Playing around.

[Spider]

The typo MtM referred to appeared in the scrolling message on the title screen.  (Now corrected though.)

Oh I see :) I'd not really read it :blush:  I was busy playing the game!

[MtM]

1) "cessation". No spell checks in an assembler. So once it is written it stays as spelt.  ---  Duly changed from "ceasation" to "cessation".

 

2) The penultimate screen was I thought a fairly easy screen. Compared to some of the earlier ones. 

 

3) The problems with adding diagonals is they traverse so much of the screen. That avoiding them is far more difficult. In JSW2 and JSW128Vk/vl/vm the diagonals mainly follow stairs.  It is possible to follow them up or down a stair and jump over them. When the game has no stairs and the diagonal traverses horizontal platforms. The sphere of influence from a diagonal is far greater. Which is why they are used so sparingly.  

 

4) No plans on adding an in game click routine.

    Keyscan routines.  From a brief read of the "NEXT"  specifications.  I would not imagine the Next changes the key scan in any way. 

 

 

If you finished the game in "TRAINER" mode, then all that happened was. The title screen came up, stopping continuation. This is not what happens in "NORMAL" or "EXPERT"..

 

 

I note your dislike of those scrolling messages. - I will write a routine to display the text in fixed normal size and see what that looks like. (for curiosity reasons)  No decisions will be made until I see what it looks like.

 

Addendum

Yuck. is my description of normal sized text on the screen.

I suppose the scrolling messages just make me scratch my head a bit, they seem inconsistent for me with the rest of the game.

Why have scrolling messages on a couple of early screens, then no more throughout the game? I think it makes sense more

on the first screen if there is a single person in the world left who does not realise to pick up the flashing objects and make for

the flashing level portal, so the explanation message works then, but to counterbalance that, this is what the beautiful, precise

precis of an inlay card did, brief scenario and explanation of what to do, so a modern .txt file could likewise do this job. Who can forget

the immortal write up on the JSW inlay - a more beguiling description is hard to imagine. 36 years later it still inspires people to play.

I digress. Just thinking about the scrolling messages, perhaps if the screen sizes changed again throughout the game and more

messages were there to be read that make me get over the consistency idea? Or does that happen on normal mode? Presumably

not. Just my opinion anyway, I hope it is taken in the spirit it is offered.

 

Your comments about diagonals and stairs makes me think - have I seen stairs in any other MM mod? I can't think of any, but

I am sure there are people here who will correct me if I am wrong about it. Anyway, now I would like to see stairs and

short swings in MM!

 

It's okay though, as once Dr Broad has written his H* engine these will be standard features of any further MM / JSW game ;-)

 

As for the Next keypresses, the Next is a quirky machine, it's great for sure and hats off to the team, but not without a few,

well, quirks. I think it could be more of a physical keyboard thing with the Next than an electronic / specification issue.

What the Next really needs is a Next specific version of any of either JSW / MM or preferably a game that rolled them

both into one somehow on the Next. That would be a killer app. Worth crowdfunding.

[MtM]

H* game engine

 

 

If I could freeze time for everyone except myself, then I would. As it is, I have less than ten hours a year for Spectrum computing while I still have my job. That might be enough to finish a JSW mini-game this year or next, but writing H* would take me thousands of hours.

 

H* will not be a collaboration. I want the satisfaction of writing it on my own, from the first principles of Z80 machine code, at least until the first game, H* Original, is released.

 

I expect that I will want to use 128K for H*, so that I can write a feature-length game with a room format as rich as John Elliott's JSW64 room formats.

 

H* is an abbreviation of H*****: a secret six-letter word. I think that the name H* has an intriguing air of mystique about it.

I think I have worked out what the H* word is ;-)

 

What about developing H* for the Next too? The Next really needs something to make it compelling software wise. The hardware is great,

just need some killer software for it now. There is some good stuff for sure, and with Next emulators everyone can use the software too.

 

It seems a real pity that you have so little free time to devote to something that seems like it gives you a lot of

pleasure and satisfaction, I hope that this situation changes in a sustainable way for you sooner rather than later,

none of us want to wait for long for H*, which I know seems selfish but we are all fans here.

 

Any clues then as to what H* the word is?

Edited June 8, 2020 by MtM

[Norman Sword]

in the here and now I use the "MP" engine. 

At a later date I might use the "NS" engine - which I have not written yet in 128k . 

Edited June 8, 2020 by Norman Sword

[IRF]

I've had a chance to playtest the Trainer* mode of Manic Panic (*so the end sequence remains a mystery to me for now).  There are some nice challenges in the game - I anticipate they will be much harder when I attempt Normal mode with its more limited air supply, and even harder still in Expert mode where a single collision with any guardian/nasty is fatal!

 

For now, I have a question and a suggestion.  My question is in regard to the final screen (the one with flying saucers moving up and down, which seem to behave like Eugene as you collect the items, only some of the guardians respond to different items being collected than others).  I noticed that there are two switches in this screen, but one appears to be completely inaccessible (blocked by wall cells), whilst the other switch doesn't seem to perform any function at all?  Is there some way in which either of these switches activates anything?

