Topic: Crazy Idea

[sleepydude]

Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the same for town/dungeon maps or not. Probably not, but hey, eventually I'm going to need to work out the world maps too. Anyway, just a quick update as to where I'm at, I've started building the maps. The tiles, layer 1 and 2 only, for the first 100 maps or so are dumped into PNG files, the animated tiles are animated PNGs which sometimes fall out of sync with each other, so I may find another solution, and I can build and display maps. There's still some things to work out here and there, but once I'm at the point of loading/scrolling around in maps I'll put it all up on the website.  The good news is that after an initial 30 second load time, for just one of the 3 tilesets, I managed to work things down to a second or two, and am confident that, amazingly, I can make the game load/run at least as fast as it did on the SNES. Not saying much considering I'm matching my 2.8 GHz computer with the 3+ MHz processor on the SNES, but I'm still pretty happy.

[Imzogelmo]

Yeah, I think you're right. I know for certain that the dungeon (ie non-overworld) maps set the availability of fights and the battle background at the map level, not the tile level. I have some info I've gathered from various people on that, but it's far from complete.

[sleepydude]

Ok, so I updated the website. The link has changed slightly because I messed up uploading everything, and there's like 14,000 image files or something, so I'm not real psyched to fix that right now. The new link is www.deadlykitten.com/ff3_online/FF3_Online. Here's where things stand. Unless you have Firefox 3 and a pretty fast computer, mine's 2.8 GHz and it just barely runs right, it's going to run real slow until I make the option to have things on a smaller screen. Here's what done, here's what's needs to be done.

Done:
  -Map's 0-99 layers 1 and 2 are dumped and displayable
  -map scrolling is working, along with the character of your choice being able to walk around

Not Done:
  -Map Tile Properties aren't existant, so you can walk through anything
  -Figuring out how things like bridges and stuff work (sometimes you walk under them, sometimes on top, this could be tricky)
  -makeing character move instead of map when character is near edge of map
  -figuring out how to work in the animated tiles.
  -layer 3

Bugs:
  -Borders around tiles
  -sometimes the map x/y is off by a tile and the map splits (you'll see)
  -need to work on the movement controls, if you start going a different direction before map has finished moving, you'll just keep scrolling the same direction
  -some layering issues.

Anyway, it's pretty rough at this point, but I think it's enough to serve as a proof of concept that this can in fact be done. I'm going to work next on cleaning up the graphics, and the controls are fixed. I'll either start in on figuring out how I'm going to get the animated tiles to animate, I'm using the <canvas> tag to draw the maps on, so the animated pngs aren't going to work, or tackle the map tile properties.

[Imzogelmo]

You've done a lot to update it since the last time, sleepydude. I do see what you mean about the speed; my computer slowed to a crawl trying to do it. It was definitely fun to see Umaro smash though walls (and into the next room), though.

So the data you need are the passability, the Z up/down, diagonal staircases, etc.?

[sleepydude]

So the data you need are the passability, the Z up/down, diagonal staircases, etc.?

Yep, that's the next step I guess.  I did a quick update again, just fixing a couple of the bugs. Still can't walk to the edge of the screen and unfortunately the borders around the tiles are caused by the way firefox stretches the tiles. Opera does it too, Safari is the only browser without the lines, it however is slow as hell, maybe the mac Safari is faster. Who knows. Anyway, I fixed the link back to the original address, www.deadlykitten.com/ff3_online. It'll probably be a little while before I can get to much more, but I'll let everyone know when I do. In the meantime, if anyone wants to take a crack at anything let me know. I've been meaning to put the source for everything up, I'll try to do that in the next couple days.

[I.S.T.]

Ok, so I updated the website. The link has changed slightly because I messed up uploading everything, and there's like 14,000 image files or something, so I'm not real psyched to fix that right now. The new link is www.deadlykitten.com/ff3_online/FF3_Online. Here's where things stand. Unless you have Firefox 3 and a pretty fast computer, mine's 2.8 GHz and it just barely runs right, it's going to run real slow until I make the option to have things on a smaller screen.

What CPU do you have?

[Dragonsbrethren]

This is running really good on my computer, about as fast as walking around in the actual game.

[bond697]

it's running pretty badly over here once i start loading maps. terra, et al walks very jerkily(word?). 

i'm running an a64 x2 5600+ (which is 2.81ghz, dual core, etc.) on windows server 2003 with 4gb of ram.

like i said, all the chars walk beautifully.  once i start loading map layers, the response time goes to shit.

[sleepydude]

Yeah, I'm not happy with the scrolling. I've dreamt up a new scheme that'll, hopefully, clean that up and make thing much much faster. I'm going to have to come up with some solution, because with my current scheme there's no way that things'll move at all with layer 3, animated tiles and sprites moving around. Even if my new implementation works out as well as I hope, scrolling layers are going to be damn near impossible. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I'll let you all know when the new scrolling is done.

[I.S.T.]

OK, that shit be insane. I got  a 62% CPU utilization out of that. I'm running what is basically a Core 2 Duo with 1 meg of L2 cache overclocked to 2.4 GHZ with an FSB speed of 1066 mhz. No clockspeed reducing when the CPU is running hot options on as well.

That's fucking insane.

[sleepydude]

I suspect that in the end, that's probably the CPU usage you can expect. There's a lot of stuff happening on the screen in the SNES and javascript is in no way build for any of it; however initial tests on the new scroll are looking really promising, so when that's up and ready, at least you'll be able to walk around comfortably.

[I.S.T.]

Hmm. I thought it was flash or java.

[sleepydude]

Nope, that's part of the project. Let's face it a web browser is just not the place for something like this, as much as this is a project to put FF3 online, it's a project to see what can be done with javascript/php. Anyway, the new scrolling is up and it is much much faster, plus my mp3's don't stop playing when I scroll around. Part of what I did was to flatten the layers, so now the sprite is on top of everything, but that's fine, I was always planning on flattening them into stuff anyway, so all in good time. Anyway, let me know how the new scrolling works. 

[I.S.T.]

Down to a max of 32%.

[sleepydude]

Put another update up, although nothing really looks any different, except that you can put on sprint shoes if you want. Flattening the layers turned out to not to be a good idea, so it was back to the drawing board in terms of how to scroll around efficiently, and I finally came up with a scheme that scrolls independently of how many layers there are, so I should be able to add in as many layers as I need (probably 7 in the end) and scroll around just fine. This method is also a little easier on the CPU. I'm pretty satisfied with this system, so I'm finally going to move onto other things. Unfortunately, the next steps are pretty much just setting up the database (I currently pull map data from a copy of the rom, which is not a very good system) and ripping out the rest of the maps, so it may be a while before there's another interesting update, but of course, I'll keep everyone posted.