players to resize the screen just like the original FFT and yet have the graphics keep their flow/style. It's VERY hard to sprite in x2, let me add, and alot more time consuming. Not to mention x1 size looks lovely and is a blessing for us pixel artists. Do we have the option of going x1 or is it all set to x2 permanently?

Existing TYPE1, TYPE2, ARUTE, KANZEN, CYOKO, and MON* sprites can be used as-is (*: lots of MON sprites have custom actions that are not supported without creating a format specifically for them). What you see in the pictures are existing type-1 sprites. The only changes made to their sprite sheets are: (1) fixing the portrait to use actual colors (rather than relying on an engine to instinctively know it needs to palette shift to make things show up correctly), (2) team color areas have been tagged with some form of hot pink (so that they'll get turned to black and white and multiplied by the color of the team the unit belongs to on the fly), and (3) the filename reflects what race, class, gender, and format the sprite sheet represents (re: something that might be named "Superknightm.bmp" would need to become "human_superknight_male.fft-type1.bmp").

Okay, noted about arrow keys. I may need screenshots of what you mean for fft-mon.

Basically, I try to keep directions (SE/NE/NW/SW) at the very end of the names so that the engine can do that part for you (because it can be determined by the engine 100% of the time). Other than that, I think it makes sense (as in, it's totally possible to do) to have every status enumerated in the actual format, but features that you limit customization on can be hard-coded in the engine instead (to take some of the work off of people working on animations). As an example, you could copy and shift a majority of the 736 composite frames that compose an fft-type1 animated resource so that they resemble the flying status (but you'd still need to create appropriate named sets for them). However, who would really want to customize that status after just making sure it doesn't do something silly (like have an effect on in-water animations)? Maybe you would if you wanted more than one level of flying/floating (in which case, you'd want to have everything be able to be visually customized at the sprite format level). Whereas, walking speed (re: haste) might be a good thing for customization in general. In other words, if you develop your own formats derivative of the existing formats, you could start compiling a library of per-monster formats. Something like the custom Titan sprite should probably walk more slowly in general. If it's hasted, it should be faster than normal, but it should maybe not be as fast as a regular human; that can be done by deriving a new format based off the old fft-mon format and changing the target animation speed on the appropriate named sets.

Thanks.

@Diethe: Those look beyond amazing. Totally professional.

Videos: Attack Boost (Weapon) and Attack Boost (Text).




Video: Speed Boost.


Arbitrarily include a player's equipped weapon as part of an effect that supports it? Sure, why not.


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Putting It All Together (In-Game Wrapper)



Video: Named Attachments Demo.

And so, the design process comes full circle, allowing you to slap any arbitrary image onto your animated sprites in Tethical. Furthermore, most of that designing happens away from the engine, so your sprite work is reusable. This paves the way for finishing off the animation-heavy portion of the battle loop. Other than that, there are still equipment, items, and traps to be implemented.


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Putting It All Together (In-Battle)