Verge, Awesome Sauce in a Box.

Demo Alarm: Time Keepers

Gayo — 2008-06-30T00:46:19+01:00

You might assume, since the front page has been quiet, that not much is going on. It's actually been pretty active, though! I've just been very busy with my meth habit and haven't had time to post. So, what's new? First up: Ness has released a second demo of [Time Keepers] (offsite link).

You might remember Time Keepers from the original Demo Alarm, way back in 2005. This is basically the same game, but with some added functionality, a second and much more complex mission, and a bit more actual plot. For those of you just tuning in, this is an "infiltrate and steal stuff, optionally killing everybody" type game. Most of the original problems (inadequate weapon choice, slow text speed, no saves) have been fixed -- the demo now autosaves regularly as well as manual saves, and you have a wide selection of weapons to choose from. THe button selection is a bit complex, but the game takes beautifully to a gamepad. The enemies are still pretty stupid, so gaming the AI is a highly effective strategy, but on the whole it feels a lot more like a game and less like a proof of concept.

There are Achievements. What the hell, Ness! I think these are the only two currently in the game, but still, wow. It's nice to see someone making good use of the net features this way; this definitely raises the bar for other VERGE games. Therre's a lot of potential for more of these as the game progresses -- the existing missions are heavily constrained, but it would be easy to design more open missions using this same framework, and even now you have a lot of options in taking out the guards.

Time Keepers still feels very alpha. There are some pretty big bugs, and the game desperately needs a proofreader. That said, the main problem is just that the AI still has a long way to go: you can just stand off to the side and a guard will lose track of you, for instance. The second mission takes place in a place where armed guards swarm the instant you destroy a security camera, but you can break into a guy's room and loot in in front of him and he doesn't react. In a sense this is a necessity since outwitting the computer is the main way you overcome the enemy's superior forces, but there's definitely some more polish needed.

What flaws Time Keepers has can be forgiven because it's an extremely ambitious game. I'm really glad to see this sort of neat stuff being done with VERGE, and it's nice to see 2D tactical infiltration games more complex than "move when the guards aren't nearby," especially fanmade ones. Whereas the original demo was more promising than truly fun, this one is actually a lot of fun to play, and I look forward to seeing what the next mission will be.

New verge.exe, new event triggers (onStep, onEntityActivation)

mcgrue — 2008-04-25T08:28:38+01:00

There are now four new read/write string variables accessible to verge3 via vc:

trigger.onStep
trigger.afterStep
trigger.beforeEntityScript
trigger.afterEntityScript

These are global callfunction triggers. If they are blank, or if they are set to a string that isn't a vc function name, nothing happens. But if they are set to a vc function name, awesome magic happens!

If trigger.onStep is set to a vc function name, that function will be called everytime the player entity crosses a zone activation border, regardless of if a zone is about to be activated. If a zone will be activated, this function occurs right before that zone's script goes off.

If trigger.afterStep is set to a vc function name, that function will be called everytime the player entity crosses a zone activation border, regardless of if a zone is about to be activated. If a zone was activated, this function occurs right after that zone's script goes off.

Both trigger.onStep and trigger.afterStep's assigned vc functions will have access to a proper event.tx, event.ty, regardless if a zone gets activated. Note that this is a change in behavior, as event.tx and event.ty are now updated at a new point. If this breaks anyone's day, please let me know.

These two triggers are good for things like dealing with poison and tintinabar-style effects and step counters, which are more dependant on the act of walking than on any specific zone. I was brought to implement this specifically because there was no good way to deal with decrementing the "steps to battle" counter for Sully, and this seemed like an idea whose time had come.

If trigger.beforeEntityScript is set to a vc function name, that function will be called before any entity's onActivate script is called.

If trigger.afterEntityScript is set to a vc function name, that function will be called after any entity's onActivate script is called.

Both trigger.beforeEntityScript and trigger.afterEntityScript's assigned vc functions will have the proper event.tx, event.ty, and event.entity values available to them, just like the entity's onActivate script does.

These two triggers are great for handling universal pre- and post-conditions for entity onActivate events. Specifically, in Sully it was getting tiresome to have to tell the game to forbid the menu as the first line of every entity's onActivate script, and it was getting tiresome to tell the game to re-allow menus afterwards. If you forgot any of these, you basically created a gameplay bug! Awesome, eh?

Forthcoming, but not implemented yet, are similar variables for before and after any zone has been adjacently activated. I'm also looking into making a new kind of zone activation which would activate when you push against it. Imagine a closed door opening when your player pushes into it. I am eager to listen to any suggestions for both new callback triggers, and new script activation conditions.

Please, share your thoughts!

Download the 2008.04.25 build of verge3 (PC exe only)

Clamming Up

Kildorf — 2008-04-21T02:13:50+01:00

Hi there everyone. It's been pretty quiet around here lately. How are you? We should meet more often! I've brought something for you.

Things have been happening, I assure you. We've just all gotten afraid of telling anyone! Or maybe, the people who really want to talk are all talked out from Gruedorf posts. Whatever the reason, I'm breaking the silence! Over the last couple of days I made various fixes to bring the Mac OS version of the engine up to date. Then, I spent this evening putting together a new release of Sully, pulled from the SVN repository, based on McGrue's instructions. I've put them together, and I've brought it here for you to enjoy!

This isn't your grandma's Sully Chronicles. A lot of changes have happened since the Ancient Times. Most noticeable (at first) will be graphical updates pretty much everywhere. Another thing to take note of is the addition of entirely new sections of story!

I hear that all this stuff was planned all along but just never got into the earlier versions of the demo. It's very cool (and I don't just say that because I designed two of the towns and did some of the graphics :D). In any case, there are still plenty of warts -- this is very much a WIP version of the game. I hope that doesn't diminish your enjoyment of the game, though!

Click here for the Windows version.
OR
Click here for the Mac OS version.

Play! Play and have fun! Play and be inspired!

Pharaoh, Let my website go!

mcgrue — 2008-03-13T20:08:15+01:00

mcgrue: Saturday night I was running into php errors on something I was trying to install on the same server as verge-rpg.com. The errors were obscure and nonsensical, so I figured it was time to try a php upgrade. A long story short: a dependency chain basically bit me in the ass, and our mysqld became... somehow uninstalled (why uninstalling Exim would do this, I don't know. Le sigh.)

By 8 AM sunday morning I'd reinstated a mysqld on vrpg's server, but it was now mysql 5 instead of mysql 4. There were some underlying sql syntax changes. And by this point I was exhausted and continued to be too tired to work on it after work.

So I brought in the canadian cavalry...

Overkill: When we updated to MySQL 5, vrpg's website codebase had lots of magical error messages involving operator precedences of joins vs comma operators. It, of course, had misleading error reports too, so then it lead me to think the error was happening in a completely different file than the boards index.

