State of Topaz: June 5th, 2011

With finals among other things having come up between a lot of us, activity has been on the wane this past month, and has slowed down to a near crawl. However, I still have three full month's worth of work to account for, so let's get started, shall we?

Firstly, I am sad to announce that Silent Sentinel, formerly known as ragingprimeape, has decided to resign from his position as a Topaz moderator. He will, of course, be keeping contributor status, and will be staying with us to contribute as he feels. Currently I don't feel we require much help with regards to moderation, but if activity spikes, who knows, that might just change.

In case you've only registered a month ago or haven't checked the site in months, you may notice that we have a new member with the title programmer: Konrad. Though lately he's been swamped with exams and things he has agreed to replace Badara as our resident coder. A warm welcome to him, filling a role that has been so traditionally difficult for Topaz. If you'd like to check up on some of his activity, feel free to look at his programming checklist topic. Currently he's MIA, but with any luck he'll see this and come back to help us!

If you have checked out the site (or are checking this on the site, in which case look around) you may have noticed that we have had a site redesign. Our site crashed and zeroality took the opportunity to recode the site, the most noticeable difference (in my opinion) being that it uses our concept art instead of those of Pokemon not even in Topaz! In addition, the site is now organized in such a fashion that anyone can check out back sprites, item sprites, and other such things which have long not been very accessible to the public. Really, many thanks to zeroality for all the incredible work he put into the design, which is now very truly Topaz.

Moving on, we've had a few name shuffles recently to lessen confusion with canon Diamond/Pearl/Black/White namings. As such:
Avalanche will be renamed to Freeze Crush
Bug Bite will be renamed to Bug Burn
Time for me to go and change each instance of each. D:

On the spriting department, X-Antibody went ahead and gave Blitzfaust and Vilephist a much-needed revamp. Here they are in all their glory:
http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/g...itzfaust-3.png
http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/g.../vilephist.png

Also metagrosslord pushed out several item sprites, one of which is an item that had long worried me: Shrapnel.
http://www.pokemontopaz.net/forums/a...tachmentid=545

In an attempt to sprite Fernando I ended up making something completely different, coming up with a mermaid sprite to add to our roster. Reliability doubled that with an almost unrecognizable edit. They're not done yet (there are a few things to be fixed on each of them, my mermaid more so), but it's nice to be seeing our trainer roster being updated and expanded a bit:
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9568/mermaidsv.pnghttp://img46.imageshack.us/img46/1703/dancerb.png

Speaking of trainer rosters, you should definitely check out some of the work being done by Reliability and Tyrannigon in this topic. There's a bit much to post here, especially since there's a lot of work still do be done, but Crys, Torri, and some revamped Orion Trainers are there to be found and worked on if you so feel inclined.

Still on the artistic side of things, many of our members have been trying their hands at concept art! Not all of these will be placed up on the site, but I'd just like to take this little bit of space to recognize some of our members for their works.
Stalwart DracoNyon's kept himself busy with an excellent Moocalf concept:
http://i142.photobucket.com/albums/r...g?t=1301681333
Not to be beaten, Reliability has been hard at work on some excellent arts too, and he did multiple just in case there was any dispute as to who has contributed the most lately:
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/8...eptartcopy.png
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/1...conceptart.png
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3493/...conceptart.png

Here's Silver's Dionare:
http://i912.photobucket.com/albums/a...on/dionare.jpg
And lastly, here's Infinity's original submission, Equill clay art.
http://img829.imageshack.us/i/dsc00112tu.jpg/

Also, the incredible Phoenixsong of OI/New Logora/other random stuff she does fame sketched us up an awesome Jirachi, to be at some point fully coloured into art we can use:
http://i265.photobucket.com/albums/i...achiSketch.png

Even One-Winged-Chaos, on a rare visit, gifted us with a coloured in version of his Fernando concept:
http://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t...Fernando-1.png

Which leaves me as the only artist around here who hasn't done anything in the past four months... I better get to work! So don't be afraid to put up some of your fanart! Reli and I are always happy to give some constructive criticism, and a few of your pieces might even get featured in an SoT!

In a fit of epiphanic awesomeness, Tyrannigon figured out his own special way to contribute to Topaz (well kind of, Pokepoindexter did some of this early on as well) by figuring out puzzles for each of the gyms in Topaz. What we need now is proofreaders to check them out and make sure each of them works out logically. So, check them out here and take a look.

On the audio side of things, Irot's made a pretty decent comeback, composing up for us a surfing theme and a random city theme that both sound really great! If you want to take a listen, head on over to his topic, and be sure to comment! Irot often voices concerns over his music and deserves many and frequent replies.

Here's an exciting bit of news. Most of the work in the past month has been in Previous Gen Pokedex Entries, and I'm happy to announce that there are a grand total of two left to do! Clefable requires one more vote only, Zangoose needs a little more work than that but we're nearly at an extremely important milestone in the game!

That's it for public work, but there's still some things done behind the scenes to share with you all. Case in point: the script. In the contributors forum a lot of the story of Topaz has been reconstructed and fleshed out, and Reliability in particular has worked on creating a script, which is finished for the demo and quite far for the rest of the game. I can assure you that we are trying to make sure that Topaz has the great and accessible storyline that it promised to have since its inception.

