Xeno Fighters R (2019 GM Studio Port)

[BPzeBanshee]

TRANSFORMERS!

X-36 IN DISGUISE!



It certainly looks good, very well done job there. I'm looking forward to trying the revamped Jade Knight as well as the X-36.

I'm sorry to nag about this issue for the unteenth time, but I'd like to get some sort of yay/nay question to this:
Will the A6M Zero be changed from its underpowered form in some way or will it be left as is?

[Drum]

I am very, very, very happy to see the Jade Knight with the Round Laser. Thank you.

[emphatic]

Great work!

[Skyknight]

Before too much time elapses...Those of you who downloaded and utilized my music modpack (preferably WITH the additional file for the Objective Failed situation that I forgot to include), how does it do in terms of thematic appropriateness? And yes, I'm aware that "Wings of Darkness" is on the low master volume side; I don't have anything to amplify it with.

[lilmanjs]

will there be any more videos that highlight the music packs?

[BPzeBanshee]

will there be any more videos that highlight the music packs?

I'll make one for mine once I actually get around to finishing it. Its pretty dead in the water at the moment.

[EddyMRA]

And now for something a bit different: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4YV7sjYEz8

[BPzeBanshee]

And now for something a bit different: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4YV7sjYEz8

What is this I dont even

Hilarious. I didnt know such a thing existed in The Raiden Project.

[lilmanjs]

And now for something a bit different: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4YV7sjYEz8

haha! that is classic man!

[mjclark]

Feels like I've come a bit late to the party here but only just getting into Xeno fighters after nZero made comparisons with GwangeDash (which I'm also lovin').
I've read the explanations of rank and basic chaining in this thread but where can I find a full description of the scoring mechanics (medalling, chaining, bonuses etc.)
Also (and I'm quite embarassed to ask this), what do the abbreviations in the fighter performance descriptions mean like "ATK" and "COV".
Anyway I've found so far that this is a really compelling shmup experience so thanks for all the effort and keep up the good work

[ptoing]

This is pretty cool. Some of the gfx are a bit out of place (mainly those big cyany rotating ships), but it's a minor quibble.

What is more or a quibble is that it is BLURRY. If you are not using surfaces there is a way to get clean scaling in Game Maker, and it is also really easy to add sexy scanlines which can be faded to whatever percentage the player would like to.

[EddyMRA]

This is pretty cool. Some of the gfx are a bit out of place (mainly those big cyany rotating ships), but it's a minor quibble.

What is more or a quibble is that it is BLURRY. If you are not using surfaces there is a way to get clean scaling in Game Maker, and it is also really easy to add sexy scanlines which can be faded to whatever percentage the player would like to.

Surfaces do not work with every graphics card. Until Game Maker's surface system gets this issue fixed, it will not be implemented. The "blurriness" on fullscreen also depends on what video hardware you have. On my laptop with dedicated nVidia hardware, it is blurry on fullscreen. However, on my newer desktop running off Intel integrated graphics, there is no blurriness.

At this point, I will not sacrifice functionality across a wide range of computers just so the game can look prettier.

[ptoing]

I know about the issue with surfaces on some graphics gards (mine suffers as well) if you mean the black box thing on sprites.
There actually is a fix for that

[EddyMRA]

I know about the issue with surfaces on some graphics gards (mine suffers as well) if you mean the black box thing on sprites.
There actually is a fix for that

"Do not work" meaning Game Maker games implementing surfaces refuse to run at all, or crash.

[ptoing]

Really? I never heard about that problem. Interesting.

[EddyMRA]

Feels like I've come a bit late to the party here but only just getting into Xeno fighters after nZero made comparisons with GwangeDash (which I'm also lovin').
I've read the explanations of rank and basic chaining in this thread but where can I find a full description of the scoring mechanics (medalling, chaining, bonuses etc.)
Also (and I'm quite embarassed to ask this), what do the abbreviations in the fighter performance descriptions mean like "ATK" and "COV".
Anyway I've found so far that this is a really compelling shmup experience so thanks for all the effort and keep up the good work

Medalling: Ever played any of the Raiden Fighters games? The system is pretty much like it, except the non-golden tiers are not affected by Slave counts. Collect medals one at a time to increase their values until 10000pt gold medals appear. Once the gold medals appear, get 9 of them to appear onscreen at once. They will explode, unlocking the 100000pt medal mode. Collect the gold medals one at a time until they are worth 100000pts. Dropping a medal when it is worth over 10000 pts resets all future medal values to 10000pts. Except for continuing on stages that restart, you cannot revert to the initial tiers of medals once you've unlocked the golden medals.

