Hi,

@number 276, thanks for the post,  I’m really pleased to hear you like the idea of us possibly releasing the sound track to Crimson Eclipse. I assume the other game you mention is A heroes Call, I also really liked that they offered their sound track as something you could buy  and I think it was also available as a reward through their kick starter too. thanks again for the post and I’ll pass on your feedback to the rest of the team.

Paul
The Ebon Sky Studios Team
email: [email protected]
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/ebonskystudios/
Twitter: @ebonskystudios

@278
I saw the video, very nice features indeed.
I have a few questions though.
1: Is screenreader support ever going to be implumented into sable?
2: I know this has been asked a lot, but will sable be released soon?
and 3: is there jumping functionality in sable?

Hi

@ number  279. Pleased you enjoyed the latest video. I’ll try and answer your  questions below:
-at the moment Sable  doesn’t support  screen readers. I can’t say what will and won’t make it into future releases of sable, As mentioned previously We  are cautious of not wanting to over promise or commit ourselves .  we want to try to focus on what sable can do rather than what it might. Actually adding party members is a great example of this, it was something that lots of people asked for on the forum, and although I was sure it would make it into Sable, we didn’t want to commit ourselves to that until it was actually in Sable and working, as sometimes things can come up in game development outside of your control and plans change.
-there still isn’t a release date for Sable, at present our main focus is on producing our first game title using Sable, this will really give us a chance to fully test Sable, iron out issues and hone and tweak the engine. As soon as we have more details on Crimson Eclipse we’ll be sure to share that information here.
-, although we  haven’t built anything in for jumping, I have however seen test maps made where through clever use of existing sable tools and a little outside the box thinking people have created maps with stuff to jump over.
@number 280, hope when you watch the  video you like how the feature works, I remember you saying in a previous post you’d like to see something like this implemented. Regarding party members leaving a party, this isn’t currently possible. Although I’d enjoy a feature like that, along with other similar mechanics like swapping out party members  in battles etc ,  these features would probably not be in the initial release and be more long term goals if sable is successful for future releases, as we are very weary of ‘feature creep’ and spending so much time adding new features to the current version of sable that its release date just gets pushed farther and further back and never actually ends up getting released.

Again, as ever thanks for all the positive comments

Paul
Paul

Hi.
Thanks for yet an other great video. I look so much forward to play around with this engine, and of course also to play your first game.

Hi, I agree with 280. Screen reader support is a pretty important thing for those who can't get good sapi voices. The voices you get on win 8 and 10 are Ok I guess, but having a screen reader support added would allow a great deal more control on what voice the end-user can use if desired. I doubt it's too hard to add it these days. As said, there's tolk, and other libraries that can be easily integrated into the game. Also, as some others have said, I'd love to be able to have party members leave, or be permanently killed, and for you to be able to change the names of the core stats (gold, strength, mana etc.) so you could have gold instead be dollars, credits, or beer tankerds if you wanted! :d

I honestly think that that "hiii! it's Paul here from Ebon Sky Studios..." is going to be iconic 5 years from now.
The way he inflects and draws it out is just so unique and amusing.  LOL
It reminds me of an older woman greeting a family member or friend at a get together where she didn't expect to see them.  You know the sound...

So basically, my game is going to be set in the world of teddy ruxpin. I always thought that world would make for a fantastic RPG. One of the first arcs of the series has teddy and his friends captured by a group of creatures called mudblops, where in they meet a prince trying to rescue his sister from a gang of monsters called gutangs. There's a short time where one of Teddy's group is separated from the rest of the group. Prince Arin also joins them when they agree to help rescue his sister. So in the RPG, obviously he would join the party, but then return home once his sister was rescued. Other situations would be if characters were to die midway through the story, Arith from final fantasy vii is a perfect example of this.

Hopefully my explanation makes sense!

