It's A Mystery!

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Fri May 21, 2004 3:58 pm

I have the feeling the more answer I give the more questions will arise!

The deluxe version is a completely separate download, i.e. you could potentially keep both the old and the new version on your system. The deluxe version can do anything (load old levels and "update" them, play old levels, play new levels) except it can't save the levels in the old version format - to do that you would need to keep the old editor around.

However, I think that gradually the new version will completely replace the old version - I think/hope that most people will end up upgrading given the added value of the deluxe version, and on our site the deluxe version will replace the old version - i.e. new users can only buy the deluxe version (at the corresponding higher price). In other words, as time goes to infinity, the ratio of old to new levels will approach zero!

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:20 pm

Coulnd't help but post another screenshot - I thought this one looked cute!

Loof and Qookie having a little winter fun!

(and yes: Qookie is one of the new characters! Do I hear the sound of a hundred hands slapping a hundred foreheads???

)

Carolyn · Post by **Carolyn** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:26 pm

Wow!! Snow... how I hate snow.... haha

... It is a cute picture... and Qookie... that's a very cute name... He even looks like a Qookie... what ever a Qookie is.... he is it...... I like that name!!

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Fri May 21, 2004 5:36 pm

(just sidenote - interesting that people have assigned genders to Stinky, Loof, Qookie, and "????". So far all male, with the exception of a few people thinking that Qookie could be a "mom". You will actually not find any "he"/"she" in any of the official levels/posts/descriptions/etc... we were very careful about that. Are they little boys or girls (or adults?). Brother/sister? Brother/brother? Or are the inhabitants of Wonderland beyond all that sillyness? Everyone can decide for themselves - and I ain't tellin'!)

(actually, nor do I know)

Gen · Post by **Gen** » Fri May 21, 2004 8:14 pm

I'm like the others, can't wait until it comes out! BUT, I guess I will have to!

It really looks great!

Will the Deluxe version have a "pause", so that one can stop play in order to answer the phone, get feeling back into the fingers, visit the sandbox, etc.? With a "pause" we could go back to where we left off and not have to start all over again.

Carolyn · Post by **Carolyn** » Fri May 21, 2004 8:21 pm

Hmmmm.... he/she... matters not.. they are wonderland creatures... Good enough for me...

majic1 · Post by **majic1** » Fri May 21, 2004 8:43 pm

Gen wrote:I'm like the others, can't wait until it comes out! BUT, I guess I will Will the Deluxe version have a "pause", so that one can stop play in order to answer the phone, get feeling back into the fingers, visit the sandbox, etc.? With a "pause" we could go back to where we left off and not have to start all over again.

Actually, there's a "pause" now - just press the escape key in the middle of a game - when you're ready to go back to the game, arrow to "resume game" and continue!

Gen · Post by **Gen** » Fri May 21, 2004 9:42 pm

AH! Thanks Majic! Never realized that, now putting on my dunce cap!

Thanks again!

OldPete · Post by **OldPete** » Fri May 21, 2004 10:35 pm

Still need a save or go back one step lol with all the stupid 'dunce' mistakes i make of knowing what to do then accidently knocking a bolder or pushing a box into the wrong spot. hehe

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Fri May 21, 2004 11:32 pm

Midnight Synergy wrote:(just sidenote - interesting that people have assigned genders to Stinky, Loof, Qookie, and "????". So far all male, with the exception of a few people thinking that Qookie could be a "mom".

Well with your latest screenshot, Qookie does look like a mom. Or at least a female.

This means we can play a level with 3 or 4 inhabitants at the same time right? Does that also mean we'll have two new colors of chompers?

Carolyn · Post by **Carolyn** » Fri May 21, 2004 11:37 pm

I think all the creatures... are kids.... wonderland kids... no mom's and dad's that wouldn't be any fun...

