The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

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Captain Dreamcast
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#131 » Wed Apr 17, 2013 1:34 pm

SeongGino wrote:PLEASE RESPOND TO LET ME KNOW YOUR ALIVE.


Hey SeongGino, good to know you are still around (despite the hellish circumstances. :? )

Dolmexica has been getting the backburner treatment lately. It's well overdue for a new release, mainly to add SD functionality, which is not difficult at all anymore because KallistiOS, the development library Dolmexica uses, has added SD support since I last posted here. Yeah, kudos to the KallistiOS developers, especially the ones who implemented the SD filesystem. (In case anybody remembers, before some demi-god coded the KOS version, I also wrote an SD library for this engine myself. Long story short: it sucks REAL bad compared to the KOS one.) Aaaaanyway, for now, there is little to no reason to make some small-time changes to the D-Engine, so I'm keeping it in backburner hell until I feel proficient enough at making the modding tools intuitive, with GUIs and whatever else is necessary. The main problem is other project(s?) are cluttering up all my free time, so while I hope to get a new release out some time this year, it won't happen any earlier than august. Holy jinkies, since the last release was also a GamesCom release, that would mean that there was a whole year of nothingness on the Domexi-front. The next one had better come with strippers 'n stuff!


Back to the topic at hand, it would be very cool to hear and see some more things from Dolmexi-Brawl. Characters, stages, etc. Please tell us more about the fighting itself, too, I for one would love to know more about what kind of gameplay you have in mind. :mrgreen:


Although my posting quota has fallen SIGNIFICANTLY over the course of the last... forever, I still check the forum a few times a week. Although hilariously enough, not always the homebrew section, which is why I'm responding so late. So if you have any more questions, I'll answer them ASAP.
For Great Justice!

SeongGino
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#132 » Mon Apr 22, 2013 1:03 pm

Good to see your alive. And hopefully whatever projects you got on the way will be just as excellent. I can understand its been in backburner hell, and there is no point in releasing a small update (Like $ony would for any small exploit). I am just glad to see your alive.

On Dolmexi-Brawl (Yes, that thing). I do plan on having it look as professional as possible, with correct proportions, well made animations, balanced move sets, move sets (Redundant, I know :D ) detail, fitting songs, etc. etc.. The character roster I want to make it full of different characters, and also add in an impossibly hard boss-fight :lol: . Realistically, there will be at least 15 chars or so from many different games, each acting (Hopefully) similar to their original counterparts, and of course variety is a must. And the gameplay I want to make it a little more fast paced, but less floaty than the MK vs SF video appeared to be IF POSSIBLE.

That is the whole theme of it all however. Im not saying it can be done, but some of the more in depth parts are just IF POSSIBLEs, but I want to cram in as much as the game, disc, and my time allows.

Of course it is a bit in the backburner hell side too, since other small things are going on of course. But I will definitely get to it when I have time.

But I wanted to make an update on this whole thing, the important thing for me is that you are still safe and alive and not killed by zombie invasions or fell off the window of a bus, or made into explosives by Sanshiro. ;) Just keep doing what your doing, and at least attempt to have fun doing it. Make it enjoyable, like for me! Anyways, bye!

Oh, and if you want, follow me on twitters where I post weird stuff, right...
Here --> Clicky Clicky!


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Segata-Sanshiro! Segata-Sanshiro-ro! Sega-Segata Dreamcast!

SMiTH
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#133 » Thu May 16, 2013 11:01 pm

We are lucky to have Captain Dreamcast around.
He is a great person with much talent, and many skills.

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stampfaceDC
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#134 » Tue Jun 25, 2013 12:24 am

Hi! I'm new to the forums & I have a question for Captain DC. Do you think Dolmexica would be able to handle Blazblue/Persona 4 Arena sprites, or is that impossible? 'Cause if it's doable, beating the crap out of Street Fighter characters with the Investigation Team sounds awesome. Just a question from a DC/fighter enthusiast.
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SeongGino
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#135 » Mon Aug 19, 2013 7:38 pm

stampfaceDC wrote:Hi! I'm new to the forums & I have a question for Captain DC.