Moral of this story: copy-pasting your error reports is BAD! Everything should be normal again now though.

mcgrue: I think there are a few more morals than that here, but... yeah. Anyways: the site is back up!

New verge.exe WIP

mcgrue — 2008-02-11T13:01:20+01:00

For those of you who like new exes, I just built a new windows executable current as of today's svn revision (200).

You can get it at: http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/verge3/trunk/redist/verge.exe.

username: anonymous
password: anonymous

For those interested in making modifications to the verge executable, I posted instructions on how to add a new vc function over at egometry.com.

New in this revision are the final two functions of this list (but you may not have been aware of the rest of them...) :

SetCharacterWidth()



DictListKeys()



ListBuiltinFunctions()

ListBuiltinVariables()

ListBuiltinDefines()



GetPlayer()

	

GetUserSystemVcFunctionCount()

GetUserSystemVcFunctionByIndex()

So there you go. A new WIP build of the EXE. If a mac-haver would like to compile the current revision we can bottle it all up and officialize it! Please: test the crap out of it.

Man, It's way too late. Who loves ya, baby?

Gruedorf: rollcall!

mcgrue — 2008-02-06T09:56:22+01:00

Okay, I'm gathering data for the next update. Here's the list of newcomers I have since the last big update:

RPGKing - DragonQuest: Abberance
Ioachim (site out of commission) ~~http://moonwalk.3host.biz~~
IkimashoZ - CPhon
Eldrich - Serinor
Mordred - Spectre Engine

So if you announced you're competing and you weren't on the old list and you aren't on this list, you have slipped through the cracks! Please respond in this thread if I missed you and I'll get you in the update.

Thanks!

LuaVerge

Kildorf — 2008-02-03T23:49:13+01:00

If there's anyone out there using the Lua bindings for Verge, here's a note about an issue that has had me tearing my hair out for the last 24 hours or so. Overkill helped me figure out what was going on here.

By default, all of the Verge stuff (its variables and its functions and whatnot) all got tossed into a table called LuaVergeRaw. This was kind of a pain to work with so one of the things that you could do was to import all of that table into the global namespace, _G. Unfortunately this had the side effect of clobbering the first-tier variables like xwin and timer. (Well, specifically, you could get their value like you were supposed up to the moment you tried to assign anything to them; after that your value of the variable and the engines became unsynced.)

In any case, Overkill and I, being the primary users of Lua in V3, had a quick chat and decided the best solution here was to just use the LuaVergeRaw table, but give it a better name. We renamed it to v3, because it's short and in keeping with Lua's style for libraries.

In any case, if you have done any LuaVerge development, be warned that the newest version in the SVN (checked in about five minutes ago) will probably break your code. Sorry about that.

(By the way, for those who follow such things: My host is currently down so this is going to have to server for my weekly Gruedorf post until it's fixed.)

Gruedorf: not quite an update...

mcgrue — 2008-01-28T09:41:52+01:00

Silence on the front page doesn't mean silence from the competition. Since the last roundup, a few competitors have joined, and there's been a bunch of people failing!

Now, this isn't a roundup, but I wanted to point out that one of the key parts of this competition is the implied mockery of your nemesis... es. And nobody has done as good a job of that to date as SDHawk just did.

No, really. I mean it! GO READ THIS NOW.

...read it?

That's grade-A showmanship and/or trash-talkin' right there. Y'all are slackers.

In other news, ustor's made a rudimentary Gruedorf tracker. It's incomplete and doesn't have the entire competition on there, but it's a start.

Anyone who's missing from the front page of the competition, sound off in this thread and I'll get you added in asap.

Great apologies!

mcgrue — 2007-12-18T22:45:06+01:00

Sorry about the downtime, kids. And thanks to Toen for the quick spot that the domain had switched to a parking page. I re-registered it in time and we're back alive.

I'm a bad father. :(

Also: with hope there'll be a new comprehensive gruedorf update. I'm sorta swamped what with the move to Silicon Valley/new job/looking for house/hiding the bodies/etc/etc...

Gruedorf: The Legend Continues

mcgrue — 2007-11-19T04:46:52+01:00

It's that time again, kiddos! Tim to see how the gruedorf challengers are holding up!

We have two new Johnny-come-latelys: Toen and Erayman. Everyone give them a round of applause for the stones to join an unwinnable battle, and condolences for their imminent demise at the hands of their betters!

We also have one Johnny-go-awayey: the indominatble John "Ustor" Weng has joined us in our little band of dysfunctional brothers. His new wundermint.com not only features an umlauted minty 'U', but a dire assortment of completed games only comparable to SD Hawk's... and on the whole prettier than those.

The competition stiffens like undersexed freshmen at Mardi Gras. I'm not too worried, though... I'm sure to vanquish you all, etc., etc...

The Motley Roster

COMPETITOR	TEAM/SITE	GAME	URL
Code	(Eponymous)	Zodiac Cogency	http://codesgame.3host.biz/wordpress/
Erayman	Armor Factory	(zomg ditto)	http://armorfactory.hextudio.com/
Falthorn	GameOn Cafe	Scroll-a-tron 9k?	http://gameoncafe.com/
Kildorf	(himself)	Geas	http://speveril.northknight.com/
McGrue	Egometry	Saga of the Stars	http://egometry.com/
Overkill	Bananattack!	Signal	http://bananattack.com/blog/
Rysen	RysenSoft	Amethyst	http://rysen.seanoyler.com/
SDHawk	Contrivia	?	http://stellarx.org/sdhawk/contrivia/
Syn	The Finishers	Soul of the Machine	http://soulofthemachine.3host.biz/
Thrasher	Implode, Explode	Vulture	http://imploexplo.blogspot.com/
Toen (zumpiez, lol?)	Stick Ninja	<--	http://stickninja-gruedorf.blogspot.com/
Ustor	Teh Ruster Himself lul	"Tactical Action RPG" for now	http://www.wundermint.com/posts

The Progress Report

Code: The Zodiac Cogency

The Zodiac Cogency has been in good upkeep, with Code making good on the "7 days or else" ultimatum. Not only has he been a sport with making some neat strides in his battle system, he currently holds first place in regards to nicest display of boobies in a gruedorf game (...even if they are potentially ripped boobies). Code is totally not a loser. Yet.

Code, having posted today, has until the 11/25 to make his next update as of this writing.

Erayman: Armor Factory

Erayman's a long time lurker, first time demo poster! Ha-ha, gruedorf is WORKING!

Ahem.

Erayman's first effort is a nice one. He's got a little map workout out of a very nice tileset (made for the public by age-old VERGEr and artist extraordinaire Hyptosis.