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:13 am

Midnight Synergy wrote:Yes, although it won't change gameplay (Stinky will just disappear inside the house). How this will work is that you can place larger objects, such as houses, or really large objects, such as your custom made castle, anywhere on the map in the editor. Then you'll be able to set tiles surrounding it as "walkable" or "not walkable". Put down a house (which sits on 3x3 tiles) and make all nine tiles "not walkable" and the house simply is decoration. Put it down and leave one tile open at the entrance, and Stinky can walk "into" the model. You could then also hide a coin, button, teleporter, etc, in that entrance way.

I got an idea from this, but it needs some additional features to make it work well.

When you mentioned about hiding a teleporter in the entrance way, I immediately understand that by using a teleporter, you can simulate Stinky going inside the house, by teleporting him to a separate area of the level that's supposed to stand for the inside of the house.

So extending this idea, we can imagine having a number of isolated areas in the level that's supposed to stand for the few different floors inside the house (ground floor, 2nd floor, etc.), and again, we can use teleporters to simulate "stairways" that connect a floor to another.

But here's the thing: for the upward-going stairway, you can make a 3D model of it and put it right on top of the teleport, thereby visually hiding it and make it both look and act like a stairway going up. But then you need a corresponding stairway model that goes downwards at the other teleport, and you also need a way to hide the actual teleport there, so that it just looks like a stairway.

So with this in mind, I'm kinda hoping to get two additional features:

1) the ability to make 3D models that "pops down" from ground level (think a water tile) instead of "pops up" (like your trees, mushrooms, houses, etc.).

2) the ability to have yet another (say) 8 teleports, except in actual gameplay they are invisible and looks just like an "empty" tile, with the intention that you're suppose to put a 3D model (either up or down) over it.

Hope my description isn't too confusing. It's not a big deal if you won't do it, but I thought it'd be a nice feature.

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:24 am

Oh, while I'm at it, here's a few other interesting ideas:

1) Currently we have those little fishies that can swim in water. I was just thinking of having more of that sort of stuff. One thing that immediately comes to mind are having little butterflies that fly around randomly above the ground.

2) Local atmospheric effects. Right now, all atmosphere effects (rain, snow, etc.) are global. What I thought could be interesting is to have a version of such effects that are "local", meaning that they only happen if Stinky is at a certain area in the level, dying down once Stinky leaves the area. This can work since currently in the editor, atmospheric effects are treated as objects. So you can have, say, a "local rain" object affects only a, say, 9x9 square surrounding where you put that local-rain object, where it's raining inside that area but not outside. Or something like that.

3) Related to idea #2, a nice example of a local atmospheric effect would be fog. Having the entire level foggy is probably not the best idea, so instead with local atmospheric effects, you can confine the fog to just a selected portion of the level, leaving others fog-free. The fog can be made so that it's strongest at the point where you put the "local-fog" object, but as you move further away from the object the fog fades out, until you're completely outside the area and then there's no fog at all.

4) All of these too complicated? Well, I suppose it could still be fun to have variations of the existing atmospheric effects, like having heavy rain vs. a light drizzle, or something like that. Or having something cutesy like raining down little rainbow stars or something.

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:41 am

oh man, I can't seem to shut my mind or my mouth up...

Here's yet another random idea I have, which I guess will probably never be implemented.

I want a raft!

I mean, it's nice having to have to build your way across water, but it can get tedious sometimes, and having all those boxes floating on water can sometimes look a little clunky.

What I have in mind is that you can have a new object called raft. There are a couple of variations on how this can work:

1) Whenever Stinky boards a raft, you immediately lose control of Stinky, and the raft will start going in the same direction as the direction Stinky is going when boarding the raft. The raft (and with Stinky riding on it) keeps going until it hits something that's not water, at which point it stops and you regain control of Stinky to get off of the raft. You can either have the raft disappear once it stops (so it's only a one-time use), or not have it disappear (so it can be reused multiple times).

