itch.io

Evidence says no

Still alive but it's been rough. Working really hard at work. I just never could bring myself to look at Morpheus for the remainder of 2020. 

New year new times. Going to try and keep poking along with it. https://soapbubble.itch.io/morpheus/devlog/213715/dusts-off-morpheus

Can you provide more information about what you are seeing? The windows EXE is provided as an unsigned electron application. Being unsigned or an electron application can both be treated as warnings. Unsigned means that I have not acquired a windows developer certificate to be able to sign the binaries. This has been on my bucket list to do.

An electron application is an unsandboxed web browser. The release is open source and you can view the source of the electron application here: https://github.com/soap-bubble/web/tree/master/packages/electron2

The application will save a config to your user directory and create a temporary cache for downloading assets. 

If you can provide any more details on what problems you are having-- please let me know.

New job since July is still very busy. Progress is slow. I'm working on some other neat WebGL stuff for work

Yikes.... I just noticed the in-browser widget on this page does not work and probably hasn't worked in many months since I switched up the DNS and moved to firebase. It's fixed now.

New renderer is getting close. I would like to do a little more testing before I replace production. Transitions still need to be implemented so scene switching is a little clunky because you can see elements pop in as they are loaded and there are no fades but that will be the next and hopefully last highly obvious piece to tackle on this refactor.

Howdy! Unfortunately Morpheus has had to take a back seat to work and theater these past couple of months 😢 I was planning on picking it back up this weekend but then fell ill.... So nothing to report at this time but allow me to fill you in on my plans for the rest of the year.

Thanksgiving and Winter holidays are approaching and these have traditionally been times where I've gotten a lot done with large periods of focus time and I am hopeful that this cycle will be no exception! I have the large performance and rendering refactor about 2/3rds complete and while there will be some amount of time needed to bring myself back up to speed I would like to iron out these issues to make the game fully playable and hopefully bug free.

A lot of this year was unfortunately burned on infrastructure migrations, but those have all been completed so that I can focus on fixing these last few issues. In addition I want to resolve the Safari bugs so that the game will run on iOS devices. In addition this year I was able to put the corporate structures in place so that Soap Bubble Productions, LLC exists again as a legal entity. I have created store accounts for Steam, Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. My plan is after this current refactor to be able to focus on creating presences there.

Morpheus will remain free to play on the web and itch.io but will have a very nominal one time cost (maybe $5?) for the other stores to offset the cost to bring games to those platforms.

I've been rehearsing with a local community theater to do a showing a Little Shop of Horrors through October. The next 4 weekends I will be rather busy. Not much Morpheus Development planned for this month!

APK updated with an unsigned developer build. I'm almost have everything ready for real signed APKs but for now going back to debug builds. It looks like some of my "performance improvements" have negatively impacted the android experience. On my device I see video play icons appears briefly before loading videos. I will need to look into that.....

I'll take a look this weekend

this definitely worked at some point.  I am still doing the thing to fix that herbalist bug you mentioned earlier.

You might be able to save, reload and try again. What I realized with the herbalist bug is that there is some state associated with scenes in memory that can cause unexpected side effects when you revisit a scene before the scene has been cleared from the on screen cache (6 scenes).

Also if you really want to see everything the game is doing, you can add ?debug to the URL in the browser.... But I guess that doesn't help when you are in the app..... I guess I should make that be an option because debug logs would probably help bunches more.  Also I should add a report this scene button that send me the save file and debug logs!!!

Long story short.... I still am debugging this rewrite of scene rendering that I am banking on fixing a few bugs.  Then I can take a look at Billy

Sent instructions on providing more debug information. Current version is working well for me. Old versions will not work.

@mdcostr I uploaded a new build of Morpheus for Windows PC. If that was the platform you were having problems with please check again.

OKay I also see that the apps are not loading the game correctly. I will take a look at that soon. In the mean time you can always play for free at https://soapbubble.online/morpheus

What seems to be the problem?