The demo also features the beginnings of a battle system and a map system, and Erayman shows some amount of dedication here. We shall have to keep our eyes on him, fellow fiends and villains.

Unfortunatly, Erayman is tip-toeing preposterously close to the edge of the 7-day-limit-of-losing as of this update. Will he manage to escape the pains of loss? Tune in next time! (how dramatic!)

Falthorn: The (absent) Sidescroller

Speaking of loss... Notice the lack of an update picture? This isn't due to a text-only update. This is due to no updates.

At all.

On his whole blog!

For over two weeks!

I'd suspect both Falthorn and the enigmatic "Thunderpudd" had died, but for the fact that I talked to Falthorn on the telephone but last night.

Falthorn is a loser and has been in a constant state of disgrace since 11/5. I hear his family has disowned him and sold all of his meager belongings.

Kildorf: Geas

My arch-nemesis saw that in the post previous to the current one I claimed to've done a light amount of work. Whereas I did several hours of map editing, here's, in his own words, what he added for this update.

"Basically, this version adds a frames-per-second counter, and has the neat feature that if you hit "A" then it crashes."

-Seamus Peveril, Neo-Renaissance Man

With competition like this, it's truly a wonder I don't slit my wrists out of shame from merely drawing comparison.

If one considers this "post" legitimate, Mister Kildorf has until 11/21 as of this writing to stop sucking, lest he be branded with the firey iron of loserdom.

McGrue: The Astrad

While boasting earlier this week that I'd be making an amazing, mindblowing, panty-disintegratingly-cool post any day now, I blatantly defied myself in.... not doing so!

Instead I spent time cleaning up the map that I am going to demonstrate the nigh-disgusting amounts of awesome upon. No, really. You have been warned.

If someone else ever cared to take the time to work up a news post like this, this here would be a great opportunity to mock me to little pieces. However, since I'm the one spending a few hours of my precious time writing this summary, I'm declaring myself super-awesome and quite handsome to boot. Take that!

McGrue has not lost to date, and will continue to never lose... as long as he posts again before or on 11/25.

Overkill: Signal

After being mercilessly taunted, teased, poked, prodded, and mocked by all the other reindeer in #verge about his Sucktastic Loser status from earlier, Mr. Crowell decided to dust off, get back on the horse and attempt to stop sucking.

Unfortunatly, Andrew's idea of "stop sucking" is "do as little work as possible in a week", as his entire update consisted of loading pre-existing artwork and displaying it. No, really, that's it!

I mean, at least Kildorf had the good sense to bind the 'A' key to application armegeddon.

Overkill has lost once before, and is currently Technically Not Losing until 11/25 as of this writing.

Rysen: Amethyst

Rysen's update is yet another unimpressive, sad sack of a post. Here, hear the man himself describe his doings:

"So Greg�s sleep is now in, there�s a fancy attack animation for it, and it will prevent an enemy from attacking for such amount of time. It�ll also break after you use a regular attack�.I meant to add this for magic attacks as well, but forgot. :D"

"Still no visual representation of it, as I�m still trying to figure out how I�m gonna do that."

Really, guys, come on. Pics or it didn't happen. Shameful.

Rysen apparently hasn't lost yet, but I'm sure he doesn't sleep well at night with work like this. Also his mother told me she doesn't actually love him. Honest. Rysen has until 11/23 to make a post before he enters the Hall of Losedom.

SDHawk: Contrivia

Crikes. SDHawk continues to "design" his "game" and pretends that these "words" constitute "work". The nerve.

Read his many new words here in google docs. Or don't. Because TL;DR.

I'm not going to bring up any irony in citing "tl;dr" in this post if you don't... <_<

SDHawk has until 11/21 to cough up more work before he's considered a big fat loser.

Syn: Soul of the Machine

Clearly misinterpreting the cheers of his enemies that he was about to fail, Syn decided to rally and post... a new technicolor sink!

Frankly, I should interpret this as an act of war.

Syn hasn't lost yet, but he *is* french canadian. So that's funny. Syn has until 11/21 to make another brightly colored appliance or face terrible mocking at the hands of the Loser Notification Execution Squad.

Thrasher: Vulture

In a mind-boggling attempt to use some deranged reverse-psychology on me, Thrasher is attempting to claim he's lost when my google reader says he hasn't. He was close, though. If he really wanted to lose he should've waited a few more hours.

Anyways, he's made a 3d thing using a 3d lib and default 3d parts. Apparently it's gonna be a tactical RPG involving ROBITS! Isn't that EXCITING?

Thrasher may or may not have lost before, and he may or may not be a loser now. He's bewildered me to my very core. Either way, he has until 11/19 to break his silence on his blog before he's definitly, definitly a loser again (or maybe not again).

Toen: Stick Ninja

Long time verger and indie posterboy Toen has decided to come out of a retirement to kick it with a new game and a new alcoholic binge! I'll let him use his own words here.

"A NEW KIND OF HERO. FOR A NEW KIND OF BITTER ARCH-NEMESIS RIVALRY.

"Featuring a KILLER SOUNDTRACK by whoever I feel like sticking into it with a flagrant disregard for copyright law, MINDBLOWING graphics by me and the size 9 Photoshop brush, and STUPEFYING rendering speeds brought to you by Master Gambrell's CAROT ENGINE.

So, we're finally getting the gun-toting, hookshot-firing stick-figure action gamers have cried out to the heavens for ages to recieve. Where a cold, unfeeling god did not deliver, Jeff "Toen" Hutchins will.

This one will truly test the Tychoian gameplay-over-pretty hypothesis. Assuming, that is, that there's good gameplay.

Toen has until 11/21 to pull more sticks out of his ass before he is branded He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Win'd.

Ustor: ???

And finally, our new dark horse candidate. I actually know a bit about this entry and am excited to see it. And that's not just because it may or may not involve more boobs than The Zodiac Cogency.

The hypothetical boobs don't hurt, though.

Apart from coding his website from scratch using cakePHP (and the first time he's used PHP), he's done little but declare his intent to rock our collective socks off. Fiend, Fearmonger, or Fraud: You be the judge.

Ustor has until 11/23 to produce something of sustance before he will be baked. And then there will be Loser Cake.

And that's it!

Falthorn's currently the only loser! HEY FALTHORN STOP LOSING!

Well done everyone... and less well done to those of you who barely did anything. We'll meet again in a week or two with a new report. Until then, let's see some more noise on those forums, people. ;)

The VERGE 3 SVN is back online.

mcgrue — 2007-11-02T07:15:25+01:00

Sorry for the weeklong outage, folks. http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/verge3/ is back up and running.

Remember: to get read-access to the SVN, you can use anonymous/anonymous.

For fans of vergec source code and games instead of real c engine sources, also check out the somewhat derelict http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/sully/.

