New Trick mirror

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New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

I create a new mod
Prince Of Persia Training For Beginners
then in turn have all the tricks of this site http://www.popot.org/documentation.php?doc=Tricks
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

Now I do not want to unload
all done, then upload
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by Norbert »

There are already several mods that aim to teach players tricks.
Several even have the word "trick" in their titles, Trick Bootcamp, Trick of Chomper, Trick of Through, Trick of Tiles.
Maybe try creating a good mod without tricks, might be a challenge. :)
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

Norbert wrote:There are already several mods that aim to teach players tricks.
Several even have the word "trick" in their titles, Trick Bootcamp, Trick of Chomper, Trick of Through, Trick of Tiles.
Maybe try creating a good mod without tricks, might be a challenge. :)
in this mode, I try not to repeat the trick, on each level of about 10 tricks
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by oitofelix »

Norbert wrote:Maybe try creating a good mod without tricks, might be a challenge. :)
What people call "tricks" are actually original engine's bugs. Any mod relying on such misfeatures for progressing through levels is ill-behaved and not portable to well-behaved engines like MININIM. Personally, I think the reason many people in the modding community are so akin to discovering and using these bugs are due to the proprietary nature of the original engine, which naturally limited the features available for modders and couldn't be improved in general. That's understandable since free software engines like MININIM and SDLPoP are quite late in the history of the PoP modding community.

MININIM approach to this is: any bug discovered is fixed as soon as possible instead of being considered a feature for use, which is the normal route taken in software development. This philosophy is easy to maintain because MININIM was developed from scratch without allusion to the poor physics and rendering engines of the original game, so in this sense it was born free from the bugs inherited by ports derived from Jordan Mechner's original Apple II code.

I think SDLPoP developers would have a harder time keeping up to the same goal, because SDLPoP's heritage makes some bugs inherent to the engine's core, in such a way that it won't be possible to fix those bugs without refactoring and rewriting large portions of the engine.

Anyway, I don't see now any reason why people would keep relying on those ugly glitches to build mods. I'd like to see truly clean and sane challenging mods that don't depend on bugs to be completed --- the way it's intended to be. I'd like to see the "cult of bugs" gone from this community.

Of course, engines like MININIM and SDLPoP will always have bugs, because every non-trivial piece of software do. However the true challenge of a developer is to minimize those bugs (particularly the easily triggered ones), while the true challenge of a modder is to make a good mod that doesn't rely on any sort of engine bug.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by Norbert »

You are smart oitofelix, but, at least in your texts, you seem to frequently lack the ability to add nuances and clearly distinguish facts from subjective judgments. For starters, your premise that tricks are bugs is flawed. If you look through the tricks at popot.org, you will see that the majority of tricks are not related to/caused by engine bugs. Numbers 1 and 2 are, but 3 is not. This already means that your statement that "What people call "tricks" are actually original engine's bugs." is incorrect. Trick 4, that a guard makes spikes harmless, is debatable. Trick 5 is a bug, 6 debatable, 7 a bug, 8, 9 and 10 debatable, even 11 is debatable. Trick 12 is not a bug, 13 is debatable, 14 and 15 are not bugs, and so on. You're unjustly generalizing. Your statements that include terms like "misfeatures", "ill-behaved", "well-behaved", "poor physics", "ugly glitches": all subjective. The same goes for "the way it's intended to be"; even if there's a single way things were truly intended (let's say by Mechner), some of us enjoy deviating from how things are intended to be. There's nothing factual there. I also don't think the proprietary nature of the original engine is the main reason players are akin to discovering and using tricks; the reason is that we're having fun. For a lot of people the intellectual property status of software is unimportant. What is a "true challenge of a modder" is also subjective, and there are all kinds of challenges, some that include working with tricks and some that don't. I could discuss your post in more detail, but I'm afraid it wouldn't improve the forum atmosphere, so I won't.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by oitofelix »

Norbert wrote:This already means that your statement that "What people call "tricks" are actually original engine's bugs." is incorrect.
By context, I'm clearly referring to the tendency of people in the modding community (like yourself) of calling original engine's bugs as "tricks". I'm not categorically negating the fact that there can be something called "tricks" which aren't bugs. Ironically, for someone whose main critique is (and have been) "subjectivity" and "lack of nuance", you are being quite bold on your understanding. In fact, many of your arguments run around the concept of subjectivity, what defeats the purpose of objective discussion. If you think my points are subjective, and I clearly don't think they are, why bother discussing them? By definition they can't be argued fruitfully on your take. Let those who think they are arguable, argue about them. Otherwise, I'm inclined to think you have a subjective reason to attack my arguments for the sake of them not being discussed, what would be unfortunate.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by Falcury »

oitofelix wrote:I think SDLPoP developers would have a harder time keeping up to the same goal, because SDLPoP's heritage makes some bugs inherent to the engine's core, in such a way that it won't be possible to fix those bugs without refactoring and rewriting large portions of the engine.

Anyway, I don't see now any reason why people would keep relying on those ugly glitches to build mods. I'd like to see truly clean and sane challenging mods that don't depend on bugs to be completed --- the way it's intended to be. I'd like to see the "cult of bugs" gone from this community.

