Parasite: Marrow and Omega Red powers
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Yesterday Zvitor released his first beta of Omega Red. In honor of the occasion, I've added support for him to Parasite... so far only the "Death Spores" hyper is done, though, because I have to do some hairy frankenspriting to make the special look right.
I've also got the Marrow power set mostly done. The Stinger Bones hyper needs a little work, but it's getting there.
Labels: Parasite
Link: new version of Fighter Factory
Friday, June 26, 2009
Just a link this morning; I'll have the regular Friday news on my WIPs later tonight.
The other day I read over on Marcus McElhaney's blog that VirtualTek has released a new version of their Fighter Factory software, which is my main tool I use to assemble and program my characters. Tons of updates make this an upgrade worth doing, even though it means having to re-learn some of my techniques. Check it out.
Labels: Links
New site features: tags/labels
Saturday, June 20, 2009
So, yesterday I got an itch to try and write some code to auto-generate a "tag cloud" to present a slightly different way to dig into the deep content on my blog. It amazes me that I've actually been writing this thing for nearly 7 years now! (since August 2002) That's a lot of content to go back through, if you were looking for some particular post that had dropped off of my front page due to age.
So, as of yesterday, all the content on this blog has now been tagged (Blogger uses the term "labels," but it amounts to the same thing, and "Label Cloud" doesn't sound as snazzy), and you can see the label(s) for any given post at the bottom-left. (this post is tagged as "site news"). If you click on the tag/label name, you'll be shown a single, large page that includes all of my posts on that subject. I've also added a preliminary (and admittedly rough) Tag Cloud section to the navigation bar on the right side of the blog.
You probably know how tag clouds work, but in case you don't: the size of the tag name indicates how often I talk about that subject. Some of those surprised me: for example, I expected the "12 Days of Christmas" posts to be pretty prominent, and the tag reflects that, but "Lobo" still has all the rest of them beat, hands down. Makes sense, I suppose: if you view that tag's page, you'll see that early on I posted just about every little stinking detail of his progress up to the 1st alpha release, 1st public beta, 2nd public beta, 1st "it's done" release, and last year's remix. Plus I still think of him as one of my favorite MUGEN "children." So yeah, I've posted a lot about Lobo. ^_^
One note: a lot of those early posts are broken in one way or another... either because I linked to my old CJB-hosted redirect (prior to getting my buyog.com domain), or because I used relative paths to link to stuff, or because the old content doesn't exist online anymore (which, alas, is the case with many of the old screenshots, sprite animations, and alpha/beta releases). At some point I may go back and fix some of them, but then again, maybe they're more authentic this way. What do y'all think?
Anyway, I've found it mildly diverting to trip down memory lane and see how far I've come in the past 7 years. Here's to many more.
Labels: site news
Kind of a slow week
Friday, June 19, 2009
I've been busy finishing up a paper I'm submitting for publication this week (grad school thing), so haven't had a ton of time to work on MUGEN. That said, I've done a few things.
First, a little clarification on last week's update, since I got several comments on it that missed the point: the Doomsday in that screenshot ISN'T available for download, nor will it ever be, because it's just a training dummy I created for making demo shots like that one. It's got a stance animation, taken from DeanJo's full-fledged Doomsday WIP and that's all. And no, I have no idea when DeanJo's project will be done and released. So I'm sorry to have gotten everyone's hopes up. For now you'll have to be content with the 3d Doomsday, or Team Spoiler's less-than-ideal-but-not-horrid version. (And no, I won't email those versions to you. Google for them if you need to, or look on Infinity's forum. What am I, your concierge? =P)
Now, with that out of the way... a guy at the ScruffyDragon forum that goes by the name "Matt God Church" wanted to help out with Parasite, so he sent me his edits for a custom strong punch for the Carnage powerset. Plus I've been experimenting with custom moves for the Green Lantern powerset. So here's a peek at those two:
I've also been thinking this week about how the customized basic attacks are going to interact. As cool as I think it would be to have, say, a stretchy, Plastic Man-style Venom punch, I fear it may open up too huge a can of worms if I set the precedent that all 100+ power sets can interact. That would mean I'd have to come up with (and edit!) 1002 = 10,000 different possible attack combinations! Clearly, that's NOT gonna happen.
So, moving forward, I think I've decided that power set #1 will determine the customized behavior of punches, and power set #2 will likewise determine custom kicks. Separate them out that way, at least for now. Maybe later when I'm done with my grad school, independently wealthy and retired from my day job, and crazy bored, THEN I might consider editing 10,000 different sets of basic attacks for a single MUGEN character. Or, y'know... maybe not.
Custom punches for Doomsday & Ice
Thursday, June 11, 2009
My partner Jet the Phoenix continues his great work on designing custom powerset-based attacks for Parasite... here are the custom punches for Doomsday and Ice:
(Note that the Doomsday character in the above screenshot is just a "ragdoll" I put together with a few sprites from DeanJo and Kal-Elvis. It's not finished, it's not public, and no I won't trade you for it. It's just a test dummy I use for Parasite, until the real one's done.)
Someone sent me a message this week, saying that he was afraid that Parasite was maybe getting TOO awesome, and all of this custom stuff we're throwing in will make the character bloated and slow. All I can say in response is, we're shooting for a truly unique experience here, and I'll do all I can to make sure he's the best -- and most bug-free -- as he can be.
Labels: Parasite
Parasite Gets All Venom-y
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Jet the Phoenix continues to crank out custom powerset ideas for Parasite, and I'm trying to keep up by coding them faster than he's sending them (I'm behind right now). The current plan is to give him some combination of custom hard punch, hard kick, guard, and stance for each of his different powersets, when possible. Here's a peek at the Venom customizations to hard punch and guard:
Labels: Parasite
More Parasite customizations
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Sorry this is late; Grad school tasks took priority last night.
My Parasite partner, Jet the Phoenix, shared a great idea with me recently: over and above the special and hyper moves, different power sets should "feel" different. His suggestion for one way to achieve this was by customizing his guard and his strongest base attacks. So far I've been working on Ice and Thing power sets, but others will get this treatment over time as well:
-Edit- I neglected to mention that the new stuff I'm adding to Parasite is almost all Jet's work at this point, and the guard effects are no exception. He's a great partner, with a ton of really good ideas to make the next release soooo much better than the first. :)
Labels: Parasite