The Gruedorf Update!

mcgrue — 2007-10-29T02:06:46+01:00

So, since the gruedorf contest gauntlet was thrown, the idea's picked up a bit of steam, and fiends and rogues from all over the game-making cosmos have joined in our mighty battle. As of last count, the never-ending competition reads as follows:

COMPETITOR	TEAM/SITE	GAME	URL
Code	(Eponymous)	Zodiac Cogency	http://codesgame.3host.biz/wordpress/
Falthorn	GameOn Cafe	Scroll-a-tron 9k?	http://gameoncafe.com/
Kildorf	(himself)	Geas	http://speveril.northknight.com/
McGrue	Egometry	Saga of the Stars	http://egometry.com/
Overkill	Bananattack!	Signal	http://bananattack.com/blog/
Rysen	RysenSoft	Amethyst	http://rysen.seanoyler.com/
SDHawk	Contrivia	?	http://stellarx.org/sdhawk/contrivia/
Syn	The Finishers	Soul of the Machine	http://soulofthemachine.3host.biz/
Thrasher	Implode, Explode	Vulture	http://imploexplo.blogspot.com/

There have been some neat examples of progress. Code posted his first demo of The Zodiac Cogency (click to download), containing the beginnings of a battle system.

The vile, worthless heap of a man ostensibly known as "kildorf" released a new demo showing off some fancy state machinery (click to download), and a short discussion about how he did it. I am sure his mother is proud of him.

Falthorn joined in with a flash-based sidescroller demo (click to launch). It's fairly basic now with a single screen containing a few floating platforms, a pretty sprite, and a bottomless pit that must've been designed by Valve (try falling into it.) Also fun is supersizing the main character by clicking upon him. Not bad for a starting base... and definitely the most accessible development platform as far as end-user development of this lot.

Meanwhile, the true hero of the people (ie, me) released a truly amazing and heartbreaking work involving the beginnings of a heads-up display. This entry has been improving upon libraries in the sully collection. Masterful use of pre-existing code. Gold stars all around for me. No, really. (download this masterpiece here).

Overkill over at the newly made bananattack.com released the first lua-verge entry in the form of his sidescrolly demo game thing there. He then went on to talk about his rather lengthy post worth reading if you're into that sort of thing(i am, personally. I like the words.) .

One of the Ancient Ones of verge, the polymath Sean "Rysen" Oyler, has brought his Amethyst Tech Demo (download here) to the table. Like Kildorf's Geas and my SotS, Amethyst has existed for years as a neglected project. Here's to hoping that the mutual shame of oh-so-many wasted years keeps us all on our toes to keep pushing delicious digital games out of our fleshy man-wombs.
...
Er, and Rysen showed off the current state of his battle system and menus, too. There are some nice transitions in there, and the skill trees in the menus totally look interesting.

sdhawk showed off his progress in a self-described "lame update". I do not disagree. He's joined by Thrasher in the whole "I like to talk about my plans instead of doing my plans" department. Chop chop, boys. Talk is cheap. Don't you know you get a +1000 word bonus for a picture? Honest. That's the exchange rate since forever.

The final entry of this update belongs to another oldish member, Syn, who has less "dead project" baggage than the rest of us sorry souls. Hanyways, while Syn hasn't posted a demo yet, he has shown some tangible work in the form of some male base character animations. Not only that, but his comment-based witty banter is apparently up to snuff.

Some less-than-good news

It's great to see everyone actually doing stuff, and I'm looking forward to this coming week's progress. But it's with a heavy heart that I make the following announcement: Falthorn and Overkill already lost. Man, how pathetic is that? One entry and nothing. The whole contest exists to put at least an hour a week into your project, and neither of them could muster that. It bears repeating:

Overkill and Falthorn are totally losers who lost!

Of course, there's no real way to win this other than being the last man standing, and even then you lose the first week you don't post anything anyways, but really... to not make it two weeks. Tragic. The English language truly has no words for the depth of sorrow I presently feel.

Our hearts go out to the friends and family of Overkill and Falthorn. They will be missed.

Lua Verge Demo: Biggses Jukebox and Menu and Renderloop demo.

mcgrue — 2007-10-21T18:49:34+01:00

Click here to download Bigg's Jukebox demo

I was a bit miffed that we didn't have many good example pieces of v3 running in lua mode. Biggs stepped up and provided this little tech demo, showing off a few fundamentals in this box-rendering jukebox demonstration.

His readme text follows:

Biggs's Demo's Readme!

Hi, y'all. I wrote a simple jukebox in Verge. It is very basic, but if you study the code, I show off some of the things that can be done with Lua. It's sweet!

Features it shows off are:

engineStep(func) and engineLoop(func) for hiding the implementation details of the game loop
- see system.lua
managed resource lists for not having to keep track of loading/freeing resources in code all over the place (sounds, images, etc., but only currently used for modules and fonts in the demo)
- see ui.lua for fonts usage and system.lua for implementation of the list.
a declarative, album information "language" to showcase how XML is not needed with Lua--create your own data!
- see music.lua
programmatically (automatically) generated menus from the album info.
- see appMenus.lua
coroutines for a sweet multithreading demonstration (and makes coding sprites much easier too!)
- see sprites.lua for coding, appMenus.lua for usage,and system.lua for implementation

I recommend that anyone trying to understand the code will read through every single Lua file until they see how each part of the demo works together.

I have commented some files, but not others.

Notes

You might notice a lag whenever a song is selected to play.

This is because each coroutine will block all other coroutines until it is finished drawing itself. Since loading a song is both a blocking/synchronous call and takes a while to load, all other coroutines will wait on the coroutine that is loading the song. There is no way around this, unless one could break the loading functions down into baby steps and execute a step at a time inside the coroutine. The coroutine that is loading, would then slow down, but no other coroutines would.

The Gruedorf Challenge.

mcgrue — 2007-10-15T04:24:30+01:00

So, while mulling that there were no proof of concepts for the lua verge addition, I tried to convince Kildorf that he should make Geas into the packin demo for verge-lua.

Well, he hemmed and hawed, things were said, people's mother's were slighted, some ten-year-old verge "games" were brough up, and after the last WWF-style fake suplex had landed Kildorf and I were bitter, bitter enemies.

No, really. C'mon guys, I'm serious.

Anyways, now that we totally hate each other and are forever to be known as MORTAL ARCH-ENEMIES, we've decided to prove our hatred for each other in the most obvious way ever: to make our games that we've been dragging our feet about for years.

"Oh, no, not at least an hour's work a week on our games. That's... torture."

The rules are simple:

The arch nemesises must have a place with RSS that they post their game in progress.
They may not go more than 7 days without posting a new build and some text describing what's new.

