Elderlore

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

I really need to start working on the sound effects for my game. I think this is going to be a whole new kettle of fish as far as issues go for using the same effects on pc/psp/gp2x etc but it should not be too bad. The first plan is to hopefully just use the SDL mixer and my own WAV mixing routines..

I have a nice USB microphone but it really picks up ANY noise in the house so.. going to take me a while to get some nice sounds recorded for spell affects and such.

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

I thought this morning I’d give a plug to a blog that’s been in my rss reader for some time, CRPG Addict.

So far he has played through games listed on the wikipedia page for DOS in release order.

Right now he is on to playing Might and Magic 1 after a mixup in Bards Tale II.

I do particularly like the GIMLET post.

Why We Are Here

THE RULES

There must be rules. Otherwise we have chaos. These are my rules as I work my way through every PC CRPG ever published.

1. Wikipedia’s list is my Bible. The titles on this list are heavily biased towards CRPGs commercially released through established publishers. I understand there are some really good freeware, browser-based, and otherwise noncommercial RPGs out there, but honestly this project is taking enough time as it is. I’m also going to work through the list based on initial publication date, even if the version I’m playing is a re-release or newer port.

2. Only PC RPGs. To appear on my play list, the game has to have been released for DOS or the PC, if only as a port. I’m not going to frig around with C64 or Apple II emulators.

3. No hints, no cheats, no walkthroughs. We didn’t have these in the 1980s, and I don’t need them now. If I make mistakes, or it takes me a little longer, well that’s part of the fun of the game. I will only use the Internet to solve technical problems. I will allow myself one exception: if anyone reading this blog wants to post non-spoiler gameplay hints to problems I’ve posed, I’ll use them.

4. I don’t have to win every game, but I must at least make a sincere effort to play it. I’m writing this initial posting after already starting on my project. The second game I played (as you’ll soon read) was an early version of Rogue. It took me four months of playing to beat it. It became almost an obsession. Four months is an acceptable time to beat some games if the world is big enough (think Daggerfall), but the reason it took so long to beat Rogue is that the game is punishingly difficult. After even a few days of playing it, there was really nothing new left to discover. I won’t do this for every game. I will devote a minimum of six hours to each one, but if after that I’m having no fun or the play is repetitive, it’s on to the next game.

4. If the game is still available commercially, I will buy it. I believe in rewarding game developers and publishers for their hard work. But if it is not avaiable commercially, I will have no compunction downloading it from abandonware sites or otherwise obtaining it illegally.

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

I have some new goodies for my C128DCR! JiffyDOS Roms to replace my C64 and C128 Kernel ROM as well as a new SD/uIEC plugin, this is a disk drive replacement letting me use SD cards… very cool. No more drive head banging.

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

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Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

I’ve finally got around to smoothing some of the rough edges in the combat engine. We have a somewhat animated spell affects flying across the screen, and special cases which I am going through one by one.

* HOLD (done)
* SLEEP (testing)
* POISON (testing)
* CHARM (testing)

Still have another 4 or 5 flags to code and test (things like turning undead, etc).

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

I’m in the middle of refactoring some of the combat code to allow me to target any space on the map not just NPC’s. This will allow you to drop gas clouds on terrain and use space between to funnel enemies down etc and play more advatange with the terrain.

Most of my code tho takes an NPC as a target, so I’ve got to tweak things a bit.

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

Things have been pretty busy lately. On the retro front I have a Jiffydos chip coming for the C128 as well as a uIEC/SD for it, which will help lessen the need for ye-olde floppy disks for the C128 and its ability to move the drive out of alignment (all those old drive head banging copy protect schemes and such). Both of these are coming from Jim Brain. Still no word on the Ultimate 1541-II, apparently they are shipping the first 40-50 units very soon, only I know I’m not in that close to the top of the batch :/

Been working a lot on my java client/server roguelike semi-mmo called Deeprun.

And yeah been working somewhat on Fishguts still, you turn over one bug only to find a few more. It is the way of it lately.

June is going to be hectic, Joys birthday, Alexanders birthday, our 5th wedding anniversary. I still need to complete the wooden pendulum clock (5th ann is wood).. so lots of sanding and fitting fiddly parts together but the clock looks pretty awesome (I’m building serpentine).

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

Nothing huge to report lately. A snafu in upgrading my Ubuntu broke SlickEdit, which luckily they upgraded to a new major version which fixed the Ubuntu regression. New Ubuntu and new SlickEdit is nice

So, been playing my game, eating my dogfood and doing lots of combat… and I noticed something funny. When you would get close to an archer or the archer would run out of arrows, the AI has them switch to a melee weapon.. and they started doing twice damage. So when they unequipped the bow, instead of removing the bows damage stats they added.. then they equipped a sword and that added the swords damage stats.. gulp! Turns out I had two routines for unequipping items and the monster AI was using an old one that was not used anywhere else, which was bugged, so now everyone uses the same (players, monsters, npc’s).

Several other minor tweaks and things behind the scenes. Some map editing and implementing story and details, slowly growing my game.

Tweaking my random dungeon routine, I already have Cellular Automata for organic cave generation, now I’m appropriating my dungeon generation routine from another one of my roguelikes, this one generates rooms and corridors, it has some nice properties that I like that you don’t see in a lot of roguelike dungeon gen routines, namely corridors can loop back on themselves and link up and connect rooms. Most routines in the RL community create a branching dungeon that is somewhat linear in its layout, they don’t link back on themselves, which I think is a pain for gameplay, but it does drive you forward.

I’m still trying to come up with a good name too :( Maybe in the end I’ll stick with Fishguts, which was not my intention.

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

Sometimes there are many distractions in life, and I feel I am my own worst enemy.  I have not even finished my current retro-styled CRPG, but ofcourse I have kicked some notes and code around for a C64/C128 CRPG.

Random thoughts to follow;

Going to utilise a 1 bit fastloader, something like u3load (because the routine is public and it is also supported by ultimate1541-ii), this lets me get a ‘fastload’ as well as music/gfx during load to retain felxability.
I’ve already written simple scripts that will be turned into native 6502/6510,6809 code. Targeting C64, (maybe apple2) and Coco3.

The coco3 makes it nice that it has a good stack of ram, the C128 obviously gives you a nice amount to play with, but the C64 can be constraining, memory mapped IO ports all over the map. I’m hoping I can decouple the kernel so I get the full 64kb ram, but if there is a cartridge or REU, I’ll loose 8kb.

The plan would be to have a simple API in place, a few kb ram with a jump table giving basic routines, whose sole job is to load/unload the scripts. If I can’t nuke the kernel rom space, I can nuke the basic rom and give myself about 50kb.

I’ve already got an experimental script compiler outputting 6510 asm. I need to get it to interface with CC65..

sigh.. I dont think I’ll multiplex sprites but I need to try and get the fastest tile rendering routine I can out of the C64’s MCM mode…

Source: Stu's Rusty Bucket

What? no activity in a long time?? Lots of things have been happening in the personal life, parents came for a visit, grandmother passed, wife directing a play so I get both kids in the afternoons/evenings, etc. Huge project crunch at work..

But I did find the time to tweak some of my tools to remove more of the handwritten code and replace it with data generated from the maps. The final piece was for auto generating the teleport locations.

I have also enlarged my map, I felt it was too cluttered so I embiggened it and spread the continents out more. It always irked me a little to hop in a sailing shop and sail only a few spaces and traverse the seas.. So I made more use of some open space and moved things out further making sea travel longer, but not monotonous. Sea travel is important and it needs to feel like it takes you a while to get from A to B (and the movement speed of the ship is slower than that of land speed movement). It certainly wont be as redundant and monotonous as it was in Demon’s Winter which had huge tracts of open ocean and a very poorly laid out world.

Still beavering away on the combat engine affects