Currently, you can essentially simulate this by putting a path of ice cutting across the body of water at where you'd have a raft, but there are some important differences: a) using ice to simulate this looks clunky; b) the ice tiles are not water, whereas with the raft, since you can still push boxes into water to turn them into non-water, you can actually influence where the raft will stop, and possibly allow you to change directions and so forth. (Sorry if the explanation is a little weak here, it's easier to explain with paper and pencil.)

2) Another possibility is to actually allow Stinky to control where he's going while on the raft (so in effect, you basically give Stinky a means to swim in water); however, you can't get off a raft except at particular spots, namely a new "pier" tile where all rafts start and stop at. This is a little less interesting and you can kinda simulate it by just making teleports at where the piers are, but it's more fun (especially if you can add new monsters that swims in water and thus must be avoided while rafting, like a whale or something).

majic1 · Post by **majic1** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:43 am

Wow! Sounds great - betcha Midnight Synergy is thinking about now, "No matter how MUCH we give them, they just keep wanting more, more, more, more." BUT - isn't that how addicts are supposed to act?

BIGZIPZ · Post by **BIGZIPZ** » Sat May 22, 2004 12:59 am

wow, looks good! got some fiendishly, outragously, sinsiter puzzles in my head, ones I wanted to make before but were limited by the number of gates etc.

For me anyway, making levels on the current game has reached its course, I feel that 500 levels in, its getting pretty hard to make original ideas, tricks, etc, and it is time for a new addon, for the addon, so to speak.

There is no doubt this will breath new life into the game, the greedy side of my designing personality wants more than 7 colored gates, but I can live with that.

Also looking forward to designing some layouts for the house templates, only thing I don't like the look of is the mothership, when you wack it up in size, the circular rim is effected, and the polygons become insufficient, and it looks jagged, perhaps this will be resolved, but its not really that big of a deal (although speaking as a guy who did systems design, for a year at college, before dropping the course, graphics designers like there circular objects to be as circular as possible

)

Is it worth 14.95? will in my currency its about 9 quid, is it worth 9 quid ? your damn right it is, at 14.95 it is a bargain, £9 buys me and my mum a chicken meal at KFC! cmon guys, wack it up to 19.99

hahahah

Good stuff!

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Sat May 22, 2004 1:44 am

BIGZIPZ wrote:For me anyway, making levels on the current game has reached its course, I feel that 500 levels in, its getting pretty hard to make original ideas, tricks, etc, and it is time for a new addon, for the addon, so to speak.

Well, yes and no. I definitely know for myself that there're still a few interesting ideas that can be done with what we have so far, just that I don't have enough time to turn them into anything yet. Visually though, I do agree that we could use some new objects to spice things up, which is why I'm quite excited about the houses and castles and snowman, and also the "create your own" option (though I'll probably never have the skills to create them).

I love the surprises and teases Patrick has put out for us with all those screenshots, but I also kinda wish he allowed for more than one month of time before release to announce the addon. I mean, just look at how reading this whole thread have inspired me to come up with all these crazy ideas of new things to add to Wonderland!

Except none of them will probably make into the release since it's less than a month away! And this is like the final version of Wonderland we'll ever get...... Oh well, at least I'm still very excited about what I've seen so far!

Also looking forward to designing some layouts for the house templates

Ooh! It's good to know there'll be at least one person here who seems to know how to use that "advanced" feature! You'll share your 3D models with us "novices" though, right?

OldPete · Post by **OldPete** » Sat May 22, 2004 5:30 am

The raft idea why not have it so that stinky can turn around on the raft and the raft travels in the direction he/she is facing. thereby giving total directional control of the raft. when he hits a piece of land then the raft stops there (unless stinky turns to face away from the land to make the raft continue)

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Sat May 22, 2004 5:51 am

majic1 wrote:Wow! Sounds great - betcha Midnight Synergy is thinking about now, "No matter how MUCH we give them, they just keep wanting more, more, more, more."