Hi everyone,

@ 289, , I’m not familiar with the rift system in final fantasy, I only played up until final fantasy 10 before I lost my sight and couldn’t play anymore, but I’ll look that up online and be able to get more information. teddy ruxpin, wow that’s a blast from the past, that was the bear you put the tape cassette in and he started telling a story , I remember wanting one of those back as a kid in the 80s, I think it was one of the most sort after toys when it first came out. Thanks for your thoughts on party members leaving, one possible solution would be to just create an event trigger  which could be set to fire at a certain point in the game when  the player does something(such as interact with a different NPC, goes through a door, finds something in a container etc) which would trigger the NPC to be then completely removed from the players party, with maybe the option at point of creation to either set a cut scene to play or text to be spoken which explains the party member leaving . I guess just a reverse version of what the ‘add party member’ trigger does. It’s an interesting idea, again, I can’t promise it will make it in, but I’ll definitely bring up your suggestion with the team.
@ number 290. Thanks for the post, really please to hear you’ve enjoyed the latest video. With shops , this is something you can select from the object creation menu. It’s not exactly a shop, but instead you can create a merchant who will buy and sell items. You can assign the merchant he’s own radar sound which plays as the player gets closer (so if you wanted you could maybe record something like a market vender calling out his items/trade attempting to draw customers to come buy from him).  you can set the sound which is played when you reach the merchant (like NPC ‘s, since just like NPC’s you can set this to be whatever sound you like as it doesn’t always have to be that  coughing/clearing throat sound that I use for the NPCs in the video series). You can assign them text or voice recorded lines for if the player decides to talk with the merchant. So up until this point really its pretty much all the standard settings you get when creating an npc. Where it then differs, is  during the merchants creation the next thing you’ll get to decide is their greed level, this is something I personally really like  . you set this as a percentage, 20% means he’ll sell everything for 20% more than the items value and buy items from you for 20% less than the items worth. . Alternatively you could set it to minus 20% and they could then sell everything for 20% less than its worth and buy items for 20% more than their worth (obviously you could use any percentage value you wanted). I think this can add an interesting mechanic into a game, where you can make it possible for the player to have to hunt around to find the best deal for selling and buying items. You can also then select which items the merchant will sell. When a player interacts with the merchant they can choose to talk, buy or sell. Although this like I said isn’t a shop, there would be nothing stopping you creating a building in your map , giving the building the name of a shop and then placing the merchant in the building,  to create more  of a shop feel than a street vender feel to your game. I can’t definitely promise that it will appear in another video, but I’ll bear it in mind when making any future videos. If you don’t see it in one of these you’ll definitely see it in action in crimson eclipse

As ever thanks for all the positive comments.

Paul
The Ebon Sky Studios Team
email: [email protected]
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/ebonskystudios/
Twitter: @ebonskystudios

Sorry, I was referring to aerith, the character from final fantasy 7, who dies near the end of disc 1. Yeah, just a function to remove a character from the party would be cool, just leave it up to the creator to give reasons for it happening.

Hay Paul, I just watched your new video, and while I'm impressed with the new feature, I feel a need to point out that it doesn't seem to let a creater tell the game to check the level of the main character and assign the new member's level accordingly.
This would really help out in games where level scaling could be an issue.
Another approach would be to have a game average the new level or at the vary least pick a level in between the highest and lowest characters in the party.
I'm not expecting this to be in the first build, but could you please consider adding it in a later build?
Another feature request; for a later build; is the ability to have the game read the level of the main character and set the levels of bosses to a level higher or lower than said level.
An example of this appears in the main-streem game "Lunar: Silver star story complete," where the game sets the levels of boss enemies higher than the main character Alex.
In the case of the first boss, it's Alex's level plus 3.
This insures that your players will never over-level and blow your game apart with eas.
And; I have no idea why you'd want to insure the enemy will be weeker than your characters, but if you're programming the feeture in anyway, may as well make it go both ways...
Well, I'm done giving you another head ache... big smile; Keep up the good work!
Later!

Hi everyone,

@number 295, pleased you liked the most recent video. Your suggestion of an option to choose to have the new party members level match that of other party members is a really good idea. The suggestion  is a simple addition which would probably only take a couple of minutes if that to add, so I’ll mention this to the team in our next meeting, since I think it’s a feature which people would find useful. As for scaling enemies to a players level, this was something we all discussed during the design phase for sable. I’ve seen it used in sighted RPG’s . I think its biggest drawback, is no matter how hard you work,, killing stuff, grinding etc you never really feel you’re achieving anything as the enemies around you just scale with you, and you can just rush through a game as you don’t need to worry about levelling quite as much. The other issue  is if you are playing an RPG where you can re visit maps/locations you’ve been to before the enemies scale. so if you return to the first location where you were facing cave bats using entombed as an example, it would be odd to go back  from level 20, back down to that first map and suddenly it seems the cave bats are all on steroids and doing  like 99 damage with each hit hahaha. Also in entombed , I sometimes like to  avoid fighting the drake if I don’t think my party is ready for that yet, and will go down a few levels first, then  come back up later to finish off the drake in just a few rounds, which always feels nice So although personally I probably prefer non scaled games, I do appreciate that others might feel different as there are also advantages to that type of system, because of that I think maybe giving the user the option to select  scaled or non-scaled  is a good solution , so each creator can make their own decision as to which style they use in their own games. this is however somewhat of a bigger change/amendment than it may seem which would require lots of testing to avoid potential balance issues, so if we did decide to add the feature, it wouldn’t make it into initial release, but as ever that’s not to say if sable is popular that there  wouldn’t be future iterations of sable with new additions/features.
@number 296. Really pleased to hear you enjoyed the latest video. Regarding your party question, yes you can set your project so that you the creator specify the class , name and gender for each of the party members  so they are pre-defined for anyone playing your game, also if you select this option there is no option for the player to rename characters mid game, so their characters will always have the names and class you the project creator gave them. For people that want their players to be able to pick their own class, gender and names that option is there too, but only if that option is selected will the player see the screen to select class etc at the start of the game or be able to rename character mid game. As for price for Sable,  we actually haven’t finalised a cost for it yet, so I can’t confirm that yet, but as soon as we have more concrete details on this we will be sure to share here.

Wow, I actually forgot about Sable until I read this topic.
Could you say it'll be ready in 2020?