Messages

1

Support / Re: Aquaria "captures" Mouse

« on: December 21, 2010, 04:42:07 pm »

I'm on a Mac, and I experience the same thing. At first I thought the windowed mode was pointless since I couldn't get the mouse outside of the window.

I eventually discovered that while the mouse is locked, my Wacom Bamboo tablet isn't. So now when I work on modding (for example) I plug in my tablet and can use it to easily swap back and forth between file editing and play testing.

2

Support / Re: Aiming with gamepad in beast form broken

« on: July 24, 2010, 07:02:45 pm »

I'm having the same problem. Beast form shots just appear on your face if you don't use the mouse to aim. 

Hmm 2 years and this still hasn't been fixed....waddup that?

I don't really know for certain, but I'd speculate the reason it hasn't been fixed is that it's not a bug, nor broken. It's the intended functionality for beast shot.


Warning: Extremely minor SPOILERS are in the next two paragraphs.




If you're swimming in a direction, beast shot fires in that direction. If you stand still, most shots sit in front of your face like a mine. I don't think all of them do that, either, if I'm remembering how it works if you eat a pistol-shrimp and fire while standing still. (Could be wrong, on that, I've only munched a pistol-shrimp a couple times, and I'm always kind of surprised when it fires) Also, IIRC, the way the firing and targeting works is different depending on whether you're free-floating in the water or clinging to a wall. Shooting while swimming makes the shot go the direction you're swimming, but shooting while wall-hugging makes the shot go towards your cursor. Sometimes, on complicated curvy walls the game doesn't quite handle that right either though, such as dropping the shot on your face like a mine because a spur of rock obstructs your line-of-sight to the cursor. That could be a bug, but again it might be the way it was intentionally designed.  Play around with it more, and you'll get a stronger understanding of the limitations.

As I said, I believe those limitations are intentional. The main shooty form in the game is energy form, which targets very well. Beast shot seems mainly designed so that you have a back-up blasting ability for areas where you need to be in the fastest current-resisting form. Like they didn't want to completely disable shooting for areas with rapid currents, but they also didn't want to duplicate or overshadow energy form. In that regards, Beast Shot is a compromise. It may also be viewed as the higher-skill option, because you have to control the aiming yourself, and manage your ammo, plus when it does connect it's usually for more damage. 

 Just a thought. Idle speculation on my part, really. Until I read this thread, I never even considered that it might be a bug or considered broken. I just assumed this was part of how they distinguish beast form and energy form mechanically.

3

Modding / Re: Magic of Aquaria SPOILERS!!!!!!! new pics July 5

« on: July 09, 2010, 09:08:35 pm »

Yogoda has Magic part 1 separated out and we will work on just that until it is done, and use that for beta-testing. When our mod is done he will help DM finish his mod. We are all feeling really good about committing to finishing both mods ASAP...

This is great news. I'm really excited to get to see and play your mods in the near future. The screen shots you've shared are really lush and beautiful. Visually dense... but in a serene way. I really like your style, and think it's a great match for Aquaria.

4

Modding / Re: Feral Beast mod

« on: July 09, 2010, 08:51:14 pm »

 Thanks to everyone that's provided feedback. You've given us good food for thought, and kind encouragement. It'll be a better mod because of what you've said.


Rather than spending the rest of the morning addressing every individual comment, I'm just going to reply to three most important concerns that people have voiced:

1: Very good point on it being too easy to miss the Beast Form Cave. Our bad. We're working on ways to solve that, without making the mod too annoyingly linear.

2: There will be save points in the next (or the final) version, including some in the levels you've already seen. We left them out on purpose because we weren't sure how much we'd end up changing the opening levels once we got a real handle on modding and the direction this project was going.

3: The whole food system is a work-in-progress at this point, and I anticipate putting more emphasis on eating things as we go. Chapter 1 was just kind of a "proof of concept" in that regards, testing everything to see if the core idea was feasible, and to see if we could actually add french fries to the main game.   We'll likely refine it some more as we go.


EDIT/CLARIFICATION: In item 3, when I said "I anticipate putting more emphasis on eating things", what I really meant was "I anticipate putting more emphasis on using the beast form bite attack to devour entities and gain benefits (health, beast shot, etc) from eating them". It came across as a comment about how we might further refine the recipes, which we no doubt will, but I meant to also indicate that eating enemies raw will also more frequently provide benefits in the finished version(s) of the mod. I just need to go in and tweak a few .lua files to make that happen.

5

Modding / Re: Feral Beast mod

« on: July 09, 2010, 08:34:21 pm »

I think you don't need to copy the Ingredients into the main gfx in Aquaria, if you put them in the mod graphics/ingredients/ it should work.

I know that technically you don't have to do so, but we had our reasons.

In theory, a person could use our ingredients list while playing the main game or other mods. (If they don't want to use our ingredients and recipes, they have to manually replace the default files once they've closed our mod).  Assuming someone might use those recipes in another context, and might mix items together that match the new recipes (either intentionally or by accident), we figured the images needed to be where another mod (or the main game) could access them. Less chance of a crash that way.

The sticky buns recipe in particular is really easy to trigger by accident (and also a little buggy it seems, every once in a while the game gives you cake instead of buns), so I didn't want there to be any chance it would stall or crash someone's game, or generate an image-less item in their inventory. The over-zealous install shores up that weakness.

6

Modding / Re: Feral Beast mod

« on: July 09, 2010, 08:23:42 pm »

Aye, the built-in world map feature doesn't function in mods. There is a script which makes it work in a given mod, but this mod does not yet include it. (It'd be a good idea, though.)

We considered putting the world map scripts into the mod but were a little intimidated by the line in the world map mod thread that says:

Note: I would recommend not trying to integrate this into any mods until I've gotten some more bugs ironed out.

Has that status changed and just never been updated in the thread?  If the designer is still saying not to use it because of bug issues, it makes me inclined to not use it.

Plus, a few lines after that the worldmap's designer said:

2) The map appears below layers 8, 9, and the shadow layer.

Does that mean if I put something in any of those 3 layers it will blot out and obscure the world map? So far in our levels we've made pretty extensive use of layers 8, 9, and J (shadow).  I'm not sure that the things gained by including a world map are worth what would be lost by leaving out those three layers. No darkness, limited radar blackout, no hidden passages, no objects that Naija can move behind. We're not sure we're willing to give that stuff up. But if we leave intact, there'll be whole levels where the worldmap is practically inaccessible, blocked by giant mushrooms, or layers of dark shading.

Reflecting on it, though, I realize that when we get a lot more done and the mod hits 10 or 20 levels, trying to navigate and backtrack without a world map will be a pain.  I guess having the map in the mod, but ridiculously occluded by a giant toadstool, is probably at least a little better than not having a worldmap at all. Or will be once we hit a certain threshold of map complexity. Hmm...

7

Modding / Re: MODS LIST

« on: June 28, 2010, 05:26:52 pm »

My wife and I have released the first chapter of our still-in-production mod "Feral Beast". Chapter 1 has 5 map levels to explore, and additional chapters will follow from time to time as we get things completed.

Download Link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/feral_mod.zip
Thread Link: http://www.bit-blot.com/forum/index.php?topic=2241.msg27753#msg27753

Once you've downloaded the file, please read the readme.txt before you try playing it. The mod includes a number of new recipes and ingredients, and so has a slightly more involved installation process than the average mod.

8

Modding / Feral Beast mod

« on: June 28, 2010, 05:19:58 pm »

For the past couple of weeks, my wife and I have been working on a mod that focuses on the Beast Form. (We think it's a really fun form, with a lot of untapped potential, so we started building a storyline that would allow the spotlight to be on that particular form.)

 It's going to be a while before the entire mod is complete, but we figured that since we've got 5 map levels done and ready, we might as well share a preview with you all.  At the end of this post you'll find a download link for Feral Beast: Chapter 1.



Installation:
This mod requires a tiny bit more work to install then you may be used to, because the recipe list has been heavily modified and completely rebalanced. (It's now more about the ingredients than about the recipes - you'll see what I mean when you start making and eating things.)  For full functionality, you'll need to install the new food and recipe files into your main Aquaria game, in addition to the normal process of placing the mod directory inside your Aquaria\_mods folder.

To install the new recipe files, follow these two steps:
1) Copy the new "ingredients.txt" file into your Aquaria folder (i.e. overwrite and replace Aquaria\data\ingredients.txt with the new one found in Aquaria\_mods\feral\ingredients.txt)
2) Copy all the .png files found in "Aquaria\_mods\feral\newfood" and add them to the Aquaria\gfx\ingredients directory.

If you forget to install those files, many of the singbulbs in the mod will be unable to produce anything.  This could even potentially cause the game to crash on some systems, so full installation is recommended.

The new food and recipe files will also affect your main game. In fact, we've had a good bit of fun replaying the original game with the modified recipes. Complete backups of the original versions of all the replaced or altered files are included inside the mod folder, so you don't have to worry about losing the originals.

You can download Feral Beast, Chapter 1, from the following link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/feral_mod.zip
Additional chapters will follow as we get them completed.