Of course, engines like MININIM and SDLPoP will always have bugs, because every non-trivial piece of software do. However the true challenge of a developer is to minimize those bugs (particularly the easily triggered ones), while the true challenge of a modder is to make a good mod that doesn't rely on any sort of engine bug.
I do my best to help with the bugs :) Luckily, engine rewriting hasn't been necessary so far, I'm actually surprised at how "simple" some of the bug fixes turned out to be (in retrospect, of course... yes the engine code can be a big tangle...)

Hm, have you tried my own mod? (thread / popot link) It's meant to played with bugfixes turned on.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by oitofelix »

Faclury wrote:Hm, have you tried my own mod? (thread / popot link) It's meant to played with bugfixes turned on.
Not yet. I'll try it with the development version of MININIM, ASAP. Will also try its mirrored version. Recently I've added the '--mirror-level' option to MININIM, that perfectly mirrors the entire levels horizontally (constructions, links, events, kid and guards positions and so on...) after they have been loaded by the active level module. It's equivalent to the level editor command 'E>LMBH', on a per-level basis. It's conceptually distinct from the long available '--mirror-mode' option that accomplishes a similar playing experience by mirroring horizontally the graphical output and the game pad input.

MININIM 3 (how I decided to call its third release and define the versioning hereafter) is being delayed because I'm implementing new features and primarily because I've been extensively hunting for and fixing bugs. Updating and improving the documentation will also take some time. Testing mods with MININIM, in particular with level mirroring turned on, have helped me spot several bugs not reproducible using the original level set.

By the way, how can I obtain a comprehensive list of SDLPoP's bug fixes over the original engine?

Ps: I see your mod uses a modified version of SDLPoP. Ideally those modifications would be all scriptable, without the need to modify the engine's core code. MININIM will only get such capabilities after a couple of releases. I don't know yet how game play is affected by playing it using the default MININIM engine.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

Faclury Norbert oitofelix
dear friends, I have all the respect
I'm sorry that I did not know English, and the place I google translate translator
I soglsen doing fashion is very good with no tricks, of course if he is a powerful hard
even I wanted to create a day

they give us the tricks? I personally
1. The interest in the game
2. rivalry
3. The new challenges with new tricks

tomorrow you can all these errors
but what you get from this?
What will happen ? you know?)
I do not know what will happen, but specifically of posts on this forum will not be)

I wish good luck to all
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by Norbert »

oitofelix wrote:Ideally those modifications would be all scriptable
There are definitely some interesting possibilities there, I agree.
Falcury made some impressive modifications for a beta release that accompanied his proposal here.
It takes modding to a whole new level.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by oitofelix »

Norbert wrote:Falcury made some impressive modifications for a beta release that accompanied his proposal here.
It takes modding to a whole new level.
Indeed. However, the only tangible benefit of using libtcc is not requiring modders to setup a development environment for building SDLPoP, since no higher abstraction or features are added on top of the raw SDLPoP's code. Furthermore, that limits the architectures for which scripted mods work since libtcc must explicitly support them.

Ideally, a scripting language should offer the following features to the users of an extensible program:
  • Architecture neutrality: this means that the scripting code should be able to run on any architecture the host program's binary could be built for.
  • High-level dynamic language: this means that the provided scripting language should abstract hardware and operating system matters, and that symbols may be redefined at run-time.
  • Friendlier interfaces: this means that simple and well-defined interfaces should be provided to access the host program's features.
  • REPL (read-eval-print-loop) running in a separate thread: this means that the game can be (re)programmed on the fly without the need for restart or pause, and a command interface is provided for evaluating language expressions and getting back their results, as well as their side effects on the game.
That's the reason why I've chosen GNU Guile for MININIM. It's the GNU project's implementation of the Scheme language, a powerful and elegant Lisp dialect.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by Falcury »

ArmFly wrote:Faclury Norbert oitofelix
dear friends, I have all the respect
I'm sorry that I did not know English, and the place I google translate translator
I soglsen doing fashion is very good with no tricks, of course if he is a powerful hard
even I wanted to create a day

they give us the tricks? I personally
1. The interest in the game
2. rivalry
3. The new challenges with new tricks

tomorrow you can all these errors
but what you get from this?
What will happen ? you know?)
I do not know what will happen, but specifically of posts on this forum will not be)

I wish good luck to all
No worries!
As for myself, I'm not "for" or "against" tricks/bugs. The tricks are fascinating either way. It amazes me that so much is still being discovered! :)
ArmFly wrote:
About this trick, I suppose the mirror trick only works when you are fast enough to be "ready" when the mirror appears?
oitofelix wrote:By the way, how can I obtain a comprehensive list of SDLPoP's bug fixes over the original engine?
There is a list in SDLPoP.ini, with some explanation for each fix:
https://github.com/NagyD/SDLPoP/blob/dd ... oP.ini#L58
oitofelix wrote:Ps: I see your mod uses a modified version of SDLPoP. Ideally those modifications would be all scriptable, without the need to modify the engine's core code. MININIM will only get such capabilities after a couple of releases. I don't know yet how game play is affected by playing it using the default MININIM engine.
Yes, you read my thoughts, this was a main reason for me to experiment with scripting for SDLPoP. We should maybe continue the discussion in that thread.
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Re: New Trick mirror

Post by ArmFly »

Falcury

when you open the main door
a few seconds later - there is a mirror
and where there is a mirror, there is removed the object that was previously

you just need to be the right time in the right place
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