So here are the feeds and sites in question:
speveril.northknight.com, Shamus "Kildorf" Peveril's HOUSE OF PAIN.
Egometry.com, Ben "McGrue" McGraw's site of terror.

We'll be putting up an aggregator on the side. If any of you "other" people want to join in on this, please contact me about it. But be wary: The price of failure is ETERNAL SHAME.

Well, more eternal shame than usually exists around here. You know... eternaller shame.

CAROT ENGINE

zeromus — 2007-10-04T08:18:23+01:00

Alright guys, I felt the need to shake something up and get this big slab of code onto the table for some folks to help me chew on.

I am releasing my c# (xna) game engine - CAROT ENGINE - alpha 1.

It is quite verge-inspired, as you might expect, and makes use of all the old verge resource formats while throwing in more than a few new features, not the least of which is the potential to run on an xbox 360.

I'm looking for a few good men to tear into this and make something with it. I'll be on 100% engine devving duty, cranking out whatever you find you need and stabbing bugs through the heart with my dull wooden wit. We need a proper packin to escort this game engine into the hearts of indie gamedevvers throughout the world.

Looking for something a little different? Give it a shot and let me know what you think. I'll have an SVN set up soon, and I'll let you check in your games so that I can fix them as I tweak the engine while it is still prototypish.

Bug Fixes.

Overkill — 2007-08-26T01:09:19+01:00

Apologies to anybody who downloaded the July 30, 2007 Verge build that was released a few days ago. Eldritch pointed out some important goof-ups we made, which have been fixed.

Verge3, 2007-08-25 build for the PC! Fixes right(), BlitLucent(), TBlitLucent(), and HookButton()

Hope this works better for all of you folks. Thanks!

Verge 3 goodness!

Overkill — 2007-08-23T22:11:37+01:00

Why, hello there everyone! I know a lot of you have been almost two years deprived of some Verge loving, and that's why I intend to resolve that today, August 23, 2007!

The new build has a bunch of nifty features that you'll likely enjoy. There are a ton of highlights. Fixing the annoying FreeImage() memory leak! Improved compiler errors, nested structs, and multidimensional arrays of structs! Gradient drawing routines! HSV color functions! New string and token functions! A way to make varargs functions! Lua as an alternative scripting language! Audiere as an alternative sound engine! A more complete sprite system! It couldn't all be crammed in here, so check out the huge changelog (which will be in a followup post) for the full details. We'll get around to making all the new documentation for the new features shortly, too.

[link removed due to some bugs - see the next news post for a less buggy release!]

Now, go forth and use this for the good of mankind! Also, report any new bugs or issues you find with it, since then we can continue to improve things. Thanks.

Also, a Mac release should be out soon, hopefully.

Demo Alarm: Serinor

Kildorf — 2007-06-18T00:55:10+01:00

Good news, everyone! Apparently Gayo escaped injury from the terrible destruction wrought by his computer. However, he seems to be a shadow of his former self, wandering on and off the Internet; he clearly did not escape unscathed. So once again, you'll have to put up with me!

Demo Alarm

The Epic of Serinor (year 2.5 release)

The Epic of Serinor, by Eldritch and company, depicts the adventures of a group of heroes out to save the world! Unlike your average run-of-the-mill heroes, these folks are tasked to do what really should be Plan A more often: to bring together as many of the world's peoples as possible to present a united front against the looming menace*. Serinor is a solid, classic RPG — it will, for some of us at least, dredge up fond memories of constructing a group of characters and then leading them on to greatness!

As I mentioned, you'll start the game by building a party of human characters from various classes as a group of adventurers being hired by the Church to deal with this looming menace thing. From there, you'll have the general plan explained to you, and then set loose to hopefully-not-screw-up-too-much. You're tasked with convincing the various (and not necessarily friendly!) races of the world to get onboard with the plan.

The gameplay is what you'd expect from an RPG, with the usual walking around, fighting monsters, and so on. Serinor doesn't pull punches though; at first you'll find that you have to stick fairly close to town to make yourself more powerful before striking out too far. Once you get underground, you'll find that torches are more than just a convenience. Overall, Serinor expects more from you than the average ~~bear~~ console-style RPG, but if you've never played this sort of game before, give it a chance. Some rewards are more sweet when you've fought tooth and nail for them!

Give it a shot. You'll enjoy it!

Download Serinor here or Get it from Eldritch's site

* Looming menaces are, after all, much like spoiled children.

Demo Alarm: Kambou

Kildorf — 2007-06-02T01:15:05+01:00

Things have been awfully lax around here. A while back Grue made a post making wild (ly inaccurate) proclamations of actually doing something soon. We all know (at least, we should by now) what comes of wild proclamations.

Demo Alarms are usually the area of Gayo's expertise, but from what I hear his house and the surrounding area were consumed in an explosive blast produced by the meeting of his computer and its anti-computer. I believe he escaped alive, so he may well return to deliver many great demo alarms in the future, but the future is an uncertain thing. Until then, I've seized the reins when no one was looking.

Demo Alarm

Kanji Bouken: The Great Kanji Adventure

"Kanji Bouken" (shortened to Kambou) means "Kanji Adventure". Kanji is one of the three mystical scripts of the Japanese language, and the most terrifying. IkimashoZ, a fearless chap who happened to be teaching English in that ancient land, has created a game that not only gives you the ability to battle it out with ji, Japanese letters, it will likely also end up teaching you something in the end.

Kambou is, in essence, a turn-based strategy wargame. Each turn you'll have the option of deploying from your pool of available ji as well as moving and attacking with in-play ji. To complicate matters, ji have elemental types for their attack and defense, they gain experience and, in a particularly brilliant play on the theme, can be chained together into phrases (learned by solving riddles) to use powerful special attacks.

Before you get into the action, Kambou has an extensive (but well designed) menu that lets you solve riddles (see above), buy items, review tutorials, and so on. Combat happens in either one-shot "training" battles, or by following the game's story, told by charming image-and-text sequences between battles (starring IkimashoZ himself, as well as an awesome magical cow from the future).

Overall, Kambou shows a lot of polish and seems to have a fairly hefty length. Its premise is a bit kooky (especially after you've seen the first story sequence) but is pulled off well. Check it out.

Download Kambou here or Get it from IkimashoZ's site
(~~I'll get a proper demo alarm in "Recent Cool Demos" list as soon as I can get the file section to cooperate with me.~~)
Overkill saves the day! File section's still uncooperative though ;_;

(And no, I haven't forgotten about Serinor. I'll make another post in a couple of days. For reals.)

But first, organization!

mcgrue — 2007-04-10T00:30:19+01:00

(Note: There will shortly be (quite overdue) demo alarms for both Kambou and Epic of Serinor. And *after* that will be the judgment of the most anti-climactic compo ever!)

