Playing around.

[IRF]

I knew my memory was a bit hazy!  Andrew, am I right in thinking that you did interview Matthew Smith yourself, on another occasion?

[IRF]

Job done!

[IRF]

MtM, the penny has just dropped about what you meant by this comment!:

 

 

 

You're referring to the need to drop down onto the items from above (after you've stood on and crumbled away the crumbly cell in which each of them is embedded).

 

I took your comment "which way you need to approach collecting" to mean that you have to take care to collect the items in a particular order (as you do in Eugene's Lair, for example, in order to be able to reach the portal in time once Angry Eugene starts descending).

The Final cavern is actually an excellent example of one in which you need to collect the various items in a certain order, if you want to complete it in Expert game mode AND get the bonus points which are available!

[Norman Sword]

Completed and minus the final music - and some other changes, like the cold room and the trivial death switch change

 

-----------------------------------------

 

With such a low score overall. I need to increase the Bonus for Kong's demise. 

 

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I now need to do what you have done, to completion with the room timer activated. From the time taken to do each room the oxygen bar will be set.

 

The original oxygen level was going to be set as the speed I can do it + a little extra. The title is Manic Panic. Having very little lee way in the time to complete a room was the general idea.

Since the speed of the clock/oxygen has been changed to run at differing speeds, I will set the timer for my run, Which is clocked at a speed factor of "6"

 

Expert will be clocked at "4" , giving a lot of time over my run

 

Normal is clocked at "3", giving twice the time over my run

 

Trainer is clocked at "2" which even if the oxygen was not set to maximum, would give three times longer than my run.  

 

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Final game version accessible via  This Link

Edited July 20, 2020 by Norman Sword

[Norman Sword]

 

The above would also suggest falling into a switch will have the same problem. (on a bigger scale and more likely to flag collision)

 

 

 

The wording I used, Is falling into a switch. Not walking into a switch. 

 

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

 

Final game version accessible via  This Link

Edited July 20, 2020 by Norman Sword

[IRF]

The wording I used, Is falling into a switch. Not walking into a switch. 

 

If you fell onto a switch from above, wouldn't it behave like a floor tile and arrest Willy's fall?  So he would end up standing on it rather than being killed (unless he had fallen from a fatal height of course).

 

****

 

Something which I meant to mention the other day - though this is a moot point now that you've fixed the problem - is that I managed to take a couple of shortcuts in the 'spiral' room by bouncing off the spiky bush nasty cells, so that I completed the screen without going all the way around the spiral (this was only possible in Trainer and Normal modes, since instant death follows contact with a nasty in Expert mode).

Edited June 10, 2020 by IRF

[Norman Sword]

The arc of fall does not always land on a block (When it has a side component). Think how often you jump trying to land on a platform, and watch Willy pass through it sideways.  I was expanding the passage of sprites through movement. Agree that standing on a switch is possible. 

 

I am surprised that the switch has managed to progress so far, without it being a problem (to me). Skylab was written first, light beams second, and for no particular reason Kong was written last. The problem encountered when producing routines is the consistency of how you self  test them. No matter how much you try to vary the way you test a routine. It is not the same as the real world.

 

 

I wrote a short game program  that contained a space ship that fired a gun. Never crashed in the month I ran it. Someone else came along and crashed the game pretty much straight away. Baffled  I asked the person to crash the program again, and they did.

 

What that person did was switch the auto fire on, on the joystick. This sent the program constantly into a subroutine which did not handle the stack properly. The auto fire kept adding junk to the stack and over the space of a few minutes the game crashed.  Yet all the time the game was being displayed on the screen, there was never a reason to fire a bullet. When the firing sequence was needed and bullets fired. The game reset the stack.  I did not expect someone to just fire the gun, because he could. The above was pretty much the first routine I had ever written, a couple of thousand lines of code, and it taught me quickly to keep track of the stack.

 

 

 

Short cuts must abound when nasties sap a plentiful supply of air. All the screens with spiders dangling from webs. Just walk through the web and jump. No worse than using rollback and playing via that method.

