State of Topaz: November 30, 2008
Another two weeks has passed by, and most of the action has been behind-the-scenes stuff, I guess. It's been mainly menial work of preparing already done stuff for Fangking's use, but the bright side is that it's now a lot easier to figure out what still needs to be done!
First thing's first, our host got a server upgrade, so we can hopefully look forward to a more reliable forum with fewer random crashes. There has been no rollbacks or anything, so I'm especially thankful for that (we are way luckier than OI and Pokemon Scarlet).
More importantly, a lot of you can probably see the Topaz Staff forums now. This is because we eliminated all members Topaz Staff position (except for Novoni, but she's already Global Mod so it doesn't make a difference anyhow) and created a new usergroup called Contributor. This is for active members who have proven to be dedicated and helpful to the Topaz Project, and the perks include access to the Topaz Staff forum (which, may I add, contains a lot of useful information) and the user title "Valued Topaz Contributor" (key word is valued). The members who have received this status are: Exile PokePoindexter OddCrow Red Rocket Ali MewLoverEx Reliability LostBinary Irot_Rebod PikangX TehLurker Pyrotechnix (lol) Chronicler One-Winged-Chaos Kisa
Congratulations, all of you, and thanks for your efforts!
A few notes for those who are seeing the staff forum for the first time: - Ignore the majority of the overview. We're using it as a skeleton mainly, and it is massively out of date. - You've been given access to every (officialized) image in the existence of Topaz. Please do not abuse this privilege.
Onto the progress:
One fairly important thing that we need to do for the demo is to figure out what TMs and Items will be included up to the end of the demo (Upon defeat of Therma, if you've forgotten), and where. This discussion is probably limited to Contributor status as maps and trainer locations are in the Staff Forum, and so the necessary information is only available to those who can see it. I honestly have no idea how to organize this, so if someone would like to create a topic about it detailing the process, I'll probably hijack it and make a few edits, and it will be official.
Sprite work is going pretty well:
In terms of backsprites:
Quote:
Needed: Eaglair (current one is outdated), Embear*, Grizlare*, Coroona*, Spidream*, Arachmare* Perhaps unnecessary, but not done: Wolvine, Harskrow*, Equill*, Tellure*, Barkub, Scorchion* * means it is being worked on by Reliability.
In terms of icons, Chronicler has promised to do a whole bunch of them, and Novoni is going to contact him so that they can split the work and try to get this done quickly. I'm glad that things are starting to roll in this department.
Also, I think that we should omit shinies for the demo, as they're a bit of a waste of time in that deciding between colour schemes, who gets to do what, and the overall time it would take to recolour every single sprite we have (I guess we have some already, but still) isn't worth the delay for the demo. We'll have them done for the complete game, though.
In terms of what we can do for the demo, we actually are closer than I thought to completion. From now on, a lot will rely on Fangking, actually, the main things needed to be done programming-wise being implementing Topaz moves, whatever items, and scripts.
However, there is one huge thing you can do: Interior maps. Maps for the inside of houses, Pokemon Centres, everything that's not outside, really =\\. The best you can do is to try to get a copy of RPG Maker XP, familiarize yourself with the mapping tools, download Pokemon tilesets here, do some maps and either post screenshots of them, or publish the game and send the actual map to Fangking (neither is better, the former is probably simpler).
The maps needed are:
Neo Bay: 5 Houses
Sunset Village: 3 Houses 1 Pokemon Centre 1 Pokemart 1 Passage (similar to the ones that go from Saffron to other routes in FR/LG)
Softwind City: 1 Passage 2 Houses 1 Pokemon Centre 1 Pokemart 1 Gym (Ignore the towers, those won't be open for the demo)
Cranewing City: 1 Bank (? I have no idea what this is for) 3 Houses 1 Glassworks Factory 1 Pokemon Centre 1 Pokemart 1 Gym
And now for stuff unrelated to the demo (I'll keep this part short):
Encounter rates have been updated to Route 226. Continued work on them happens here.
Since the last SoT, we've finalized 4 new entries, and added a few of new topics. I am running out of fodder. (Even from Kisa's huge supply). Vote on dex entries here and add fodder here. (Please!)
Thanks to TehLurker, we got a lot of Trainer Line-Ups done. However, we still need Route 204 done, so if someone could help out there that'd be great.
Mandy and Gerad have had their line-ups officialized. Work on Christina and Osiro here
Items discussion has gone nowhere, really. The only real items in debate right now are Link Cable and Tackle Box. We may be forced to move Tackle Box to later discussion, like Pocket PC, as we're still not quite sure how it's supposed to work. [link]
Revamps have been going slower and slower. I thought people wanted to do Ludicolo? Then what's up with the total lack of activity on it? Come or face Habenero-izing
Lastly, the Random NPC Lines topic is feeling kind of lonely and would like to be posted on. Sympathizers can go help out there!
Thanks everyone for your continued activity on this forum, and continue to post as you have done before! (Please!)