In an attempt to get things into a little less derelict and a little more organized around here, I've created three google groups.

The VERGE 3 Engine Development Groupmeant to organize and focus developers who want to improve the main line of the engine. The Engine's open source now, after all, and as such we should try to manage it in the style of the more successful open source projects. After all, collaboration doesn't just Spontaneously Generate. That's a trick only maggots can do!
The VERGE 3 Pack-In Demo Development Groupa group dedicated to discussing and organizing people to clean up and betterify the pack-in demo, The Sully Chronicles. There's a battle system in the working build (I'll be making the sully SVN public shortly after (hopefully) some people join the group and some chatter happens), and I'm interested in seeing the demo polished off and the libraries made awesomer/more useful.I'm also very interested in any ideas on how to make verge libraries more easily portable/insertable. Any ideas at all are welcome.
Finally, there's the Verge General Interest Group which is basically an unmoderated do-whatever group. Sure, we do have the forums for this, but I figured if I set up groups, there'd be a desire to fool around in them, and the first two I'd rather stay courteous. Which is to say I'm moderating them, so you'd better remain nice.

The groups are meant to provide a better forum for the development of the engine and the packin/devtools in an organized manner, instead of being developed in a sort of clandestine, darkroom environment with all of the goings-on hidden from most of y'all.

Because, frankly, that really hasn't worked well for the past 10 years, now has it?

It may seem a little redundant right now since we have these forums, but google groups has email, rss, and google search at hand, and it was easier to set these up for now than to implement things in the site. I'm fairly busy, and if we were to wait upon me to update the site... well... yeah. I'd rather see progress actually made so I can sleep at night with (slightly) less shame. ;)

When the next site revision occurs (no breath holding) the forums will finally have optional email alerts, individual rss feeds, and all sorts of goodies I really am looking forward to coding (because I'm a dork like that), and I'll integrate the groups backlog into the forum structure for a sense of completeness, but until I have some blessed free time, just think of these three groups as a much more notice-me-notice-me version of the vrpg boards.

So, please, join one, join all!

Current contest almost over!

mcgrue — 2007-03-03T02:39:10+01:00

So... how's everyone's entries? ;)

MapEd 3.0.1 Released.

Tatzen — 2007-03-01T07:48:16+01:00

MapEd 3.0.1 has been released.

Click here to download.

Maped 3 - 3.0.1

0000005: [Display] removing zones from the map list doesn't remove them from the map (tatsumi)
0000007: [General] Missing help file can cause crashes. (tatsumi)
0000001: [Display] VSP animations do not display (tatsumi)
0000003: [Importing] Import as Layer misbehaving (tatsumi)

More MapEd3 Announcements

Tatzen — 2007-02-28T07:42:01+01:00

I have setup a bug tracking site over on pi-r-squared.com. This will be the new and only valid portal for Maped bugs. If you have an outstanding issue, and it is not currently on that site, please create an account and open the issue.

This will streamline the bugfixing process and save everyone a lot of time. Also, I'm changing the maped versioning system. Previously, maped releases have followed the "MapEd3 BETA YYYY-MM-DD". To make it easier to identify bugs and future releases, I'm officially restarting the version counter, and the next release of MapEd3 will be 3.0.1.

The bug tracking site is located here:

Pi-r-Squared Bug Tracker

Thanks again for everyone's cooperation.

- Tat

MapEd3 Release

Tatzen — 2007-02-25T10:37:42+01:00

First of a series of beta MapEd releases. Reply to this thread with bugs/concerns.

Maped3 2007-02-25 beta

- Fixed: Various VSP Import crashes
- Fixed: Many .NET 2.0 Incompatabilities
- Fixed: VSPController was not being invalidated in some cases.
- Fixed: V2 VSPs will now correctly convert transparency
- Added: Ability to export tilesets without the grid
- Added: Option to create a layer based on imported vsp contents
- Removed: 'saving prefs' message when exiting.

Comes the Developer.

mcgrue — 2007-02-23T03:23:56+01:00

Tatsumi, creator of MapEd3, has return from the great beyond and is currently actively fixing and enhancing MapEd 3 again!

This would be a stellar time for you all to go help him by giving him bug reports.

He's currently monitoring This Thread, and asks that you provide stack dumps (that text crap that shows up during a crash) and relevant image data (screenshots) or your bug may be completely disregarded.

The Competition... begins.

mcgrue — 2007-02-15T04:15:32+01:00

This one's pretty simple, folks:

The competition starts as soon as this message posts. Go go go!
The competition ends at 00:01 Central Standard Time, March 5th.
Like the previous contest, this one must have RPG elements (ie, you are a person, some of the game involves interacting with other people. Use of textboxes is expected.)
No points will be deducted for originality of art. However, aesthetic appeal may be taken into account. That is, I don't care if you steal your art, but I do care if you put it together well. This also goes for music.
Your game must feature CANDY and/or the color PINK and/or the concept of CUTENESS. Daww.
Welcome, my friends, to the most emasculating RPG contest... ever.

Okay, there will be a compo.

mcgrue — 2007-02-12T05:50:03+01:00

There shall be a 2.5 weekcompo starting on Valentine's Day (ie, Feb. 14th).

It will last until March 4th.

That is all.

Valentine's day compo?

mcgrue — 2007-02-07T03:01:58+01:00

Okay, guys!

I want a show of hands as to how many are interested in a 2-week compo starting on valentine's day.

Respond in the comments, the compo will be announced on sunday if there enough people.

Demo Alarm

Gayo — 2006-12-20T05:39:14+01:00

So you may have noticed lately how we have been languishing in utter disgrace, what with no new build for over a year and multiple crippling website problems. Like a deadbeat boyfriend, we promise that we'll get these things sorted real soon now, even if we won't. And you'll put up with it, because you can't look into these eyes and say "No," now, can you?

But we do have something for you at least; it's something we didn't make, which is the easiest kind of something from out standpoint. Before you lies rpgking's Unnamed Dragon Quest Thingy! This is a picture-perfect emulation of the Dragon Quest GUI, and it manages to fit in a lot of really nice touches like the weird way your party surrounds the wagon on the map. Combined with the ripped tiles it's a punch in the nostalgia gland.

Like Choris' demo below, this one doesn't really have much to do, but it's worthy of mention for the verisimilitude alone. The BS isn't done yet, but everything else is shockingly accurate and well-implemented. The Dragon Quest games always had an insufferable UI, so it may seem perverse to go to this much trouble to duplicate it, but that's nostalgia for you, and here at VERGE we are all about nostalgia. So download this demo and remember a time before the crushing responsibilities of daily life destroyed your spirit!

Server woes!

mcgrue — 2006-11-01T16:52:39+01:00

The server has partially recovered from a 25 hour hardware-related outage, and may be up and down for a bit today.

