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Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:03 am
by Wilson
Thank you for wondering Mike, and thanks for your kind words OBSysteme. :)

Wow, I can't believe it's already been over a year since the last update. Where does the time go!? :shock:

I haven't made a ton of progress, and it's been a while since I've touched the code. I'll have to look through it to see what progress has been made since last I updated. I'm pretty far along a side project that will be help a lot in developing one aspect of the game though.

I've definitely been thinking about this project a lot lately, and I'm determined to keep working on it when I find time (hopefully soon!). I won't have access to my computer for the next nine days so that will sadly have to wait a little bit. But when I get organized and rolling on this again I'll be sure to post an update.

Re: New Game in progress: Castle Rex

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 8:29 pm
by Wilson
Can't believe it has been over...eight years since the last update. :mrgreen: Seems the quarantine has yanked yet another project out of the void. :wink:
Well, not exactly, I've been working on this still in some capacity off and on since my last post. It's rather comical looking back at the last updates. That's some legendary scope creep if ever I've seen it.
In the last week I've been posting updates on my a devlog page dedicated to this development, which you can read here. If you read them, note that even since I started writing these posts, some things have changed. I actually lost my job because of this virus so I've been working on this pretty much all day everyday, and progress is movin' quick.

But I'm not here to promote my own blog, so I'll non-comprehensively summarize some of the developments since, uh, March of '12.
  • First of all, the engine was scrapped and written from scratch again. As far as RAM goes, I'm not worrying about it for now. I expect a 32K expansion will be required, and that's what I'm using to test.
  • Bitmaps are 96x112 (this seems to be a good compromise between providing ample room for content and me actually being able to make that content timely). If you look at my post in '10 (looks like at least that image isn't broken yet, heh), you can see my first bitmap approach was an ambitious 160 pixels wide.
  • Objects each have their own handlers and their are no built in behaviors for various fields as I defined in the last post. If an item, God forbid, needs to concern itself with a weight property, it is up to that object's own callback. Objects are actually just a combination of a sprite, some very basic data (a name and description), and two
  • Following the guidance of recent point-and-clicks, there aren't two dozen different selectable actions the user can perform on something. You can use/operate, look at, or take it.
  • I'm leaning heavily on Python to generate the game data. The native Vic-20 suite I was using before was charming but it definitely was becoming cumbersome to manage all the game data. A script now converts the room data and object images/data into a binary files to be written onto the disk image.
Image

Re: New Game in progress: Castle Rex

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:16 am
by AndyH
This looks great. I'll certainly have a read through your blog too.

Re: New Game in progress: Castle Rex

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 4:54 am
by Mayhem
Wow, I had forgotten about this!

If you do complete it, then there are publishers such as Psytronik, Double Sided and PolyPlay willing to publish physical VIC20 games on disk.

Re: New Game in progress: Castle Rex

Posted: Fri May 22, 2020 8:01 am
by orion70
Ditto, I forgot about this thread... I cannot but encourage you, go on and deliver, this is utterly impressive! :shock:

Re: New Game in progress: Castle Rex

Posted: Sun Dec 27, 2020 4:56 pm
by kokkiklhs
Wow, this looks VERY promising..!!! Will we be lucky enough to see it in the near future?
8)
How about e.g. a nice gift from Santa for 2021, for the whole VIC community?
Hasn't the second lockdown helped you to concentrate again in the project?
:wink: