Ueda

Rory's Development Log #12 Water Prison Technique & more! Dear Shinobi, It's been a long time since my last development log. Once again, I apologize for not keeping everyone in the loop with developments. It's not easy being in the army and still working on a fan game. My lifestyle is pretty crappy at the time being. To give everyone an idea of what I'm going through.. Being a National Service soldier, I get an allowance of SGD400 a month. My parents are divorced, so I live with my mom and 3 siblings, my mom doesn't earn a lot, so she doesn't provide for us. We just get roof to sleep under. My dad is jobless. So $400 is practically all I have to survive on, about half of which is spent on transport. Take note that $400 here in Singapore is close tonothing, we're statistically the world's most expensive economy. I do freelance work in what little free time I have to survive. But I've decided that once I clear my last job, I'll spend more time on Nin Online and live on whatever crumbs I can find. I miss the days I could just wake up and just work on the game the entire day I had a few hours after dark to work on some stuff, so I did a Water Prison Technique animation! Water Prison Technique I'll take the opportunity to showcase some other stuff I've worked on recently. Updated Masteries The 3 new masteries in the UI are Medical, Weapon & Taijutsu Mastery. Heaven & Earth Scrolls for Chunnin Exams Minimap This hasn't been programmed in yet, but these are the UI pieces. The recent bank UI was also done by me. Hopefully the progress is pleasing to everyone, and hopefully this will help ease the whining! Regards, Rory

Economy is going to be an important part of RP

Controls are just for this test!

Glad to hear from you Fernando! Started experimenting with the online functionality

We're commencing building a multiplayer stress test stay tuned.

Hey Sipher, I can rely on you to be a voice of reason here. You have a very valid concern. It's not fair to say we're completely restarting, or putting our work to waste. Because the old code is a clear a template for our new one, which will also speed up the development. We will also not be reworking the graphics all that much, or at all. This is basically a port to HTML5, and the benefits are pretty clear. I was stubborn about making the move earlier, because I simply wanted to work with the language I felt we would get the game released as fast as possible, I didn't think about the long term state of the game. Inevitably, VB6 will not even run on half the Windows PCs owned in a few years down the road. The demo took less than a day to do, which in a way is a good testimony to how fast production will be sped up with this move. Of course, the demo has no networking and mostly shows off the rendering and animations. But the amount of progress we can make with this new development process, is definitely many folds faster than with VB6. For example, it took 2 weeks to get a basic implementation of the GUI back in VB6. Work that could be completed in a day within Construct. I wouldn't make this move if it weren't a better option at this point.

Right now the concept of elemental strength and weaknesses is generally just going to impact situations like this.. If you have an earth shield, how would a lightning Jutsu like Chidori do against it. If you have a lightning trap, how would a fire explosion technique do to cancel it's effects.

Actually, we can export it as a Windows/Mac application as well With web-Nodekit.

As lame as that was, I admit I lol'd. Glad, it's only natural, I haven't kept anyone outside of the staff team in the loop for awhile. I was holding the announcement back until I did enough research about WebRTC.

I want Nin Online to be a 2D game. I don't think I'd ever have such wild ambitions to attempt a 3D MMORPG with no budget :/

I'll think of a better control scheme soon and it'll be customizable in future.

Anytime you're ready man I'll bug you for graphics soon.

Pleased to have you back, Elk. Once we have our base game set up, testing your animations will be as easy as dragging and dropping a few pieces of graphics around. Implementing it, not that much harder. Full speed ahead! Nice to see you again Keezus, hope you like how your fireballs and explosions are implemented