Some of the scenes on the cargo elevator are missing chunks which causes missing or repeated texture loads in panorama.  The files were run through an automated process, but I think I need to get a clean source.  The one that is live is actually from an installed Morpheus installation directory that is 15+ years old.  Need to try again from a clean CD pull.  I have higher quality versions of most of the assets, but they need additional pre-processing before I can stuff them through this same process.

Thank you for your feedback!  If you could post some screenshots and any console errors it would help track down errors in the game.  You can open the javascript console in the browser by pressing F12.  I've seen issues were panoramas take longer to load than other parts of the scene, which can lead to some disorienting scenes.  This issue probably becomes more of a problem the further you are from Oregon, USA where the servers are located.  Transitioning to an edge provider for assets would help accelerate asset loading and help scenes load faster.  Anything other than slow load time I am very interested in seeing more of so that I can try and fix it!

Try again.  I had an old version deployed which I just now updated from latest master. 

Morpheus is a fully featured HTML5 web app written from the ground up with React and Three.js.  The "downloadable" versions are Electron or Cordova wrappers which are a packaged browser running the game.

Thanks, that did the trick.

WTF, this is just a copy and paste of my reply earlier.

Also, it is a great idea :-)

I would like to see achievements to be added.  In addition, a seamless way to do the OAuth login from a game installed to the Itch.io app launcher (something that does not require the usual Oath permissions grant step) to make it easy to key users to their Itch.io account and to implement said achievements.

Opened an issue https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/923 

When I try to search, like or comment on a dev log or community forum I get an  error in Chrome devtools:

Blocked form submission to 'https://itch.io/blog-post/51668/like' because the form's frame is sandboxed and the 'allow-forms' permission is not set.

14 years!  Wow that is an exceptionally long time to work at a single software company.  I am happy to see you taking some time off and working on your own projects.   I've enjoyed your work over the years and look forward to what you come up with next.

Sorry to hear that you were caught up in the Telltale fiasco.  I now see where some of your adventure game talent comes from :-).  Good luck on your kickstarter!

Thanks!  I've been working on this for a long time.  It all started when I got a 64bit machine and was no longer able to install Morpheus to it.   At one point I had a legitimate C++ cross-compiled Qt native version of the game running on Linux, Windows and Mac with plans to compile natively for iOS and Android.  However, there were issues with media support in Qt.  The APIs were in constant flux and I couldn't keep the app running in between Qt version upgrades.  That lead me to trying to re-building the app (again) using WebGL technologies.  

Getting a prototype (simple panorama) was easy.  Making a polished HTML web app run cross platform has turned out to be pretty hard.  But I've been working it and am getting very close to a fully playable beta release.

This thread came about very soon after I discovered Itch.io and that it could serve as an early deployment and download platform for Morpheus.  I was not really ready to "release" in any real sense of the word other than myself being able to take what I had already working and get it working on the itch.io platform.  The game was still very buggy and there were not large portions of the game you could play.  When I did development I was always in a god mode of sorts-- able to teleport around and manipulate game state from the console.

Kind of sad that 322 days later I have not yet "released" or even entered any form of beta-- but in that time I have solved many many game play bugs (down to few known issues), implemented basic in-game menuing, implemented queued preloading of in-game assets, rewrote the 3D engine to be 2x as fast and use much less memory, cloud saves behind a google login, a sweet title screen, unit, engine and UI automated tests, and a desktop app and packaged installer.  I also transitioned my build and test platform from a custom drone installation to gitlabs and kept my docker deployment systems up to date(ish).  In addition, in working with the original Soap Bubble owners  I am resurrecting the business entity and funding for the re-release.  There's stuff I'm sure I missed but also more to come!  My next update I hope to be a real beta release, with mobile platforms, EV certs and the financials ready to accept money on Soap Bubble Productions behalf.

Until then, I updated  first post to reflect current progress and todos.  If you want blow by blow updates, I recommend you follow me on twitter @dev_morpheus or look up Morpheus Game on facebook.  You might even get rub shoulders with the original technical talent that produced Morpheus :-)

Fun fact, Morpheus was released nearly 20 years ago, but stopped working on PCs on 64bit hardware and stopped working on Macs after the deprecation of 68k Mac Classic support.  But now you can go to Itch.io to download installers to play Morpheus on modern 64bit (and actually 64bit only) PC, Mac and Linux Desktop computers.

