Hello, new here but not new to JSW/MM

[Sendy The Endless]

Hello, nice community you have here! My name is Alexandra and I used to be a regular at the old MM/JSW Yahoo! forums ran by Andrew Broad. In an effort to stave off the existential dread of modern life I seem to have caught the bug again. No, not THAT one, the JSWEDiting bug : )

I have two near-complete Miner Willy games, which I designed... a long time ago... Jet Set Willy: Role Reversal is the one I'm most proud of and am intending to release shortly. It is (I believe) the first Erix1-mode game and makes use of some interesting features that expand the possibilities of 48k JSW. It's a simple re-imagining of the JSW mansion, but with the roles reversed! Because being forced to clean a house under threat of being crushed by a heavy object shouldn't be a gendered activity... Or something... I dono... I just thought it made a funny premise, seeing Willy take revenge after all these years : )

So who here is from the Good Old Days of the Yahoo! club? Hi Jet Set Danny!

I've posted some screenshots of some of my favourite rooms. I actually want to make the game a bit easier, as my older design philosophy was pretty much to make sure every platform and crucial jump was at least partially covered by guardian patrols. These days I just find that kind of thing aggravating, unless it's a puzzle sort of dealy where you're expected to save-scum.

Anyway, I hope to spend some good time here sharing my stuffs. I really, really like platform games so I suspect I'm in good company here.

[Jet Set Willie]

Hello Alexandra, and welcome to the "new" JSWMM! 🙂How pretty screens you have put here! Maria is looking so good, thank you for showing your skills! One room seems to include Matthew himself. 🙂

[Sendy The Endless]

Hi JSW : )

Thanks for your kind comments, however I can't take credit for the Maria sprite, that is Erix1's work, as were the extra game features such as multicolour sprites and the c-c-c-crumbly floors. Oh how I love those crumbly floors! They are so flexible for making puzzles and action set pieces.

[SymbolShift]

Welcome Sendy The Endless!

I'm relatively new here myself (since Oct 2021), but the members are a good bunch, and have been really welcoming. There's already a wealth of knowledge if you search the forums, or if you ask any questions everyone is always super helpful. Looking forward to seeing your new games!

[jetsetdanny]

Hi Sendy,

What a great start of the year it is to have you join this forum and feel the JSWEDiting bug again! 🙂 You are certainly in good company of platform games lovers here and I'm sure both your contributions to the forum will be invaluable and the feedback you should receive will be useful for you.

For those who are relatively new to the scene, Sendy is the author of willy to the rescue, where's woody? (the first ever JSW game to have 256 edited rooms) and STRANGEL, and a coauthor of Jet Set Willy: Mind Control. That's only speaking about the gamma-released games, as there are those awaiting release (like Jet Set Willy: Role Reversal that Sendy mentioned above) and others awaiting further development 🙂 .

Thanks for the screenshots of "RR", Sendy. I am looking forward to this project being finalised, and if there is anything I could be of assistance with, I'll be happy to get involved 🙂 .

Regarding this: "It is (I believe) the first Erix1-mode game," it is certainly the first Erix1-mode game edited by someone else than Erix1 (Vidar Eriksen), the first one ever Erix1-mode game being his own Maria vs. Some Bastards 😉 .

Do you still have that Hackulator tool (if I remember the name correctly) he developed? Are you able to modify any of the elements that are outside of the regular JSW48 game engine?

[Sendy The Endless]

LOL, yes, the first EDITED Erix1 game : ) I did pick up on that error but was too lazy to edit it. The Maria Vs Some Bastards Hackulator tool, yes, that's what it was called! I had forgotten the name entirely but sadly it's sitting on an old broken PC. It was a standalone program where you could type in a room number, and then change a bunch of flags for each room, by typing in numbers and stuff. JUST like real hacking : )

I do believe Erix1 wanted me to keep IT under my hat, i.e. not spread it, but I suppose it might be possible for someone to reverse engineer it.