Dear Ninjas, It's apparent that due to the lack of updates, some are beginning to lose faith in the project. My presence has also become somewhat of a repetitive cycle of giving short news posts to assure everyone that development is not dead. We have some very exciting news to present to you everyone. Though it may be viewed as bad news by some, it is definitely very good news for us all in the long term. Development until now Visual Basic 6 While developing Nin Online in Visual Basic (an ancient language that got it's last update in 2003, that's over 10 years to put it into perspective!) we were practically pushing the language to it's limits and we were still unable to create many wonderful features we would have loved to that would allow Nin Online to reach it's full potential. The IDE and Language itself were so ancient in fact, that moving a line of code or making a small change in one function would very easily break something else. As you can imagine, this was frustrating, as the engine broke frequently due to minor changes. The language is also no longer supported by Microsoft and is only running on our newer machines with tons of compatibility issues and fixes everywhere. This problem became even more apparent from our tests late last year where many players encountered issues simply getting the client to run for them. The only reason we were using this for our engine was because it had been our most comfortable tool to create games, since Robin, Eddie, Seth and I had all been working on Visual Basic games, particularly Mirage based engines for years. DirectX8 The renderer we were utilizing to bring to you the graphics in the versions thus far has been DIrectX8. Technology from 2000. As a result, our graphical presentation was not as good as we wanted it to be. We were very limited in terms of what we could do, even pushing the renderer to it's limits. We were unable to bring you many advanced modern rendering techniques like blending options. Development time was also severely hindered because we were using many old-school methods of implementing our graphics, such as manually recoloring sprites. First Conclusion Up until now, we have been limited on what we could do, and our development speed was being hindered by old development tools and technologies. The exciting future HTML5 I have personally always been a supporter of HTML5 technology. Since it's announcement years ago. But back then, the tech was slightly limited by the lack of stable support on different platforms and missing components such as audio, a good renderer etc, real time communication. All of this has of course, been improved over the past 2-3 years, so much so that it is hard to see the limits of this amazing technology anymore. We have cross-platform audio standards, WebGL (an advanced renderer) and WebRTC to settle our multiplayer needs. The most prominent benefit of HTML5 is of course that is is cross-platform across every modern operating system. HTML5 runs on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iOS, Android, Tizen, Wii U and any system with a browser like Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer! All this, with one single code base. Construct 2 Arguably the best engine to create HTML5 games, Construct 2 has slowly filled the gap between the reality of creating Nin Online with it's amazing toolkit. With the latest announcement of WebRTC Datachannels support, there is literally nothing holding me back from making this jump to create Nin Online with the engine. The engine is very fast and efficient, it takes barely minutes to make a simple game, and it's only a matter of days to create a game like "Lazy Rocket". Apart from this, it is very expandable with it's Javascript SDK. Me & Seth have been very avid followers of this engine for years, we're comfortable with the tools, and quite certain that we'd easily port over the Nin Online experience back to it's current progress in a matter of weeks. There are also a lot of features we'd like to add to Nin Online to make it an even more wonderful game. WebGL As modern as a renderer could get, WebGL is an amazing modern renderer with modern capabilities. Check out how capable WebGL is here! Possible news features With all this new tech, we won't need to be held back by the limitations we once had. We will be able to bring Nin Online to it's full potential and all in a fraction of the time it would take to create a game like this in C++ or C#. With that, I'd like to tell you some big and small changes we'll be making to this new version of Nin Online. [*]Jumping & Platforming Jump onto rooftops, jump between them, drop off higher grounds. A whole new dimension to Nin Online! This opens up a lot of potential for combat and travelling. [*]360° Movement & Combat No more 4 Directional jutsu casting limitations. Shoot your fireballs at any angle. This will make for a dynamic combat experience! [*]Pixel-based movement Right now, our movement system is tile based with 8 directions. Pixel-based movement means that you will be able to move and stop at any point and not in every 32x32 tile. [*]WebGL Effects Imagine a fireball - glowing! or a Genjutsu making your screen do this to your screen. [*]More character customization Hair & eye colors and shades on every spectrum. This is easily possible with HTML5 tech. [*]Cross-platform! Play on your browser or download a client & updater. [*]Multiple Resolutions & Fullscreen mode Our attempts at a good implementation of multiple resolution support and fullscreen support in our Visual Basic 6 engine were failures. But with our new engine, this will a piece of cake in comparison. [*]Social integration This is up for debate, as I'm not a big fan of Facebook games for example. But this isn't out of the question. Development speed With Visual Basic 6, we were very limited to what kind of Jutsus and content we could create, because our system was very rigid and didn't give us the space to create a lot varied content, eg. epic jutsus & cutscenes. With this new engine, we'd be able to add new spells in a matter of minutes. Graphical implementation and coding entirely new systems are both also sped up significantly! Nin Online ProjectV2 Without further ado, I present a little demo codenamed "ProjectV2", I did in two days to showcase the engine and to show you guys the potential of the world of Nin Online in HTML5. It's very basic, and lacks the most important feature yet, multiplayer tests will be here in the near future! Version 0.0.1 ALPHA Controls Movement/Combat WASD/Arrow Keys - Movement Shift - Run Left Click/Z - Punch Right Click/X - Kick 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9 - Hotkeys (Jutsu Selection for now) Middle Click (Scroll wheel pushed down) - Use Jutsu Scroll wheel - Zoom in/out G - Test death Hair/Eye & Other Options H - Hold down to change hair hue Y - Hold down to change hair saturation N - Hold down to change hair brightness J - Press once to change hair style E - Hold down to change eye hue F - Toggle Fullscreen Final conclusion Here's to a much brighter future for Nin Online! One that is sustainable in the long term and hopefully more popular! We understand this might feel like a set back, but in actuality, this might be the biggest and best update to ever happen to Nin Online yet, you'll see I hope this restores some faith in Nin Online for you guys! I've been holding back the announcement for a later update, but I've been too eager to announce this myself. Regards, Rory

As do I It's slowed down a little for sure since I've been in the army but things are getting back on track.

We're staying close to the universe in terms of features. Things like Bijuus, Jutsus and Chakra aren't going anywhere. Ranks and generally everything related to how a ninja functions in the Naruto Universe is the same. We're just opening the floor to new content, freedom to innovate on what Jutsus exist, what bloodlines exist and what creatures exist in the universe. We're staying true to the series, but expanding on it, if that makes more sense. For a good idea of what I mean, think of Ninja Saga or My Ninja.

I'm glad you see it that way. How and what changes will be made is hard to say at this point in time. I have gotten quite accustomed to just following the series and the names of things. We'll try not to overhaul the universe until it's not recognizable as the Naruto Universe. But at the same time, we just want the creative freedom to not be held back by 'not being accurate'. Bloodlines aren't going to be around for awhile. Maybe months or years. They'd definitely not just be things like Sharingan and Byakuugan though. We'd make original ones. None as of yet! Thank you Izuna, it's good to see you again. Thank you! Thank you so much

Hey everyone, In the past month or so since I last made an announcement a lot has happened behind the scenes. We've made decisions to cut down on the amount of Naruto content going into the game, and even decided to take a spin on the elemental system because we felt this was a better elemental system. I'm going to put it up for discussion what people think about this, let me know, and we'll review the change! But what is the point in making decisions when nothing is being progressed right? In the past few days, I've been working on a few things (not ready to show-off), most importantly though, I've been struggling to get back the style of pixel art and the speed I used to work at creating art for the game! Bare with me! all the time in the army has been slowing down my brain a little. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I've been very grateful to see the amount of support given to the game in my absence! It's also great to return to the community each time and see the familiar faces again and again. I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank Seth once again for his hard work. He's been draining himself a lot running the community and taking lead of the project. I'd also like to thank our highly talented artist Whispywill aka. Llexi for being passionate and continuing to produce artwork for us so faithfully. All I can say is expect some really neat new content soon! Regards, Rory

From what I know, It's added to the machine for caching. So whatever system operations need memory to cache something, it uses that 16GB, so boot-up and applications work faster. Something like that I'm no systems expert. But it is a beauty. I must say, I really miss everyone!

Dear Ninjas, First of all, I'm here again! Back in the flash for this festive season. I'll talk a bit about how things have been for myself in awhile, but before that. A belated Merry Christmas from me to the whole community, and an advanced Happy New Year to everyone! The end of the year signals roughly the 6 months mark for Nin Online's development, as you all know, the Nin Online you see now began development in June 2013. Despite being absent for the past two months or so from the community, I'd like to say that I still think about Nin Online everyday and hope everyone in the community and staff team awaits my return to normal development on the game's visual aspects! Seth has been doing a great job maintaining the community, managing the staff team and developing the game and as such, it has been a great honor to have him as a partner. I've recently ended Basic Military Training and am currently posted at an army camp near my house. Unfortunately, I only get to book out on weekends, so most of my days will be spent in camp. Luckily enough, I've recently bought a new laptop, and I'm getting the authorization to bring it into my army camp. This way, I can work on Nin Online at night! So expect me to be on here much more often in early 2014! Happy Holidays, Rory

False. Selection of this role has been delayed due to some bugs in our event system. I'd rather have this settled before introducing a team who require this system.

Don't bump old topics it's a joke. Topic locked.