Zeromus personally drove to Houston yesterday to fix it, because he is that hardcore.

More to come...

New Battle System demo from Choris! (He makes the good stuff...)

mcgrue — 2006-10-08T17:54:19+01:00

So, two things of note occurred recently!

Choris released a battle system demo he made over the summer...

...and Choris finally opened my eyes to how bad the current upload error is.

So, please, check out the demo. It's got a fully operational (sans skills) battle system, and outside of the battles you can bring up a full menu system. It's real purdy!. And when I get home from work, I'll give some of this php some sweet, sweet loving.

I'm such a bad father... :(

Edit:Link fixed. I'm an even worser father!

Return of the SVN.

mcgrue — 2006-10-07T04:23:47+01:00

Although it's been back for a few weeks*, I sorta've been busy enough not to finalize everything and test it out. Anyways, here it is:

For the public access SVN of verge3, point your Subversion client to:

http://www.verge-rpg.com/svn/verge3/
user: anonymous
pass: anonymous

If you want an account with which to commit, please contact me via email. My email address is hidden cleverly on many pages of this website, including the front page.

Furthermore, if you wish a SVN project for your personal v3 game, all you must do is ask. Isn't that nice?

*Hey, cut me some slack. vecna and ustor visited. Also some girls. Maybe some donkeys.

The judging is over! The winner is...

mcgrue — 2006-09-28T06:24:09+01:00

Here are the scores:
Gayo:
1. Overunderworld
2. Lexico
3. Junction 5
4. ORiJ
5. TPO
6. Polarity K

Rasis:
1. Junction 5
2. OverUnderWorld
3. Lexico
4. TPO
5. Orij
6. Polarity K

Grue:
1. Lexico
2. OverUnderWorld
3. Junction 5
4. Orij
5. (tie) Polarity K & TPO

Totals:
1. OverUnderworld (5pts)
2. Lexico (6 pts)
3. Junction 5 (7 pts)
4. Orij (13 pts)
5. TPO (13 pts)
6. Polarity K (17 pts)

Note that the top three places were incredibly close, with but a single point between each of them. This was a very difficult contest for me to judge personally... definitly the tightest pack of games I'd seen to date. Rock on out. Y'all. Word.

...

...I need to sleep. Check the comments for the actual detailed judgements!

Huzzah!

mcgrue — 2006-08-16T21:55:18+01:00

That there contest is over!

Your friendly judges will be: Rasis, Gayo, and MySelf.

~~Expect the judgements by the end of the day this Sunday. No, really!~~

Update: in a plot twist I'm sure nobody expected, one of the judges has requested more time! Frankly, y'all can blame SDHawk's team for breaking 2.5 judges worth of brains.

Not to sound desperate, but...

Gayo — 2006-08-07T03:43:33+01:00

There was only one entry for the compo. As a result, it's been extended for another week, until one minute after 11:59 PM on the 13th. Submit some stuff this time, or we'll have to extend it for a month.

OMG, teh contest!

mcgrue — 2006-07-23T05:30:28+01:00

Sorry for the delay, folks. I forgot I wasn't in the time zone I used to be in.

Here's the rules:

The contest will be ending two hours later than previously announced (IE, it now ends 1:59 AM EST ~~August 6~~ August 7).

The majority of the game needs to take place in one (1) town area, where a "town" is defined as a place with NPC entities, has domiciles and has player interaction of a non-combat nature.

If the gamemaker desires, there may be 1 (one) dungeon area, with the stipulation that the afforementioned "town" needs to be stuck in the middle of the dungeon, be it a cave, a tower, a maze, or whatnot.

The afforementioned optional dungeon is, well, optional. Having one or not will not affect grading.

Having a battle system or not will not effect grading.

Having original or ripped art will not effect grading.

Grading will be solely based upon how fun the interaction is with said town (sidequests, little garnishes like switches, levers, and whatnot that produce effect and bring the player into the game, and general humor/ambience/experience).

Consider this the "make a fun demo" contest. Also, consider this a warmup for the next contest, which will be the "Sully is done, wheee!" commemorative contest... which will have very similar rules.

Any questions can be directed to me (mcgrue) and I reserve the right to clarify and/or modify the rules up to the end of the contest.

Goodspeed, soldiers of indeterminate spiritual and/or intellectual backgrounds!

EDIT: The contest ends 1:59 EST on Monday, August 7. The dates got bumped two hours, but Grue mistakenly forgot to up the date. 11:59 PM on Sunday + 2 hours != 1:59 on Sunday. There, we've got clarification.

-- Overkill

360 Hov! (or: onoes, I've been the terrerized!)

mcgrue — 2006-07-20T10:10:26+01:00

This is a formal announcement that, yes, we'll host a gamemaking contest. Whee!

The rules will be as follows:

Starts 12:01 AM EST July 23

Ends 11:59 AM EST August 6

No penalty for unoriginal art (ie, you may rip/recycle)

It will be an rpg, just to remind you all of our url. ;)

There will be extra conditions declared when the contest starts.

Newcomers to verge are very welcome to join! HoV (Hours of Verge) contests are a longtime tradition (zomg almost a decade now. We're so old) and a good way to gain practice! Some very awesome things have come out of HoVs before...

Also, I was in no way coerced into declaring this contest. Nosireebob.

Holy Contest.

mcgrue — 2006-07-08T07:11:49+01:00

While I don't usually bring notice to gamemaking contests that aren't exclusively for VERGEns, this one is way too weird not to give one of your street-like "shout-outs" to.

Word.

Anyways, check it out. SdHawk just may be onto something here. Besides, we need something to fill in the hole made by the lack of HoV's lately (really, what's up with that?).

For those of you who are impatient...

mcgrue — 2006-07-06T02:58:44+01:00

...the SVN now contains a precompiled windows EXE of the current point release. The executable safety is *not* guaranteed (not that it ever is, really) and new features/functionality and may or may not be consistent with the final "official" release of said hypothetical features!

Anyways, the executable is in the "redist" folder of the repo. Current additions are mentioned in the changelog in the base directory.

I shall not really go into how to get the SVN other than to point y'all to the about verge section where the location of the SVN server exists. If you can't figure out how to get it without assistance, then playing with undocumented features might not be such a good idea after all. ;)

Aside: please help me stop ~~cancer~~ the annoying login bug!

Website fixed, new engine imminent.

mcgrue — 2006-07-02T03:12:07+01:00

Just a note to those of you who like notes: I've hand merged the database so the "missing month" is no longer so missing. This makes me ~~completely pathetic~~ the best amatuer website admin ever.

Also of some interest is that we're discussing a point release of v3 sometime soon, with new features of much love. Isn't that great?

Edit: The nefarious login bug should now be dead. Hurray. Everyone may need to log in once, however.