Off the top of my head, you could:

1 - turn water cells on specified rows into solid coloured blocks, conveyors or ramps

2 - turn fire cells into crumbly cells globally in a room

3 - turn on and off horizontal and vertical unidirectional guardians (a la Geoff mode) in a room

4 - add four colour attributes to each guardian

5 - turn conveyors and ramps into switches, which could:

a) reverse conveyor direction

b) erase a guardian

c) stop and start guardian motion (in the entire room)

6 - make the guardians in a room colour-cycle

7 - make horizontal guardians into makeshift moving platforms (no friction provided)

8 - allow guardians that make holes in platforms (provided no pixels are present in the platform graphic). This is something you could do in regular JSW, however the holes were non-functional illusions without this patch.

9 - you could turn certain blocks into trampolines too (autojump platforms) and perhaps even trap cells.

A lot of the functionality was controlled by using parts of the room names as flags, and data was also stored in the air tiles of the room (which would be blanked out in-game). It was all very clever stuff and it's a shame Vidar isn't on the scene any more.

Speaking of dead PCs, btw, we have Danny to thank for providing me with backups to these old files. I thought I'd lost them for good!

Edited January 17, 2023 by Sendy The Endless
To add stuff I forgot mate

[Sendy The Endless]

As for editing RR without the hackulator tool, I believe I only really need to alter some guardian bounds and start positions, and maybe delete a couple of the most irritating ones entirely. That should be doable in JSWED without the tool.

[Spider]

Welcome @Sendy The Endless 🙂 Great to see your projects too!

[jetsetdanny]

I sometimes thought about the mythical Hackulator tool over the years, but never realised it was so powerful! It's a shame Erix1 never made it public, and that he's not on the scene any more. Perhaps he'll be back one day, some people come back after many years, we even have a very recent example 😉 .

It's good that the current lack of Hackulator will not affect the release of 'RR', I was a little worried about it.

[IRF]

On 1/16/2023 at 5:42 PM, Sendy The Endless said:

Hello, nice community you have here! My name is Alexandra and I used to be a regular at the old MM/JSW Yahoo! forums ran by Andrew Broad.

So who here is from the Good Old Days of the Yahoo! club? Hi Jet Set Danny!

Hello Sendy, sorry for not welcoming you here sooner - before doing so I wanted to dig out, by way of a welcome, the following quote from the readme file for a game called 'Jet Set Mini' that Andy (Spider the site moderator) and I created a few years back.  In amongst the credits for the game, it says this:

"- Alex Cornhill ('Sendy'), for unwittingly inspiring ideas for new block types, in messages posted on the Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group more than a decade ago!"

Due to the passage of time (and the unavailability of the Yahoo! Group, other than as a compressed backup file that I don't have to hand right now), I can't remember the full details of what I was referring to there.  However, the 'Kitchen's Cold Store' room has - appropriately enough - an ice platform similar to the one that you initiated a discussion on elsewhere in this forum recently.  (Albeit executed differently - a Main Loop Patch, implemented via the Patch Vector system, constantly updates the Conveyor Direction Byte in that room so that the conveyor flow direction always matches Willy's current facing direction.  This means that he never gets stuck on the spot, as he's always facing either left or right.)  And there's also a crumbly ramp somewhere in the game.  Those might be two of the examples of "new block types" that you might have "unwittingly inspired" me to create for 'Jet Set Mini'.  (That game is also packed with lots of other special effects thanks to the Patch Vector system, so I humbly suggest you check it out - it's available to download from the 'jswmm releases' section of the Downloads tab at the top of this forum. 😀 )

****

By the way, I was a member of the Yahoo! club towards the end of its existence (about 90% of the last hundred or so messages on there were from me), but that was probably after you had (temporarily) diverted your interests elsewhere.  (But you might have noticed auto-generated emails from me appearing in your email inbox as a result of those posts!)