MorningStar

[ficedula]

So, this is the game that myself and Jake wrote. Jake is currently at my house, so he made me upload and register on the forums to post it

It uses a custom game engine, so it's probably not perfect, but we needed to achieve certain effects that weren't exactly possible in a pre-existing engine. So please bear that in mind when playing it (that's a subtle way of saving 'save often, just in case'). That said, we've had people testing it all the way through and we think all the crashing bugs are gone!

Only runs in Windows for the moment, I'm afraid; sorry, Mac-Linux-and-other-things users.

Download it from http://yuri.sylphds.net/

New download links in this post

[mokenju1]

Congratulations !. It seems it's a very interesting game (I'm a little worried about the yuri content, but I think I can handle it if things are not too extreme ).

I have a problem playing, it was the third or four day and I got this message:

An unhandled exception has occurred in your application...
EXCEPTION IndexOutOfRangeException:Index was outside the bounds of the array. at line 42.

I can post the details too, if they are necessary to know what has exactly happened...

EDIT: I've uploaded the Dump.txt

[ficedula]

Gah :/ Thanks for posting the dump, but it hasn't helped us track it down. Annoyingly, because it should.

Hopefully you saved not too long ago ... right? If it happens after you reload the game, please send the savegame to us ... if not, well, that's sort of bad (random crashing isn't desirable) but at least you'll have carried on playing through the game...

[denzil]

Interesting game, but it crashed at the end of first day. I also had problem with music not stopping when I returned to title (start battle, then go to title screen - the music won't stop for me).

[ficedula]

Jake suggests the problem is possibly to do with non-English locales, which makes sense to me, since all our scripts are written with the numbers in English format (ie. decimal separator).

Could anybody having a problem try downloading http://yuri.sylphds.net/MorningStar_test.zip and replacing the game exe (and DLLs if it needs them) with this new version - and seeing if it helps? Sorry for the inconvenience

[Jake]

(Jake actually just suggested that both of the people who mentioned problems weren't in England, and all the PCs we'd tested it on which it worked fine on were, and that it definitely wasn't a problem with the artwork so he really had no idea. )

[papillon]

Minor engine comments (I also work with a custom engine!)

This isn't exactly a bug, but the auto-typing text seems to freeze when it hits the end of a line instead of wrapping around and waits for me to click to go on. That is, if there's a single line of dialogue that should wrap, it doesn't until I click, so the speaker is 'frozen' in the middle of a sentence. Kind of a pain.

Also, the displayed-speaker's face changes before they actually speak. That is, if character X is speaking and character Y *will* reply, the face changes to Y at the end of X's string right away, before I click to make Y's text start. Which can make it confusing at the end of a sentence to be sure who said that.

Now, to play some game...

[DaFool]

Sweet! I will go disable my Japanese locale now and play this!

[mokenju1]

Hmmm.... I have changed the files and now the game doesn't work at all .

EXCEPTION EConvertError:"0" is not a valid floating point value at line 1.

[Hime]

I'm playing this, and I must say I like it. At first, the engine felt totally weird, and I don't like the position of the dialogue box, but anyway. I love shoujo ai! (Though I'm not sure if this is yuri or shoujo ai. Yet.) The game is really hard, too, especially the fighting lessons... Is there no way to get more HP for the main character? Because it's like, very hard at times to beat the enemy. I usually just keep on losing... ^^; I won once, though! But well. And is it possible to get Natsuki?

...And, the main menu music never stops from playing. It plays on the background all the time.

[DaFool]

Mai Hime / Mai Otome, anyone? (from the title at least)
I still have 2 hours on dialup

[Jake]

I'm playing this, and I must say I like it.

Then the month wasn't wasted! Yay!

At first, the engine felt totally weird, and I don't like the position of the dialogue box, but anyway.

Sidenote: personally, I prefer the textbox at the top because it allows a better view of the character with the horizon at a reasonable level on the screen... I'm curious as to the reasons people don't put it at the top. Maybe that deserves a separate thread...

I love shoujo ai! (Though I'm not sure if this is yuri or shoujo ai. Yet.)

We probably should have mentioned in the opening post; there's nothing particularly explicit in the game, if I had to guess I'd say it's probably about a British 12 rating. Probably. But it definitely has some, uh, inference.

The game is really hard, too, especially the fighting lessons... Is there no way to get more HP for the main character? Because it's like, very hard at times to beat the enemy.

It starts out hard, yeah - Hikari's just transferred in, she's new to the whole thing, and her classmates are totally ruthless.
It should get easier after about four or five battles, IIRC.

If it's any metric - the battle systems been mostly finished for about two weeks, and in that time I've once managed to come within a single turn of winning the first battle, and that was by gaming the AI. There's at least one point in the script that assumes that you've lost at least one training battle...

...And, the main menu music never stops from playing. It plays on the background all the time.

Well, we do use the same music for the main academy theme, is that what you mean? Or is it playing at the same time as other music? We had that bug a little while ago, but I thought Fice had fixed it sometime early yesterday...

Mai Hime / Mai Otome, anyone?

Oh, just a little bit.


Incidentally, Fice has just reliably reproduced the bugs Mokenju and Denzil were having, it's apparently to do with having Japanese locality with European decimal separators, and has been described as "utterly bizarre". But should hopefully be fixed shortly.

[ficedula]

OK, I've found all the crashing bugs; they were indeed locale issues. Download http://yuri.sylphds.net/MorningStar_test2.zip if you're having problems...

I'll be updating the main download later today.

(Bizarrely, just changing my locale to Spanish didn't get all the bugs to happen; I had to set the system locale to Japanese and then the number format to Spanish, in order to get the bugs...)

[mokenju1]

Ok, it works well now .

[DaFool]

Have you updated the main download yet? I still have 30 minutes to go...or am I resuming an old version with a new version...which means the thing won't extract?