Metalmickey

I had a vague thought about some kind of hidden fire cell at the top of the screen, something invisible but that would spoil it.

 

I then had a random thought (something I looked at once at least in principle) of moving the 'spears' up a bit in Quirkafleeg but to get this to work properly they have to move up a couple of rows and that then makes the Quirkafleeg screen look odd :huh: , not to mention the rope may need a trim too. A solution but a highly impractical one. I may actually go and try this tomorrow now to see how it (badly)  works "in practise" :D

i did try this and yes indeed the room just looked weird, certainly not in keeping with the rest of the rooms, even when moved up 2 rows the gap looks out of place and if it's filled up with earth cells then Willy is just trapped there .. i could toy with the idea of swapping the earth cells for water cells so that the brickwork is a water cell and the edge of the wall is an earth cell .. 

A slightly less messy albeit still not particularly satisfactory solution here, i've had to make some changes to the fire cells so as not to make them look too out of place where i have put them...

drj.z80

so that would mean that a fire cell directly above this point would be needed, admittedly it's a bit unsightly but you get the idea...

who is Dr Jones anyway.z80

probably, but this was really just to demonstrate how a minimal discreet modification could be made, perhaps another firecell might be needed to 'bookend' the existing one at the top left...

i think the solution is as you mentioned earlier to prevent Willy being able to make his way out of the top of the screen, much in the same way as Watch Tower and Rescue Esmerelda it was clearly not intended for Willy to make his way upwards, i think the only solution is to either place blocks at the very top of the screen or make some discreet (as far as possible) modifications to the elephant, i have already toyed with the idea of replacing earth cells with firecells, but i also made some minor modifications to the cell itself - see attached, the left is just a simple replacement of the earth cell with a fire cell, the right is the same only with slight modification so now the elephant doesn't look like a unicorn, i think the fire cell could be further improved without deviating too far from the original graphic

on the subject of cells, i feel we need to talk about the elephant in the room... or more accurately, ask people's opinion on it; the darker red water cells in Dr Jones Will Never Believe This look (to me at least) a little malformed, for those who have not noticed i have already made the 'corrections' in my most recent release. The attached shows the difference, the one on the left being the original...

That is an excellent suggestion. :) I was aware of what it would do but before I saw it "in action" I was not really aware of how much it does improve it.

 

For those who prefer it in decimal it is 62121 , 14

 

Here is an expanded 'combi' pic of before / after so you can see the Water cells clearly to compare:

 

http://jswmm.co.uk/public/style_images/master/attachicon.gifwt_comparison.png

 

Out of curiosity I took a quick look at the C64, Amstrad and BBC versions of this screen in JSW1 and all of those also have the same Water cell 'paper' colour as the background which matches this 'new change' :)

 

I was not able to confirm the MSX/Einstein variant however given its cell design I suspect that will have black paper due to the way it was 'built' from the Spectrum version at least as I understand it.

I had thought of this a while back but did wonder if it was intended so as to make the blocks stand out as though the sun was shining on them ... on reflection (no pun intended) it would seem that this is another little 'bug' where the background colour was incorrectly set as black, I think it's worth putting in so i'll include it in my next version .. oh by the way, yes Ian i think i did make the correction to the flashing conveyor in 'To The Kitchen / Main Stairway' i think you provided a fix for it as, if my memory serves me rightly, it also had other effects elsewhere as the cells stopped flashing in 'Nomen Luni' when the game was paused

as previously mentioned, rather than attempting to finalise this project and assume it to be complete, i've decided to just leave it as an ongoing concern (if that's the right word), i think that as long as this website continues to attract interest then someone somewhere will at some point be discussing an issue, oddity, quirk, bug within the game or some other point of discussion that perhaps i can look into tackling and perhaps improving somehow, for me this is good practice as it is helping me to understand assembly language which i am (very) slowly but (not so) surely beginning to get to grips with, i'm a long way from where i started but still a million miles from considering myself in any way competent, my next step now is to add a big chunk of info to the blurb, this will include all of the address changes to the game code. I am also developing BASIC loader that will convert the original version to the new patched version at the press of a key, the challenge here is of course to make it small enough to squeeze into the system memory without going into the game area, there are quite a lot of changes now....

peculiar, i just re-did that RZX for my own purposes and yet i can now quit the game during Willy's toilet dash ... although i am using SPIN now i can't remember if i created the RZX with it or Spectaculator, i know Spectaculator can create a few odd effects when making RZX files...

Slightly unrelated but I had an opposite issue actually as I wanted to restrict it but keep the sprites the correct colour, after some changes to the code it still would not play nice (in that case) until I changed AND to ADD ( ! ) then it did exactly what I needed. Idea to try that came from the 'moving room' data where ADD is needed to get it to work properly...

 

On topic, how are things going now Metalmickey with progress ? :)

painfully slow at present, still finishing rewriting the disassembly, not currently re-assembling properly, there's a load of typos to correct .. on the plus side i've now been able to make more detailed notes about all the potential free space in addition to what Skoolkid has documented

 

.... I note that 'break' does not work actually *during* the 'dash' either, another useful change. The original does (I just tried this, do not recall ever having tried that before)

I never noticed that, i have changed emulators now, i'm using SPIN since i am re-assembling the game at the mo .. can't think of anything i have altered but maybe i've incorrectly copied over an opcode or something..