Chaining: Destroy certain enemies and/or get bonuses off of them in a span of time. A chain is broken if the last bonus message scrolls off or the countdown timer above the chain report falls to 0. All enemy kills and bonuses are multiplied by your chain count, capped at 10x.

Bonuses:
QUICK SHOT!: Destroy a large enemy before it can shoot (10000-100000pts).
DESTROYED AT A TIME!: Destroy a group of similar enemies within 50 frames of each other (100000pts)
DISCOVERED THE MICLUS!: Uncover a blue monster from its hiding spot. Their hiding spots are usually conspicuous and marked with strange environmental formations (like trees growing out of asphalt). Shoot the Miclus to gain 9 medals, after which it explodes, awarding 100000pts.
DISCOVERED THE FAIRY: These appear after getting a certain chain count at certain parts of some stages, or after performing some special conditions. They drop an extra Bomber icon, and can be collected for 100000pts.

There are other bonuses in different stage. Keep a lookout for them.

Ship Attributes:
SPD: Movement speed
ATK: Attack power
COV: Defensive coverage - how much of the screen the ship's weapons cover. Low COV rating means the ship's weapons are fired only straight ahead (Judge Spear, Zapdos) and high COV rating means the ship's weapons have a wide arc (Raiden mk-II Beta, Miyamoto).
RPD: Rapid fire rate
BOM: Bomber power. Usually the ships with very low ATK will have tremendously powerful Bombers, and vice versa. Some Bombers are very effective panic attacks (Dimension Mine of the Viper Phase 1 ships and Miyamoto's Shinkuu-Giri), are weapons of mass destruction (Vic Viper's Mega Beam Cannon), earning a high BOM rating for that ship. Others have some disadvantages such as long deploy time to offset their damage payload, resulting in an average BOM rating. The ships with a very low BOM rating have Bombers that are purely defensive and offer very little offensive prowess (Gyaraga/Hoplon's Phoenix Barrier and the Mega Crush of the Lord British and Jade Knight).

[mjclark]

Thanks Alluro- that's exactly what I was looking for and now I can start playing Xeno Fighters with a bit more awareness!

[BPzeBanshee]

Thanks Alluro- that's exactly what I was looking for and now I can start playing Xeno Fighters with a bit more awareness!

If you weren't aware of it already, you can verse Black Heart (yeah, GwangeDash has him too but this one's more faithful to Battle Garegga's version) by going to Stage 5-C, EX-6, or by pressing 'T' at the Conquest Mode game select. And some weird debug stuff along with Jade Hydra by pressing 'Y'.
I think you'll find Alluro's version of the Gemini Wing ships are different and faithful again too.

Hey, Alluro, not sure if you remember me telling you about my problems with TATE in GMOSSE but I got the issues fixed and made a sort of workaround for the distortion effects that occur when rotating at 90 degrees left and right from center. If I release a MK-IV release of GMOSSE with these new changes sometime soon will you consider implementing TATE in Xeno Fighters R?

[Drum]

Hey Alluro, I remember you were having issues with scaling and I found a link that might be helpful:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... 9#msg86809

This is a tutorial how to get around using GM's built-in screen-scaling, which has an often undesired blur-effect when scaling up. An alternate method was to scale the view-port dimensions to scale the view. The problem with the view-port method is that it causes ugly seams to appear in your graphics when displayed on certain machines.

Thus, we're going to use the surface-method. The good thing about this method is you can apply it to your game easily, because none of your drawing events or anything need to be changed. You just have to make one persistent object at the beginning of the game, be consistent with your scaling, and you're set.

With this method, we will be changing the view-ports as well. This is a sure-fire method, because if the graphics card doesn't support surfaces, it'll automatically revert to using the view-port method, which is better than nothing, right?

Hope it's relevant/of some use (the whole thread is pretty great, actually).

[EddyMRA]

Thanks Drum, one thing good about this is that it has something to fall back on if a graphics setup does not support Game Maker surfaces.

Here's the most current changelog for the upcoming v0.11:

Code: Select all

Xeno Fighters R - v0.11 Changelog
=================================

NEW COMPLETED STAGES:
=====================
Stage EX-2 (Forest of Naju)

New feature list:
-Key binding customization

MAJOR CHANGES:
==============
-Jade Knight overhauled, since the Vic Viper was given its v0.10 Laser weapon. Jade Knight is a single weapon mode ship that now uses Round Laser from Gradius Gaiden as its Missile weapon and Pulse Laser as its Laser Weapon. It now uses standard Options that have a closer follow distance that those of the Vic Viper. It automatically gains the Small Spread missiles upon powering up.
-The following bosses have been rebalanced significantly for lower difficulty levels: Silver Banshee, Jasper Gigas