Hello, this is Dreamcast-Talk customer service. Captain DC is not here at the moment, but I can take his place if you wish.

stampfaceDC wrote:Do you think Dolmexica would be able to handle Blazblue/Persona 4 Arena sprites, or is that impossible?

In theory, if you can find rips for the characters and put them in the right formats, it can be done. If I remember from reading the documentations back then, it is possible to have enough frames if not more for Blazblue, but
Persona 4 Arena sprites have much less frames per stance so at least that game is perfectly doable.

This is only for sprites though. For Gameplay styles, the engine is not the most complex capable one out there. (And what more did you expect from one indie developer designing it?) Having aspects like land to air combos and others from the Arc System Works fighters are, for now, impossible. But otherwise all the basics are doable, as well as some complex moves.

stampfaceDC wrote:'Cause if it's doable, beating the crap out of Street Fighter characters with the Investigation Team sounds awesome.

Yes, indeed does that sound very nice. But anything's possible in this engine for the most part.

stampfaceDC wrote:Just a question from a DC/fighter enthusiast.

Nice to have a fellow enthusiast out there. Enjoy your stay in the DC Scene. ;) This has been SeongGino from the Dreamcast-Talk customer service, and you have a swell day.

rullare
rebel
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#136 » Wed Feb 05, 2014 7:52 am

hmm nice one now i can maybe make a port of melty blood to dreamcast when this is done that whould be nice^^ cuz the game are online on PC, ps2 and so on and made some other cool stuff^^ thx for you coll work.

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Lord*Hypnos
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#137 » Fri Feb 07, 2014 1:48 pm

@rullare: There should have been a Melty Blood on DC, anyway, b/c IIRC, there was a version of that game for the Naomi platform. I bet a port wouldn't have been that hard!
Not that I've ever played it, but I've heard it's pretty good.

One thing that just occurred to me, reading these past few replies though: Does anyone remember when ArcSystemWorks and Capcom were considering doing a vs. Capcom fighting game? It was basically going to be Guilty Gear vs. Darkstalkers. Someone should make that once this engine is further along.
Also Known as TheRedFox

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flamingflimflam
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#138 » Fri Nov 14, 2014 9:56 am

Any word on this? It's been a while.
"I usually drop a dollar or two into UFO Catchers if I'm with a girl. Then I blind her with my skills, and she's like "oh damn, this is a stuffed animal" and the panties drop." -Captain Snarky, 2012

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Captain Dreamcast
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#139 » Sat Sep 09, 2017 2:52 pm

Happy birthday, Dreamcast! Yes, it's the time of the year where everyone and everytwo comes crawling out of their holes to do something for the good old DC.

My "thing" for this year's Dreamcast day is thematically related to the burning plane wreck that is Dolmexica, so I thought I'd share it here. It's a mini 2D fighter called Dream Fight 16 A.D., a touching tale in which the Dreamcast's three most popular(?) heroes come together to beat the snot out of each other.

Now I wouldn't necrobump the Dolmexica sticky just for that, the core thing of interest is that Dream Fight runs on Mugen. Yes, that Mugen. The moddable 2D fighter that works miles better than Dolmexica and has a gigantic fanbase that is incredibly lively to this day. Before you start downloading your favorite characters and get your CD-Rs ready, I have to break the bad news here: It's not in a good enough state yet to "just add a character and it works". It's an experimental port, it runs without sound, occasionally the text glitches goodbye and the framerate is anything but the stable 60fps we all crave for.

This may sound a bit farfetched without the pudding and the proof, so I invite you to download it yourself: https://captaindreamcast.itch.io/dream-fight-16-ad

I'll spend the rest of this wall-of-text going into the more technical details, I dunno if it's that interesting but that didn't stop me the previous 13 pages, did it?

What's still missing from the full Mugen experience?
Memory issues
Dream Fight runs using the same development library I use for the rest of my dumb monthly games. Once a game wants to allocate texture memory and there's not enough left, it (optionally compresses and) moves the least recently used texture to main RAM. It's kinda what Dolmexica did, just smarter. Sadly, that still means we are limited in memory. I'm still not using the Dreamcast's on-chip palette slots yet, but even with them, the situation's pretty grim. This is kind of an open problem since it's just a sad cold fact that a Dreamcast has less memory than a modern PC *gasps from the audience*.