 

My suggestion is as follows:

 

The penultimate screen (the one with loads of purple crumbly cells) looks great the way that the guardians (the blinking eyes) pass through the background cells (without pixel-colliding with them, of course).  I wonder whether that screen would benefit from a similar approach for the items?  From their appearance on the screen, the items seem to be placed in air cells (like most items are), but if you walk through them they don't get collected - it's not immediately apparent why, but if you stand on top of one and wait, it soon transpires that the items are embedded within crumbly cells (after eight 'ticks' of the game, Willy falls through and collects the item, because 'behind the scences' the crumbly cell's pixel-rows have disappeared and then the crumbly turns to air).

 

Something similar here to what I did in 'Manic Mixup' might look cool?  i.e. In 'Manic Mixup', I rewrote the item-drawing routine so that an item's bitmap doesn't overwrite whatever lies underneath it, but instead is merged with the bitmap of its host cell.

 

This difference in logic is only visible in cases where the items are stored in something other than air cells. e.g. there are some items located within crumbly cells in 'The Vat/The Lab', and there is one item embedded in a solid wall in the first cavern of the game [back in the Central Cavern], which is situated immediately above Willy's head as soon as you start up the game, and which can be accessed by headbutting it away from below (but if you do that straight away, then good luck with trying to complete the cavern...!)

 

The net result is that you can identify the location of the items by their flashing attributes, but their pixel pattern is only fully revealed one pixel-row at a time, as the host cell crumbles or is chipped away.

 

Just a thought.  :unsure:

 

 

EDIT: For what it's worth - though I'm probably teaching my granny to suck eggs - here is the short new subroutine which I created to draw the items in 'Manic Mixup' by merging them with their host cell's graphic:

 

LD B, #08

loop:

LD A, (DE)

OR (HL)

LD (DE), A

INC HL

INC D

DJNZ loop

RET

 

Which replaces the previous CALL from #8FAB to #92D5 [those are equivalent addresses taken from SkoolKid's disassembly].

 

Before the subroutine is called, HL is pointed at the item bitmap for the cavern (#80B4), whilst the item's location in the pixel-buffer is assigned to DE.

 

(The original routine, which overwrites a character space with an 8x8-bitmap, is retained as it is used for other purposes by the game, as well as being used in a subroutine as part of Matthew's 'Print a message' routine.)

Edited June 8, 2020 by IRF

[IRF]

Weirdly, I just completed the Normal mode of 'Manic Panic', and the screen I was referring to before - the one with load of purple crumbly cells, some of which have collectable items embedded in them, and the multiple 'blinking eye' guardians - was completely bypassed!

 

The game proceeded from the screen with the 'spiral' layout [which, incidentally, I forgot to mention last night but which has a very nice design  :) ] straight to the final screen (the one with the 'flying Eugene saucers').

 

I wonder if the 'purple cavern'* will come back when I playtest the Expert mode?...

 

EDIT: Aha! I see what happened now.  I had been playing in Build 4 (the one with the title tunes) when I completed Trainer mode.  Then it wasn't immediately obvious how to change modes [i've since discovered you can do so on the title screen by pressing 'T', although there is no prompt on the title screen to do so], so I reloaded up the game before playing in Normal mode.  But in reloading, I inadvertently went back to Build 3 (the one before the title tunes were added).  It seems that Norman added an extra screen (the purple one) in between Builds 3 and 4.  :thumbsup:

 

Is Build 4 the most recent one??  It's been removed now, so no downloads of Manic Panic are available currently. (Was there supposed to be one attached to post 50, with the ability to jump off/stand on nasties removed?)

 

 

*One more bit of feedback - whilst the expanded playing area across the full screen height is great for the enhanced gameplay it provides, it's slightly confusing when discussing the caverns that they don't have names with which to identify them, so that we know which is which.  For example, I'm not sure which one MtM was referring to now when talking about the 'penultimate cavern' [the 'tennis' reference didn't help], since the 'penultimate cavern' seems to have changed between Trainer and Normal modes! EDIT: between Builds 3 and 4 of the game.

 

(It's a shame that the hardware doesn't allow a cavern name to be printed in the border!)

Edited June 9, 2020 by IRF

[IRF]

Attached are my playtests from beta3 for each 'mode' from 00 to the start of 06 aka "Menagerie" :)

 

http://jswmm.co.uk/public/style_images/master/attachicon.gifTrainer_00_to_06.rzx http://jswmm.co.uk/public/style_images/master/attachicon.gifNormal_00_to_06.rzx http://jswmm.co.uk/public/style_images/master/attachicon.gifExpert_00_to_06.rzx

 

Is it the Menagerie, or is it the Cold Room?  (This screen in 'Manic Panic' combines those two original caverns into one!) 

Edited June 9, 2020 by IRF

[Spider]

Is it the Menagerie, or is it the Cold Room?  (This screen in 'Manic Panic' combines those two original caverns into one!) 

Well, that's a good point! :)

 

I guess you could say its the combination cavern.

[IRF]

Very weird effect when I tried to pause the game - all the pixels drifted rightwards off the edge of the screen!!  :wacko:

[MtM]

Beta build 0.4 is the most recent build I have seen / played.

 

The tennis room is the one mentioned by IRF as the penultimate screen, the one with lots of crumbling brick.

 

You collect tennis racket objects and the crumbling brick is in a net design, so I thought it was all tennis related,

I think the eye nasties make a kind of court area or something like that / umpires.

 

To collect the rackets you have to approach them from above.

 

Is tennis something to do with Dr Broad, or am I getting confused with someone else who plays a lot of tennis? It

is possible.

Edited June 9, 2020 by MtM