BUGS AND ISSUES SOLVED:
=======================
-FIXED: Pressing ENTER Key at difficulty select will set rank to 0/0 if player has not played any game during before then. This results in a division by zero error on enemy shooting actions.
-FIXED: Pressing ENTER right after killing a stage boss (before the mission brief comes up) and invoking the PAUSE menu causes the game won't show the mission brief at all but end up in an endless loop.
-FIXED: Retrying a stage in the Conquest Mode menu when your score is exactly 0 will not reset your lives, resulting in the retry having no extra lives instead of 2.
-Optimized shadow code to reduce performance hit when a lot of objects that cast shadows are active.
-EX Medals now fall slower than regular medals. This is to allow players to collect regular medals, while making it easier to drop the EX medal if the players choose not to enter an EX stage.
-P-38's shadow now changes when it performs its loop-de-loop bomber animation.
-P-38's loop-de-loop animation now appears on top of bullets.
-P-38 now has 60 frames of mercy invincibility after its loop-de-loop animation finishes.
-Michelle's hitbox moved from her head to her shoulders.
-Jade Knight's hitbox moved to center of ship.

BALANCE CHANGES:
================
-A6M Zero: increased rapid fire rate of main shot.
-Xelcor: Increased rapid fire rate of main shot at lower levels.

If you can suggest any useful features, feel free to indicate it here. One other feature I want to implement, but in a later version, will be an easy way to select music packs in-game.

[emphatic]

That's a really solid update. Grrrrrrrreat work!

[ZacharyB]

The only thing I can think of to improve this game, a small fix, is to eliminate the objects' shadows that appear on top of the outer space background graphic when flying through space. But I don't know how much of a pain that would be to implement. It's just an aesthetic thing.

[BPzeBanshee]

If you can suggest any useful features, feel free to indicate it here. One other feature I want to implement, but in a later version, will be an easy way to select music packs in-game.

Really liking the new changes, especially the bugfixes, and I'm looking forward to trying a (hopefully) balanced Mitsubishi Zero when the next release gets out.
Now I've got a few ideas for a few nifty functions for later versions of XF-R, might want to get a coffee before you get mad at me though

A few features I've been considering trying to implement in GMOSSE was replays via external timelines encrypted to some sort of special file that people can pass around like MAME's input files. I think we've discussed replays before and it certainly seems like a bright idea if only I could think of a solid way to do it. When I went looking around for such a function through Google I only got strange time-paradox discussions, dead links, a replay engine that didn't work and some internal-video-recording DLL that crashes the game whenever it's used. In theory I think recording input events to a timeline which can then be saved externally should be possible looking through Game Maker's commands but I'm not terribly familiar with such commands.
I know it's possible but I'm not sure exactly how, and I'd be interested to hear your view on whether such a thing would be possible in the later future. In that area of externalisation you have more experience than I do.

I also had an idea for implementation of a random ship select (I recall you saying it'd be too difficult to do on MSN once but I thought of a way to do it):
Somewhere along the line we gotta assign each ship to a number. I dont know how you do it but in GMOSSE I'm using case/switch/breaks with the events related to picking a certain ship assigned to a number. Anything with case/switch/breaks can't be that hard to convert.
Have an object, obj_random or something with its default sprite being the typical question mark we've seen in earlier XF-R releases. When in contact with the ship selector it will change sprite to another sprite that has the still pictures of every ship. When you press the FIRE key it will accept selection to irandom(x) with x being the ship selection number. If selecting Vic Viper was case 7 and the random generator picked 7 you'd get the Vic Viper for example.
Now I realise for something as simple as random ship select it's probably not-so-trivial for you to go about implementing something with this method, but I'd be willing to have a crack at coding it in via a GMRES or something provided I have some idea of how you currently handle ship select functions in XF-R at the moment. Again, long-term idea, probably an idea for a final release when all of the ships are locked-in as that it doesn't need constant updating.

Lastly, still waiting for your view on possible TATE in XF-R. I can tell you now it might not look brilliant at certain angles but its certainly readable and playable the way I've implemented it in GMOSSE. Really its a bunch of commands I got from one of worstplayer's old games and putting it in within room creation code and a global variable to switch between them via a button or in the config. Emphatic requested on last page for retaining 3:4 aspect while fullscreen on a 16:10 monitor and I can tell you right now that GMOSSE rotated on such a monitor retains its aspect ratio with no problems. Sorry for being persistent regarding this matter but I really do think that TATE is a must-have for this project now that the problem of that weird scaling effect on the sides has a workaround.