Yeah, and there are always lots of great new ideas, so it's hard to pick a point and say "this is the final feature list". No matter where you draw your line, there's always sand beyond it.

Except when you go to far... then you fall into the ocean and get wet.

Okay, so maybe that was not the best allegory.

Quick comments:

Raft - I like the idea, but it won't be in this version.

Save/Load - this one is too bad, we really wanted to get this working, but it doesn't look like it will survive testing. A simple undo doesn't work since many things in Wonderland run in realtime (monster, fireballs, etc), so you have to mix undoing steps and running time backward. This is an example of the kind of reasons why I'm quite sure that this will be the last update to the Wonderland engine - certain things have simply become too entangled in the code to effectively add to the game, and I'm sorry to say that the Loading/Saving in a level is one of them - the engine was simply not designed for it from the beginning, and would require a complete re-write.

Atmospheric Effects: there are some new things (you can now control some "lighting" in the levels... eg. bathe everything in a blue light), but they remain global.

So, for once, a post about what the deluxe version does not contain.

majic1 · Post by **majic1** » Sat May 22, 2004 6:10 am

Thanks for the update. I think WE SHOULD ALL JUST SHUT UP NOW & LET PATRICK & MIDNIGHT SYNERGY DO THEIR THING! The sooner we leave them alone, the sooner we'll have our Deluxe version!!!

LinkyNStoof · Post by **LinkyNStoof** » Sat May 22, 2004 8:56 am

Midnight Synergy wrote:Save/Load - this one is too bad, we really wanted to get this working, but it doesn't look like it will survive testing. A simple undo doesn't work since many things in Wonderland run in realtime (monster, fireballs, etc), so you have to mix undoing steps and running time backward.

How about just rerun everything from the beginning but in super speed, up to the time before the last step you've taken? That way you don't have to run time backwards at all. All you would need to do is to record the timing of each keystroke.

Davimad · Post by **Davimad** » Sat May 22, 2004 9:48 am

I think all these new ideas are fantastic.

Must admit to being with majic1 , give an inch, take a mile springs to mind.

We wanted more features and next month our wishes will have been granted.

Lets just be patient, Patrick and co. can get on with what they do best!

It's all very exciting, we are like children waiting for Santa!

Lets all relax and wait for the big day!

M.A.D.

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Sat May 22, 2004 10:13 am

Wow, a lot has happened since I posted yesterday.

I read your (quick) reply Pat - thanks. Just some (equally quick

) notes. I had intended to post after yours but had to go out...

Pat wrote

no door opening animation

That's a bit off Pat...

I was just curious to know whether entering a house opened up a different screen - 'inside the house' so to speak as happens with RPGs. Even as it stands there are still plenty of possibilities. As you said hiding coins, teleporters - that has potential in itself to either a. set up a separate area at the edge of level (empty border) with an enlarged area similar to the pyramid thing I did in AL2 only a whole lot neater or b. teleport to another house/area that might otherwise be inaccessible. Either way the extra teleporters will come in handy.

If you had a 3x3 house with all 9 squares walkable, could you then have a box object in the middle which could be pushed out?

Pat wrote

I don't think there you can use "3d models" and "novice" in the same sentence

...unless you're refering to model aeroplanes... it's something I'd really like to get into but like you said, it's not something you can just pick up and run with. I've managed to make a box & a sphere (well... sort of) but time is something I don't have a lot of - you know work + own business + parenthood... sigh! One day...

Actually one thing I'd like to see (whether I do it or someone else) is to see little zelda like people models - throw a sign in front of them & there you have instant NPCs

Pat wrote

Again I must stress that this is really an advanced feature - most people will not go out and make their own models. But hopefully some will enjoy doing it and share with the rest of the community. We'll see!

I'd imagine much like when you released Return to Wonderland, it might be a little while before we see a flurry of level making let-a-lone 3d creations. Most of us will be just wrapped in what you create first that our own levels don't even come to mind...

Pat wrote

Nope.

Pat wrote

Yup. But this will probably be the last Wonderland game/update/etc for a while - which is why so many features are going into this one. We want to make sure it will still be worth playing a few years from now!

How long has Return been out for now? I think the blowout in features coupled with the 3d modelling will easily extend it for a number of years (though the no. of signs may rein it in a little

). And it's a credit to you this far even with the 'relatively' limited features (& I don't say that ungratefully) this is the only game I play

Pat wrote

That's (so far) exactly the plan. But no sub-areas for 3d models - only if there actually are many that come out. I doubt many will be developed over the first months

Not likely, and should it start to take off - it shouldn't take much to set up. I think everyone's got even more on their wishlist but again you are operating within the confines of the existing engine & noone's going to be disappointed - just keep these things in mind for the next.... (heh)

xx days and counting...

Neither was that. Back to work.

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Sat May 22, 2004 10:31 pm

Robbie wrote:Wow, a lot has happened since I posted yesterday.
I was just curious to know whether entering a house opened up a different screen - 'inside the house' so to speak as happens with RPGs.

No, although as you and Linky have stated you could "rig" something to that effect using teleporters.

[note: I've deleted the next post in this thread since it caused some misunderstanding and some confused emails from folks]

BIGZIPZ · Post by **BIGZIPZ** » Sun May 23, 2004 11:57 am

[note: It was a joke " This was sent to me by Immah Fibbr" = I'm a fibber]

As if there would be a link to the new game on my crappy little webpage, the joke was the password would always come back incorrect, and you couldnt change the amount to donate from 5000 *sigh* at least 7 people got the joke, who emailed me anyway.

<input name="Button1" type="button" disabled="true" id="Button1" onClick="alert("Sorry that password is incorrect - check your typing and try again")" value="Download">

Come on! the number of pranks I have pulled on these forums, I can't believe some people thought this one was geniune. How obvious could I make it with a name like Immah Fibbr! Who needs an IQ test?

ol'gramma · Post by **ol'gramma** » Sun May 23, 2004 12:33 pm

How obvious could I make it with a name like Immah Fibbr! Who needs an IQ test?

You are insulting and childish.
It is time you found a forum that is in your age group, if there is one that will have you. Why are you here? You don't play any of the levels.
I have raised a 12 year old, he was never allowed to be as obnoxious as you.

ol'gramma
Carolyn

BIGZIPZ · Post by **BIGZIPZ** » Sun May 23, 2004 12:51 pm

The slightest bit of something out of the ordinary, a wee bit contreversial perhaps, something that doesn't quite fit the norm and you can't cope. Of course you never have liked me, that much is fact. It's people like me, who have a bit of spunk, who mix things up, that you can't stand.

At least I know what some people think of me.

"Can i ask you, as a mate, to move on from that incident and do what you do best? Make great levels, fun posts and just generally be the good fun guy on the board that you are."

popo · Post by **popo** » Sun May 23, 2004 1:50 pm

I like you Bigzipz, you're potty but I like you. You've got my sense of humour, I love practical jokes (as long as I'm not the brunt of them!)

Everyone should know what to expect from you by now and not get so upset. You've done good things like the custom level zip file and the database.

I missed your post btw, it had been deleted by the time I looked.

BIGZIPZ · Post by **BIGZIPZ** » Sun May 23, 2004 1:56 pm

Thanx

ill be starting a new levels database for the new game next month. Each author will have his/her own section.

The post that was deleted took you to a site I made, which asked you to enter a password to download the new game, everytime you entered the password it said it was incorrect, just a bit of fun. I said it was by a guy called Immah Fibbr, I thought this would make people aware it was a joke

eeyore31 · Post by **eeyore31** » Sun May 23, 2004 4:22 pm

Thanks for explaning----I missed it, too.

You little stinker.