Sound
It kinda goes hand-in-hand with the memory issues. I guess the BGM could be streamed again somehow, but fitting all the sound effects in the memory is hard and probably undesirable. So Dream Fight is a mute fight for now, but it's something I still have to look into properly.

Palettes
Yes, it was mentioned already, but everything related to palettes was taken out since I am still not 100% sure in which way I want to use the Dreamcast's on-chip palette slots. Mugen fighters have one main palette, so I guess an improvement could be to use two of the DC's four 256-color palette slots for the characters' main palette. Still makes a lot of Mugen's palette effects blatantly impossible, though. One good example here would be background palette effects.

Framerate
The framerate varies depending on how much memory is moved between main ram and video ram, that much is given. My main gripe and source of saltiness here is that it even varies in similar circumstances. It's still something I have to look into more properly. My pet theory is that it has to do with memory fragmentation (and thus the cost of moving memory around), but then again the script statement parser is written in such an INCREDIBLY inefficient way that it might actually be fully on the implementation.

Mugen itself
I wanted to make a small Mugen port to make a small 2D fighter game and that's what I did and (sadly) not a single line of code more. Pretty much everything is a little 'off' and a good chunk of state controllers is not even implemented. This is also the main reason why I'm not releasing a standalone version yet. It would just result in a sea of assertion failures and despair. There's also graphical glitches and whatnot, but these happen whenever my texture-memory-is-full heuristic messes up due to fragmentation and feels like overwriting my font texture. Also, I removed most of the juice from the game, such as explods and after-effects (basically all the cool stuff unrelated to gameplay). The AI pushes random commands, which is kinda similar to how the original Mugen AI acted. This AI is also pretty dumb and aggressive though, so it keeps moving forward and never ever blocks.

Why did I have to sit through 10 minutes of an MS Paint comic to get to the first fight?
Exquisite question, I haven't touched anything outside of the actual fight yet. The title screen, story boards and select screen were hastily put together and are not part of a proper Mugen port.

But why the MS Paint comic, Captain?
Y... you can keep holding start to skip it, y'know.

What happens now?
I've added the Mugen script, animation and sprite stuff to my gamedev library, so I'll keep refining them while making dumb non-fighter games. I'll work on proper Mugen in the background, though I can't really say when it's done or how good it's gonna be (if Dolmexica taught us anything, it's "Only trust what exists", eh?). My paragraphs above are highlights of what problems there are right now and obviously there's gonna be wayyy more ahead. It really feels like every other line here has a // TODO at the end.
It might actually be true: https://github.com/CaptainDreamcast/DreamFight16

What about Dolmexica?
Nickelback clearly demonstrated that Dolmexica's own stuff is not worth preserving:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbNYWRWRuwg

In all seriousness though, it makes more sense to have something like Mugen on the 'Cast that has a thriving fan base rather than force people to learn some obscure restricted fighter script language.

So yeah, have the link again, because why not:
https://captaindreamcast.itch.io/dream-fight-16-ad

It also runs on Windows and in browsers, so if you don't want to waste a CD-R, it's the exact same game (my dev library compiles to DC, Windows and HTML5). Of course if you're like me, you want to have the real deal to play Frisbee with.

Anyway, that's it from me for this Dreamcast day! I hope you manage enjoy Dream Fight 16 A.D. at least a little bit! (Also thanks for reading or skimming this wall-of-text, went a little overboard here.)
For Great Justice!

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Anthony817
Shark Patrol
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Re: The Dolmexica Engine [Moddable 2D Fighter]

Post#140 » Sun Sep 10, 2017 5:09 pm

Holy shit! He is alive!

Hallo mein freund! Wie geht es ihnen! 8-)

Long time no see eh? Damn how many years has it been now?

So Mugen port? Damn looks like you have been super busy!

Please keep up the good work and don't go missing in action like that for years at a time, you had us worried something bad had happened to you!
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