 

 

My other half used to play hidden objects games. I bought about 100+ of the games and gave her access to them. Halfway through the 100+ games, she stopped using a pc completely and moved over to an android smart phone. So I had a mass of unused games. They were never even download and existed unused for around 10 years. Until two months ago, I down loaded one of them. (around 1 giga bytes)  and played it.

 

Great graphics, nice tune. Yet in a lot of circumstances I had no idea what was expected and I spent the weeks just clicking the hints button. Most of the game puzzles were easy enough to do, but some words do not translate well  across the pond. The hints button would keep highlight something, where that the american word, to me, was obscure. Or indicate an object where the  correlation to another object was vague . I finished the game having played (clicked on hint) it all the way through. Not tempted to go back and play again without the hints button, but I suppose the constant "hints" is just another form of cheating.

 

Therefore in Manic Panic  I now class jumping on and passing through nasties, as just using the games hints. (Now without the jumping on part)  

 

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------

 

Final game version accessible via  This Link

Edited July 20, 2020 by Norman Sword

[andrewbroad]

I knew my memory was a bit hazy!  Andrew, am I right in thinking that you did interview Matthew Smith yourself, on another occasion?

 

I have never interviewed Matthew Smith or anyone else.

[MtM]

I have never interviewed Matthew Smith or anyone else.

Maybe you should!

[MtM]

(edit)

 

 

Thanks for the feed back.

 

Having a variable mode play game has not made this easy. Far easier to detect collision and just kill,. Far easier to have a fixed room and sprite layout.

 

This may be true Norman but I think it has helped enormously this game, and I really salute it. I hope it becomes a mainstay of all future mods etc.

 

 

I read an interview with Matthew Smith (interview conducted by Dr Andrew Broad!) in which, if memory serves [tennis pun intended] correctly, Matthew said the Cold Room items were supposed to be snowshoes, but he left out a pixel [either that or the opposite - he inserted a pixel erroneously - I can't recall which], which made the items look like tennis rackets.

 

Andrew Broad released a 2008 Remix of Manic Miner, in which the item shape for the Cold Room was tweaked, to add/delete the said pixel.  I also carried that forward into the cavern 'The Big Freeze' in the jswmm.co.uk release 'Manic Mixup'.

 

Yes I have Manic Mixup, not played it for a bit, as I recollect it is in that psychological gaming cabinet of being 'a bit too difficult' ;-) I will return to it.

 

 

example of change.

 

When Kong falls he increases the score for each frame of fall. The Bonus Given by Kong is dependent on permitting Kong to fall all the way. Touching Kong in expert mode curtails the fall of Kong, as Willy dies in that instance. This change means the full bonus of Kong's fall is only achieved when he has completed his fall. 

 

The older simplistic method gave the bonus in one go. Even if a few frames later Willy dies.

 

It is almost like playing a bandit the big bonus - can you gamble to stay on screen long enough to collect the points?

 

 

(edit)

 

 

Moving one line of code has removed this problem.... I hope

 

the change in code order from

 

Update willies position

punch hole for willy

move sprites

draw sprites

draw willy

 

 

to

Update willies position

move sprites

punch hole for willy

draw sprites

draw willy

 

 

Where the switch is updated by the move sprite routine.

 

 

 

I really appreciated this insight into coding Norman, more than seeing z80 code listed on here it is the abstract of the code, the symbolic, that I think is really interesting.

 

(edit)

 

Therefore in Manic Panic  I now class jumping on and passing through nasties, as just using the games hints. (Now without the jumping on part)  

This kind of reinforces what you said previously Norman about change. I think it is really good, to play a MM or JSW game without being

killed instantly by a sprite or fire cell is counter-intuitive at first, and can sometimes be, admittedly, confusing on some levels due to their design and

look, but it does also increase the game's playability, and of course with the skill level you can play it old style too where everything that you expect

to kill will kill you. I hope that once this is finished, a big push is made on all the forums like WoS and Spectrum Computing etc. to get the

word out and a lot of downloads and people playing it, it is a great game!