Denial

I decided to take a break from writing dialogue content, so I wrote some actual new code for the first time in several months. The good news is that after only about 6 hours of programming, I've accomplished a major milestone. There's now "line of sight" when you travel in the cities. Ins...

Played the demo a bit... Feedback time! When entering character names, I noticed there was no check or stop for length, although the display automatically truncates to ten characters. Cursor input is always a pain to code. (My solution in my CRPG is... not to have any, an external program does chara...

Looking good... I really need to try the demo, been a busy week but I'll definitely have a look this weekend. :) On the subject of balance (and imbalance), the one thing to avoid is the system under which it is unthinkable NOT to have this item, or this class, or this race, because they're so powerf...

Looking good! I haven't had a chance yet to load up your latest demo, but it's looking really awesome. One thing you should start doing... which is what I did... is start prioritizing features. Because you will probably run into that 32k wall before you're done, and then you'll have to agonizingly s...

Right, it's the one thing that I've seen so far in RQ3 that's just simply out of character. You're making a story here, an environment. Smiley faces are associated with Forrest Gump, silly T-shirts, and children. Nothing something that looks right in a serious adventure game where you're supposed t...

Random number generation's always an interesting exercise when vintage programming. Here's the one I'm using in my own CRPG on the TI, in TMS9900 assembly: * Random number generation RNDGEN LI R4,23729 MPY @>83C0,R4 AI R5,31871 MOV @CLOCK,R0 ANDI R0,>000F SRC R5,0 MOV R5,@>83C0 RT Basically I load a...

Incidentally, you may not have noticed it, but in part 4 of my CRPG articles I had a link to the actual 6502 LOS algorithm derived from the Apple II version of Ultima IV.

You can view it here.

Adamantyr

VIC-20 also has a 256 char table that can be user-defined. It doesn't really use a bitmap--unless you're using double height characters so that you can 'map' the whole screen with the double height chars. Yeah, bitmap mode on the TI is memory-consumptive, mapped weirdly, and mostly useful for drawi...

Thanks! I will definitely use a bit of randomization though like you said. As well, I'll be using a single nibble to display a big castle as follows: IF TILE=CASTLE THEN SCREENPOSX=SCREENPOSX-1: DISPLAY CASTLE_GRAPHIC1 SCREENPOSX=SCREENPOSX+1:DISPLAY CASTLE_GRAPHIC2 SCREENPOSX=SCREENPOSX+1:DISPLAY ...

I was thinking about this last night, and I thought of a way to create 3-4 different types of tiles for 'grass' while only using a single nibble to represent the information on the map: (the following is in pseudocode to give you an idea) IF TILE=GRASS THEN IF XPOS+YPOS.AND3=0 THEN DISPLAY GRASS_GR...

... but then again the 256 bytes built into an unexpanded TI-99/4(A) isn't much either (not counting the 16K VDP memory also used by its Basic). When Adamantyr writes 8+24K CPU memory it must be an expanded machine? Compare to the VIC-20 which has 5.5K RAM shared between CPU and VIC chip. Yes, I'm ...

That's rather an impressive map, lots of attention to detail ... you don't happen to study (or having studied) geology? Like how the rivers flow and mountain chains mark watersheds. As for adamantyr's map--all I've got to say is, wow. All I've done for my map so far is to create a general outline o...

... including stack-pointer, and program counter, which are actually stored in memory . There's a single internal register that points to the register set - useful for fast context switches. The 6502 can be regarded as having 256 registers, or 128 16-bit address registers, in much the same way. The...

Congratulations... the map looks awfully big... it's a real wonder... I wish you're planning a vic version... ;) Yeah, I wanted something the size of Ultima 4, which was 256x256 tiles, which works out to 64k of map. (Although really in U4 there were only around 16 different types of tiles used on t...

P.S.: hey adamantyr, what game is your avatar taken from? Is it a vic game? It's actually from the game I'm writing on the TI-99/4a. I cut it from an older map I was doing when I was still on the "big map" concept. I've switched to zones instead because it works way better on vintage syst...