[emphatic]

Lastly, still waiting for your view on possible TATE in XF-R. I can tell you now it might not look brilliant at certain angles but its certainly readable and playable the way I've implemented it in GMOSSE. Really its a bunch of commands I got from one of worstplayer's old games and putting it in within room creation code and a global variable to switch between them via a button or in the config. Emphatic requested on last page for retaining 3:4 aspect while fullscreen on a 16:10 monitor and I can tell you right now that GMOSSE rotated on such a monitor retains its aspect ratio with no problems. Sorry for being persistent regarding this matter but I really do think that TATE is a must-have for this project now that the problem of that weird scaling effect on the sides has a workaround.

^^This if it's doable.

[EddyMRA]

I also had an idea for implementation of a random ship select (I recall you saying it'd be too difficult to do on MSN once but I thought of a way to do it):
Somewhere along the line we gotta assign each ship to a number. I dont know how you do it but in GMOSSE I'm using case/switch/breaks with the events related to picking a certain ship assigned to a number. Anything with case/switch/breaks can't be that hard to convert.
Have an object, obj_random or something with its default sprite being the typical question mark we've seen in earlier XF-R releases. When in contact with the ship selector it will change sprite to another sprite that has the still pictures of every ship. When you press the FIRE key it will accept selection to irandom(x) with x being the ship selection number. If selecting Vic Viper was case 7 and the random generator picked 7 you'd get the Vic Viper for example.
Now I realise for something as simple as random ship select it's probably not-so-trivial for you to go about implementing something with this method, but I'd be willing to have a crack at coding it in via a GMRES or something provided I have some idea of how you currently handle ship select functions in XF-R at the moment. Again, long-term idea, probably an idea for a final release when all of the ships are locked-in as that it doesn't need constant updating.

I've been assigning each ship its own ID number since the VAF Squadron days. It's not hard to make a random ship select. It will be hard to implement one based on how ships are unlocked in XFR. I want to make a random ship select that cycles through ships a player has unlocked already, not the entire roster from the start. Ships will not be unlocked one after another like in XFEX. They will be unlocked depending on whether you clear the game, clear an EX stage, and this certainly will not be done in just one strict order. I can make a random select for the entire ship roster from the start with my eyes closed, but it is not what I want. Now you understand why implementing random select based on what a player has unlocked already in XFR will be difficult?

[BPzeBanshee]

I've been assigning each ship its own ID number since the VAF Squadron days. It's not hard to make a random ship select. It will be hard to implement one based on how ships are unlocked in XFR. I want to make a random ship select that cycles through ships a player has unlocked already, not the entire roster from the start. Ships will not be unlocked one after another like in XFEX. They will be unlocked depending on whether you clear the game, clear an EX stage, and this certainly will not be done in just one strict order. I can make a random select for the entire ship roster from the start with my eyes closed, but it is not what I want. Now you understand why implementing random select based on what a player has unlocked already in XFR will be difficult?

I can see it not being as easy as the original idea I had, and obviously the 'phase unlock' system in XFEX isn't going to work here with a simple case/switch/break argument by itself though I still strongly believe that with some planning, and good enough manipulation of variables based on specific events it's definitely possible to do. Obviously it's not going to be a complete piece of cake but I'm still willing to have a go to put in something for whatever ships that currently have an unlock plan given the opportunity.
In all fairness I DID say it's a long-term plan so it's not like I'm trying to put pressure on you to do anything difficult right now. In fact my idea is not to put pressure on to you at all but serve some sort of a working idea in GM code on a platter so that when it's ready you can just slip it in and it will work. All I'll need from you to get started on this matter is some co-operation.

^^This if it's doable.

I didnt get around to sending you a build of GMOSSE did I? Feel free to try MK-III because as it is it should work on your monitor with no issues, and every version I make has an EXE included with it in case you don't have GM8 and just want to play.
As it is in my project everything I had problems with has been fixed. The only problem I can see with doing such in XF-R is basically what I had with the background_create_from_screen function not showing at the proper angle and position which was fixed by me not doing epic fails on syntax usage like I was before and a switch/case/break related to whatever the current TATE setting was, which is the same variable I manipulate and save to a config in GMOSSE. I'm willing to put in the time to implement this as well.

[skyrish10]

no updates? why?

[Twiddle]

no updates? why?

hey fuck you pal the storytime team has been hard at work

[Skyknight]

In addition, new formats are being schemed for 4B's boss and 6A's location. Besides, Alluro has projects besides this. No point in forcing the issue.

[mjclark]

no updates? why?

Where I grew up in Hounslow many years ago, someone used to go round circling dogshits on the pavement with chalk, then drawing an arrow pointing to the encircled shit and writing "Dog owners why?" next to it.
Was that you?