Finally, where do we go from here? There are a few important things that have stagnated and need to continue for Topaz to move forward. In particular: Moveset Revamps and Pokemon datasets. So, for those who don't know or have forgot what they are:

Moveset Revamps are topics where we bring canon Pokemon up to date by giving them Topaz moves and abilities, as well as making any changes we think are appropriate (like giving Ampharos Signal Beam). Right before these stopped happening, we were on the Clefairy Line and the Slowpoke Line. These need to be done for the full game, so feel free to help out!

Pokemon datasets is the text file in the game which tells the game the data on each Pokemon. We have all of this data but it needs to be put into the text file. If you'd like to help out, just PM me and I'll send you the document link and a couple of pointers to get you started.

Whew, that was pretty long. I'm sure I've missed lots of things, but that's the general gist of what's happened at Topaz since the last SoT. Until next time!

<3

Quote:

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Also metagrosslord pushed out several item sprites, one of which is an item that had long worried me: Shrapnel.
http://www.pokemontopaz.net/forums/a...tachmentid=545

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Correctioned. Otherwise, YAAAAAAAY!!! NEW SoT!!!!
Once summer vacation starts, I'll probably try looking into learning Ruby, and (to a lesser extent) editing movesets.

Whoops, fixed.

You also need to fix it on the site.

Yipee! SoTs are always encouraging!

The link to IR's topic goes to the front page. XD I think you mean this.

Not that this is a huge issue, but the "unread posts" button is broken. It's quite inconvenient. Ofc I was gone a while so if this is something that has already been discussed just ignore me.

Never noticed that. Search seems to be broken too.

Unread thingy's broke, thats all I noticed.
...something else I noticed was the lack of work compared to while back. Not sayin' this is gettin done, but at this rate, I'll be done with college (that I haven't even started) before this is over. Hell...I work 3 jobs, possibly 4 and I bet I could still throw a sprite or 2 out there, maybe an idea or tile or somethin too. I aint no mod or admin, but COME ON PEOPLE! I dont wanna see our work become just dust in the wind. WE ALL HAVE HAD 100's OF HRS OF WORK! I want to see this done...we planned to have a demo out back in 2010's summer...ummm...what happened? Basically this needs recruitment, and some more work. And remember who's sayin that! Dont wanna sound rude, I just dont want to see this go down.

There are very few active members left, which is why the level of work is lower, not because people are any busier than usual. But I think more important to that issue is that there aren't any large scale projects going on anymore. No single thing gets a lot of attention, so it looks like less work is being done, but it is instead being spread around. Though recruitment would be a solution, it is difficult to find people who are willing to jump on board and are willing to contribute.
Also, demo dates have always been tentative, since when I first joined, the demo was scheduled for release in 2009 (I think). Things are always slower than we want, since no one here has any real incentive to meet these "deadlines." I'm sure that if we had a larger team lead by a strict schedule of deadlines, we could make accurate projections. But we don't, so we can't. We all have work and school and other commitments that are certainly more important than this.
As long as things move forward, it isn't going to "go down." We have a strong couple of members that form the core here, and we actually have a programmer who has produced something material. Realistically, we are in a way better place now than we were a year ago. Work will get done eventually, probably slower than we would all like. The important thing is to keep posting and to be patient.
(Concerning the Unread post button, zero hasn't been on in a while, so it will have to wait until he comes back. I don't even know if I have access, but I'm sure if I tried to fix it, horrible things would happen and nobody would love me anymore.)

I think it's really amazing how much we've got done already. Nearly the only thing left for the demo is implementing all the events on the maps and the programming. There might be one or two things left to do, but largely the non-programming portion of the demo is pretty much finished. Once we have a demo out we might get a good activity bump, until then my best suggestion for a large-scale project is really the pokemon.txt file.

Previous Gen Pokedex Entries is near to completion. *sigh* I organised that! :)

There are two major projects that the community can work on as a whole. One is the pokemon.txt file, which is just busywork, but the more exiting task left to do would be the battle animations. I'll bet we could find all the existing animations somewhere online, but all of the topaz moves are going to need spiffy graphics. In case boredom sets in, we could make animations for all the old moves as well.

Instead of waiting for people to volunteer, I'd find out who is interested in working then assign them something specific.

Then is anyone interested in working?

I have already volunteer'd for battle animations. I'm waiting on others to do the same.

I'd be willing to help a bit if you can assign me something Zero. I mean I may not be the best spriter but I dedicate myself to stuff till my "Fuel of Motivation" is gone. I can be highly active if I want to :)

I'll let IB dole out the work.

I'd also be willing to help with animations, but only if someone assigns me something specific.

Okay, post on the topic and I'll name a couple of things for you.

I can't do animations (already tried :/) and it's a pain to download things on this pc....

what kind of animations?

Move animations. We've been asking for volunteers to help with them. It may sound complicated, but almost anybody should be able to do it.

It involves a bit of work so I don't think we've had too many people volunteering. </hint>