EDIT: I forgot to mention yesterday that there are a few areas on some of those 5 maps that you just plain can't get into yet. They require a song or form that you can't access currently. I mention this so that no one spends bitter long hours stuggling against a wall or implied puzzle. If it seems like you can't get to some portion of a map, then you probably can't. This will of course be addressed when we release the future sections of the mod.  In the meantime just have some casual fun exploring what you can, and the rest will open up to you sometime down the road.
Given that the wiki lists three mods that are "on-hold" and "may never be released", my wife and I figured it was better to release an incomplete "teaser" version now than run the risk that we too might run out of steam and never release anything playable.

9

Gameplay / Re: Thorn jump

« on: June 18, 2010, 08:48:49 pm »

I'm not sure why Beast form would move you forward while in air, so I think it's the pretty light you see that makes you think Naija goes faster.

The beast form does jump farther than any other form, when jumping out of the water or off a wall.

I think they were indicating they'd throw the seed and try to change forms before it could sprout and fling them. Not sure if the timing would work out for that, but if you could change before the seed hit the ground, the extra jump distance seems plausible.

Once you're in the air, though,  I agree it's probably to late to for form switching to matter.

10

Modding / Re: New Aquaria Wiki

« on: June 10, 2010, 01:27:41 am »

I added some new pages to the modding wiki today. I've put up tutorials on how to get functional singbulbs and healthplants into your mod. They're pretty simple, but didn't seem to be documented anywhere. A day or two ago, I added some casual tutorial-like stuff to the List of Nodes as well. Hope this proves helpful to people (like myself) just getting their feet wet when it comes to modding Aquaria.

11

Modding / Re: Respawning fish are turning invisible?

« on: June 09, 2010, 06:06:47 am »

Really? I'd never noticed that... but I spent a lot more time in energy form than in beast form, so if it's part and parcel with being pink and fuzzy, I might not have noticed.

12

Modding / Respawning fish are turning invisible?

« on: June 08, 2010, 10:06:38 pm »

I'm working on my first mod, and I've hit a minor but weird issue.

I've got a few schools of fish on some of the levels. They spawn normally when I start a level, but I've found that if I eat them in beast form, when they respawn they come back invisible.  At first I thought maybe beast form prevented them from respawning if I ate them, but then, while fighting with a monster, I lunged through the area where a school of fish had been, and it triggered a bunch of the whispy green lights that flash when you eat a fish (and my health bar ramped up like I'd just charged through half a dozen edible fish, even though there was nothing visible). So I went to a safer map and tested it. Same thing happens anywhere I eat fish in my mod.

My background graphics are in the right layer, so it's not like they're just hidden behind it. All I can think of is that I'm missing either some line of code, or some whole script involving fishes that I should have copied into my mod. I'm not aware of any such script that's needed, though.

Here's what I am using to call up the fish in the first place, in the map.xml files:

<SchoolFish x="4376" y="6058" id="1" num="30" range="400" maxSpeed="80" layer="8" gfx="Fish-0011" />

There's a few variations in that line of code from map to map, but they're all basically set up like that, and that line in particular generates a school that's in any easy place for me to locate and eat.

13

Support / Re: Having trouble getting Mods to open

« on: June 05, 2010, 11:47:25 pm »

After a great deal of effort, I have finally been able to get it to run a mod. It took a very thorough manual search of my hard drive. When finally we found the correct folder, my wife and I were dumbfounded. Yesterday, following the instructions of the bugzilla.icculus guys, we'd looked in a particular place (inside Library/Application Support) and there was no Aquaria folder there. I'd been so upset that their instructions involved looking for a folder that didn't exist, and didn't come up when I searched my computer either manually or by automated means, that I showed it to my wife like "do you see this thing here? Cause I can't find it." She helped me look, and confirmed for me that the folder wasn't there. 

Today, it's there. I'm absolutely certain this isn't user error. I was really thorough yesterday, and showed it to her. Since then, though, i've reinstalled the software. I'm guessing there was a glitch when I unzipped the software and booted it up the first time, because that folder was not there yesterday. We're both absolutely certain it wasn't.  (Oh, and interestingly enough, when I do a search for "jukebox.xml" my computer can't find it anywhere. I can find it manually, but an automated search doesn't. I don't know what to make of that.)

Anyhow, thank you to everyone who offered advice.  I'm gonna go play some Mods.

14

Support / Re: Having trouble getting Mods to open

« on: June 04, 2010, 11:38:28 pm »

Further update: I've got more information now, but it's still not working.

Before I started this thread here, I also filed a bug at bugzilla.icculus.org (the readme that came with the software said to contact them about any bugs).