No.... I think that is my fault.  My putting the game up here is a bit of a hack as it is an iframe in an iframe.  AFAICT that border is appearing as a default iframe styling of the browser.  I should remove the styling.  

As part of my work packaging up the game for electron and phonegap I have been working to make all assets static.  Once I have that build process working (https://drone.soapbubble.online/) then I can upload actual static assets for the game which is more in the spirit of how web game uploads are supposed to work.

#notatgdc but I'd sure like to be!

As a side effect of making https://soapbubble.itch.io/morpheus I have been building an open source game engine located at https://github.com/soap-bubble/morpheus.  While the source has been somewhat tailored to play the game of Morpheus-- the engine itself is purely data driven and can be used to build puzzle / adventure games involving panoramas, movies, 2D scenes w/ triggers, buttons, 1 and 2 axis sliders as well as custom Javascript game scripts.  

The general game flow are scenes which are collections of cast elements.  Cast elements can be hotspots, panoramas, pictures, videos, sounds or cursors.  Hotspots, when activated can change game state or transition scenes.  Casts can have comparators that test against game state to determine if enabled.  On-screen elements can be bound to game state to control their appearance.

I am getting close to having a game engine that can faithfully play Morpheus.  I have been thinking about using the engine for a game jam as a way to work out the details of making the engine more general purpose and able to easily target other datasets.  That being said, anyone is welcome to fork the code base as-is and use it for their own adventure games.  I am happy to help!

I would like to use this space to document my effort at making the morpheus engine more general purpose as well as answer any questions developers might have.

Thank you for the kind words!  I have previously watched your full replay because I wanted to hear all of the Spanish voice overs.  They are not the best, but good for a laugh :-D.  Unfortunately, the localisations were paid for by the publishers (Piranha and later Tiburon) so I do not have clear ownership of those assets so all I have are the English assets.  Thank you for your support and your replay on Youtube was great!

Greetings!

I am working to port a game called Morpheus my family independently produced 20 years ago to modern platforms.  If you want to read more about the history of Morpheus then you can find more in my devlog.  

I've programmed on a variety of platforms going all the way back to the 80s.  Lately I've been doing mostly web programming and I put those skills to use porting Morpheus to an HTML5 web game.  

Thanks!  Also-- very nice!  Is there a difference in the color of the words?  I am deeply color blind and I just may not be seeing it.

What do I need to do to get past the first scene?  "Of course everything is going wrong..."  The text just stays there.  No buttons.  I've tried click everyone on the screen and pressing keys but AFACT only the `esc` key works to open the settings.

I am able to reproduce the control lock with the following steps:

• Start game, spam left click
• Pick a backstory
• Pick a name
• Exit apartment
• Press `esc`
• Select controls
• Press `esc` twice to exit controls and menu

I personally think I should be able to walk over the bodies but it's your game :-D

Parry should not be an instant block that you can hold down, but something that must be timed correctly.  It's a tricky thing to get right because now you probably need wind-up animations for every attack as well balancing the parry window.  It's just something to think about.  I'm having a hard time finding a good strategy to fights other than tanking hits.

Another thing, it would be nice when starting a new game to get a warning that the old game is going to be overwritten.  I ended up overwriting an existing game I had when I started the game up and accidentally selected `new` instead of `restore`.  I quit the game immediately and now `restore` went to the brand new game  :-(

Has potential.  I like the cross between point-n-click and side-scroller battler.

Here are some issues I found:

• During the first fight sequence, after leaving apartment-- I opened settings to check controls.  When I left the menu and returned to the game I could not move anymore and all controls were inactive.  I had to quit game.
• Can't walk over dead bodies, instead have to jump way high over them.
• Could really use a parry to block attacks
• Would be nice to be able to hold down LMB to advance through dialog faster

Fun!

Did you intend for the demo to have some existing save files?  The animations are all really well done.  Much fun.