Home again, home again...

mcgrue — 2006-05-07T19:08:04+01:00

...jiggity jig.

We're back on the new server. All of the user accounts have been meshed. However, the last few weeks of forum posts are in need of a little php script to merge them back into the database correctly. If only I'd've set the autonumbers on the user and message board post tables up a thousand or so counts, we'd've had no overlap between the two boxes. C'est la vie.

Anyways, we're back. Hopefully for good this time.

A question: Is anyone presently on a mac or on linux following the mac/linux verge developments, or has the lack of mapeditor turned all y'all away in bitter tears of disappointment?

Overkill has volunteered to add map, vsp, and chr-saving functions into v3's vc itself! So, we may have a universal v3 resource editor in a realistic timescale, and it'd be a verge-based program itself. The mind boggles.

Anyway, that should be neat. Even if I exaggerated about the volunteering bit. But you'll all encourage him to do the right thing, right?

Finally, I added the svn information to the about page. If any of you guys have C++ experience and want to fool around with the source, have at it. Free like your mom, and all.

Still more by Ustor

Gayo — 2006-04-12T21:20:51+01:00

Greetings, all! You may remember ustor as the man who brought us VERGE Wars, and more recently as the man who didn't finish VERGE Wars. Well, he's back, this time with two new games!

It's a story as old as time itself: stuff falls from the sky and you have to not get hit by it. BlockDodger is an extremely simple twitch game in the style of old arcade games. You play as a blue square who has to evade rectangles that fall from the sky. At its heart it's a story about racial conflict, but things aren't so cut-and-dried as you might expect -- there are also squares working on the rectangles' side.
This is a really, really simple game. The graphics are nothing but boxes, lines, and pixels on a black background, hearkening back to Asteroids and the like. There's no music, and aside from the confirm/quit buttons, which are not used in actual gameplay, the only controls are left and right. You can't even pause. There's a tendency nowadays to dress up really basic concepts with fancy graphics, and I feel this method suits that kind of game better. Combining an extremely simple mechanic with an extremely simple presentation produces a very pure, visceral gaming experience. Unfortunately I'm not very good at that kind of gaming experience, so I can only get to level 4. Overkill says he got to level 7 once, but that is an empty lie. In the context of BlockDodger levels, 7 is a number so huge that it has no meaning.

Next up is Cuddles, the for serious game of the pair. Let me say right here that Cuddles is hot shit. it's easily the most professional VERGE game I've ever played. If not for the ripped music it'd look for all the world like a for-moneys mobile game.
Cuddles is a game about clicking on things to save armless guys who die if they touch water. The cuddles, the aforementioned guys, are stuck on platforms above a water-filled pit and need you to harvest scrap metal for them to eat so that they can build ladders to reach the top of the screen. Shut up, it's not supposed to make sense. Anyhow, while this is happening the water level is rising and little monster guys are dragging the platforms down, and if the water meets the platforms you lose. You can also use money to buy power-ups. For an extra strategic element, different cuddles are finicky in different ways -- some want to eat money instead of scrap, some won't leave until all the others have left, and so on. The whole thing is sort of like Speed, except instead of a bus you have platforms and instead of having to go 50 miles per hour it has to stay out of the okay it's nothing like Speed.
The gameplay is somewhat simplistic, but not unpleasantly so. This is a perfect coffee-break game of the sort you would see on PopCap or on someone's cell phone. It's good that it can be played in bite-sized chunks, because after 10 minutes or so the intense mousework will murder your arm. I'm completely not kidding about this -- I got to level 10 in one sitting and I can only move my right hand in a twitching parody of motion. If your insurance company finds out you play this game they will double your premiums. Having said that, you should all play it. because it's awesome and really shows off what can be done with VERGE.

Quick note...

mcgrue — 2006-04-03T05:29:40+01:00

Signing up, recovering accounts, and other things of that nature are temporarily down. All should be well within a day or so.

Honest!

(also, the evil pagination error seems to be gone. One hopes forever!)

The server change has finished...

mcgrue — 2006-03-22T19:12:35+01:00

...but the cleanup has just started. Viva la... something.

It may take a day or two for the DNS to sort itself out.

I'd like to know if people are still having trouble logging in now. The various link errors and such (ie, when someone clicks on a next/previous type link and gets booted to the main page) will be solved as soon as I wake up.

Crazy stuff, man. (site updates)

mcgrue — 2006-03-08T08:05:39+01:00

Okay, so there's been some... unreliability at the present host of late. They change stuff here and there on us, so the manly Zeromus (my current hetero life-partner and/or roommate) has taken it upon himself to set up a pimping server on which I'll be leasing a manly chunk of resources for youse guys.

Anyways, I've fixed the stupid post-editing problem on the site. Overkill all but finished the games section a while back, and as soon as we make some final changes, we'll open that up to te public. This'll allow you to associate image galleries, files, and users with your game... and if you all are really good boys and girls, game-specific forums. But only if enough of you care to tell me that'd be desired.

It's been a little dead around here lately. Sorry I've been busy, baby. Will you forgive me? You know I love you, and I've been working on the Sully Battle System to prove it. That (and also vergecon 2k6, a month of zara, and vergecon2k6.1. Also work.) have been eating up all my time lately, but there's fun things ahead.

For instance, there's a linux version of verge3 out there in dev land, made by the awesome adderd. And there's the ever-active Rysen toiling on coolness, and Geronimo just released his Tetris Attack Clone demo (and also changed his name to phree radical). And Overkill's also been working on a slew of new v3-builtin functions (which sourcemaster aen has been keeping a wary eye on). And don't think I haven't noticed Code's Zodiac Cogency looking all pretty in the gallery. And Int22's definitly up to something with all the questions he's asking lately (and it's about time, too)!

So, yeah, there's actually a lot going on! Wow! Let's not do a repeat of 'the dark ages' where all the cool stuff is behind closed doors. Give a shout out here in the feedback. Are you new? say hi! Are you old? Are you working on anything? Is there something you'd like in the engine? Ask away!

Hrm. I guess to be extra-appealing I should put some screenshots and videos up here. People like shiny things! I'll totally edit those in, in a bit.

Rysen Ranch Update

Gayo — 2006-02-25T03:31:38+01:00

Greetings, true believers! You may recall Rysen Ranch, a Harvest Moon clone by delicious, nougat-filled VERGE veteran Rysen. That early release had very little functionality, but now Rysen has come out with an update that, while still a demo, adds many features and puts a coat of polish on what was already there. This has actually been out for over a week, but there's an important reason why it wasn't mentioned before now: shut up.

Anyhow, this version is much more like an actual game, so those of you who have a farming sim itch should give it a look! The details of what's been added can be found in this thread, and the actual demo is here. Go to!