They got back to me today, saying that mods aren't supposed to be put in the package, they're supposed to go in "Library/Application Support/Aquaria/_mods". They claim that the first time you run Aquaria, it's supposed to copy the _mods folder to that location automatically. So I opened up Library/Application Support, and there was no Aquaria folder there. It never copied.

So I made an aquaria folder there, and put a _mods folder inside it, and moved all the mods into that.  No luck, though. It still won't let me access mods via the software. It would appear my copy of Aquaria is not looking at "Library/Application Support/Aquaria/_mods", despite what the bugzilla/icculus guys think.

Could someone on a Mac (who has been able to get mods to work) please tell me where their "_mods" is located? Also please include either the version number you're running, or at least whether or not you got yours via the Humble Indie Bundle, so I can figure out if we've got the same version of the software. Thank you!

15

Support / Re: Having trouble getting Mods to open

« on: June 04, 2010, 09:43:57 pm »

Thanks for the efforts at helping. Thus far, you haven't told me anything I didn't already know / do. Here's some more information and details in hopes that someone will find something that I'm doing wrong...

I open Aquaria, and on the screen with Naija in the blue crystal with various buttons on rocks, I click on the purple rock that says "Mods".

This brings me to a screen with a big box that says "Template Mod" and has a close-up picture of Naija. I can click on it, which opens the editor and places naija on screen in a nondescript circular room. Or, I can click on the ornate right or left arrows from that screen with the "Template Mod" banner. Clicking on the arrows cycles through precisely four Mod banners. They read "Template Mod", "Test Map", "Aquaria Jukebox" and "Tutorial". Those four were already pre-loaded when I installed the software from the Humble Indy Bundle, I haven't done anything to load them.

I wanted to access the other mods that people have made. So, after exiting the Aquaria program, I right-clicked on it's icon, and chose "Show Package Contents" from the pop-up menu. This brought up a new finder window. That finder window has a number of folders, the first one is named "_mods", the second is named "Ambrosia", then it has aquaria.png, then there's a folder called "config", a folder called "Contents" etc.

I double-clicked on the "_mods" folder. Inside it were a folder named "aquariaeditortutorial", a folder named "aquariatemplate", a folder named "jukebox", and a folder named "guert_mod". Each was followed immediately by a correspondingly named .xml file. Since three of them have the same names as the mods my software came with, I'm assuming these correspond to them, with "guert_mod"  being the one that comes up as "test map".

So I downloaded a number of mods from this forum, and from the Aquaria modding wiki. These came in a variety of compressed formats, .zips and .rars, etc. I extracted each of them just as I've extracted plenty of other files before for other programs. I copied them from my downloads folder into the "_mods" folder inside the Aquaria package. 

So now my "_mods" folder has in it those initial four folders and .xml files, plus it also has a "AngryLi" folder and AngryLi.xml, "beautyOfAquaria" folder and beautyOfAquaria.xml, "big_energy_battle_121" folder and big_energy_battle_121.xml, "rpg_PrequelCampaign" folder and rpg_PrequelCampaign.xml, etc. They look just like the format and structure for the existing Mods that came with the software. Poking around in the folders, I see each contains a number of other folders, an "entitygroups.txt", a "mod-icon.png", a "mod-init.lua", etc, so there's really nothing missing from those folders that is present in all 4 mods that came with the software bundle. Everything looks to be in order, and seems like it should work.

But when I open up Aquaria, and click on the purple Mods rock, it only ever shows me those same four Mod banners to choose from, just "Template Mod", "Test Map", "Aquaria Jukebox" and "Tutorial". It never shows me any other mod banners or names, no matter how many times I click through with the right and left arrows.

I'm left with two questions off the top of my head:
1) Should I have put the mods somewhere other than inside the software package? I do see that at least one mod has a readme.txt that says "To install place the CostumeMod folder and CostumeMod.xml into your Aquaria _mods folder (ex: X:\Games\Aquaria\_mods)" That example doesn't match the placement of my aquaria "_mods" folder at all. The default installation just placed my Aquaria in the Applications folder, so I've assumed thus far that the example given in that readme was probably the default installation location for the PC version. Maybe it/I installed to wrong spot on my machine? I'm pretty sure I just did the default installation and nothing special, I can't imagine why I would have done anything unusual, but it's been several weeks so I don't know for certain.
2) Has anyone on this forum had similar experiences with the Mac version purchased via the Humble Indie Bundle? If others who got the same version of the software as me are having no trouble running mods, then maybe they could take a close look at what I wrote above to see if I'm doing anything wrong. They could also chime in that mods work for their mac with this version, so that I'd know for certain that the problem must lie with my computer or my files, and not with the Mac version in general, or the specific build included in the Humble Indie Bundle.