Mickey, I've just spotted a minor bug in the JSW 'Game Over' routine - the 'AND #FA' at #8CAF should be replaced with 'AND #F8'.

 

This doesn't affect the original game, it's more of a 'game engine' fix, but it allows a full range of INK colour choices for the Barrel on the Game Over screen.  With the AND #FA in place, the choice of INK colour for the Foot/Willy can restrict the possible colours for the Barrel.

Interesting ... will implement that to the 'rebuild' i'm currently working on

Thanks Ian, i'll give that a try

See i think this is another type of bug, i guess if i was to resolve it, i would use the alternate frames where Willy's legs are completely together and fully apart, might make him look a bit like Mr Benn but i still think it would be an improvement .. i'm going to try an experiment...

Whilst messing about with the DEFB value that changes the game status at  34271 i've noticed something odd.

As we all know, on completion and during his toilet dash his animation is limited so it looks like he's skidding or skating as his legs appear to be still, i'm guessing this is because the game code skips every other animation frame in order to double his speed .. but look what happens when we set DEFB to 2 (34271,2) whilst in the Nightmare room. Willy still travels at double the speed but his animation as a winged pig seems not to be affected by the frame skips... at least not in the same way ... his animation still only seems to be of 4 frames here so i'm wondering now if i can somehow improve his running ability when he is his normal self

Untitled114.rzx

By the way, if anyone wants to use the improved game engine for their own projects they're welcome to do so and if it helps in some small way then so much the better  :)

Good stuff. Setting it to '2' while in Banyan Tree is good as he has a path to run provided guardians do not interfere**. I have set it to 1 to 'resume' play to rescue him from the toilet on the odd occasion too. :D

 

** If they do can always set it to First Landing I guess. That reminds me there's no reason the 'bed trigger' could not be set there actually either :unsure:

True, but then that would somehow detract from the 'story' of the game, Willy collects all the items before heading off to bed, so if he was to begin his frantic dash for the lav at the bottom of the first landing then he would never make it into the bedroom, and besides, i think it adds to the challenge that he has to go to the Master Bedroom to see if Maria is still on guard...

A couple more that haven't been listed in this particular topic.

For emulators only unless you have multiface 3.

These need to be invoked during gameplay

34271,2 - make Willy run to the toilet instantly before he has finished collecting the items if he is in the Master Bedroom, Top Landing or Bathroom, elsewhere he just keeps running to the right until he hits something

34271,3 - Instantly put Willy's head down the toilet in The Bathroom regardless of what room he's currently in. Useful when used with WRITETYPER but be careful if you have not corrected the Attic bug.

These are only temporary and will be reset when the game is restarted

Indeed it does ... it also has an extra life at 10,000 routine which i might also add in .. obviously taking item count into consideration as opposed to score... or perhaps having a spare life hidden in the house or grounds somewhere masquerading as an item or tile...

Although the intention for most of us was to perhaps make more rooms or make the existing rooms more interesting or challenging somehow i have been thinking about one or two other 'enhancements (??)' ...

One such idea was to add an interim routine after Willy has met the foot of doom (or has completed the game) where perhaps we could add some sort of leaderboard / hall of fame maybe showing some statistics from the last half a dozen or so plays, maybe borrowing an idea or two from Pyjamarama adding number of paces taken, time spent playing and of course number of items collected with the obligatory player's three initials...

before i embark on such a project can anyone tell me if it's already been thought of or done already? 

I'm with Ian on the pm vs PM issue, i've always used pm after a time with a 12-hour clock and i think it's more the done thing. Seems to be the exception to the rule in that we neither capitalise nor put in dots for these particular abbreviations. I also feel that the leading zero is not really necessary although i would say that in some ways looks a little more uniform ... perhaps because we are aware that it's being displayed by a computer.

With the Item count i'm thinking about a single zero until Willy collects his first item, in fact to not have any leading zeros as the item count increases

Might even go further (not in my AMI project) look at doing a JSW2 style blank until an item is collected so that 'Items collected xxx' is not shown at all until Willy collects his first item

not sure if it will ever truly be finished if i'm honest, it may slow down and get less attention as time progresses but i think it's one of those things that we can revisit from time to time, so i've just decided to keep it as an ongoing project for now. In the weeks that i've been away i've made a few more minor tweaks, mainly 'invisible' ones where the game engine has has had the odd superfluous byte removed plus a few other minor changes, i've also been toying with the 'extra' rooms, i've never been truly happy with the ones i created, to me they don't really challenge the player, not in the way that Matthew would have done. I've changed the way that i edit the game now, i have the full source code set up in SPIN's assembler which should make things a little easier

i'm in the middle of re-doing my 'As manufacturer probably intended' project following an experiment that didn't quite go to plan .. i might put this in  :P

The question is, was there even an item intended to be here at all? After all although it is for the most part just a passage on the count of the lack of 'furniture', like other itemless and sparsely furnished rooms such as The Back Door. My thoughts are perhaps his style of coding would perhaps leave certain rooms as go-betweens and as a rule not have items in them 

I would have thought that in the modern days of emulation it might have been possible to see just how it functions and maybe even try a bit of 'Old school' coding, i'm sure there's no shortage of TRS80 emulators knocking about there on the interweb .. so we could quite literally code (almost) exactly the same way as Matthew Smith did when creating MM and JSW ... as long as, that it, the TRS DOS code is complete and hasn't been overwritten with one of the rooms ... who knows?