TGA - The Great Adventure

[Kweepa]

Best english would be "20-sided die" (since die is the singular of dice, and -sided is more common than -faced) but I guess for best readability you could go with "20-sided dice".

Awesome looking game!

[e5frog]

"sided" is perhaps more commonly used yes, but it sounds more fun and mysterious with "faced" (which is also correct) - appropriate for this kind of adventure in my opinion.

"faces" is wrong anyhow.

[orion70]

Phew! Sorry for all this mistyping - well, ignorance of English .

OK, HERE's v4 of TGA:

STRENGHT -> STRENGTH
THROW A 20-FACES DICE -> ROLL A 20-SIDED DIE
THEY'RE APPROACHING ! -> THEY'RE APPROACHING!
HE DODGED YOUR HIT -> HE DODGED YOUR SWING

@e5frog: 24K RAM (blocks 1/2/3) required.
That's all for now - please keep reporting problems! Thanks!

[Mayhem]

throw a 20-faces dice => THROW A 20-FACED DICE
(It's in there more than once)

Pedant mode... it should be DIE (singular)... dice is plural... and it would sound better as "20 sided die" instead.

[e5frog]

Ahh - my bad, luckily orion70 caught that as well as you can see in the post before yours.

[Mayhem]

Yeah, somehow I failed to see this thread had hit page two before replying...

[dabone]

May I suggest the following.

Original

To Gain Their Amity You have to charm them.

Roll a 20-sided die and totalize less than
your charisma

New


To Gain their friendship you have to charm them.
Using a D20, roll less than your charisma

or

To Gain their friendship you have to charm them.
Roll a 20-sided die and get less than your charisma

Here in the USA I have never seen the term totalized used. and I had to look up amity. (not a common word either.)


Thanks for all your hard work. I've been enjoying playing.

Later,
dabone

[orion70]

Thank you, dabone. I'm happy you're enjoying it .

I'll be waiting to see if the American faction prevails over the English one (polls open), and if other corrections are suggested, before producing v5 .

[e5frog]

Well, if you let Google decide, the term "gain their amity" gets five hits - so that's probably not good English.

It doesn't seem "totalize" is used much either so dabone is most likely correct.


Perhaps the best way to go about this is to let a native English "speaker" (Brit or American) read through it and then let him/her make suggestions what to change and perhaps get an explanation exactly what a sentence is supposed to mean so you get a correct translation.

I'll use the BASIC-listing and skim through it again, as a non-native English speaker I guess I just skip the parts I don't understand exactly and treat it like a hole in my knowledge rather than understanding it's an error.
I'm also not that in to adventure games so I'm not familiar with all the terms and what special language and words are commonly used.


EDIT:

Using Boray's PRG Starter I got a listing with extracted text, I found these errors in v4:

is waiting for you ! -> IS WAITING FOR YOU! (space before ! )

You've used some other words here instead of totalize:
"roll a 20-sided die."
"the result must exceed";
"your intellect ("in")."

"roll a 20-sided die"
and do less than" (DO less?)
your luck ("fr")!"

Why not the same on all of them, like the intellect version?



Other than that I can't really find anything odd that hasn't already been mentioned.

I'm looking forward to play a game or a few of v5.

[orion70]

I took note of every suggestion, thanks again. Will wait 24h more before producing v5 (you know, American time zones).

Sometimes, I had to compress a sentence or a concept in one or two lines of 22 characters, hence the awful AND DO LESS THAN. I'll find something nicer though..

[e5frog]

roll a 20-sided die,
get less than
your luck ("fr")!

No need to complicate things, but perhaps you wanted variation and skipped having the exact same words.



When running it in VICE...

There also seems to be space here "WEEK 1 ." instead of "WEEK 1." in the first screen where WEEK is displayed, but that period could perhaps be omitted (I saved you a byte). Then later on there is no dot and then it turns up again: "END OF WEEK 3 ." "END OF WEEK 4 ." Perhaps scroll through it and add a ; or remove it - however it's solved, perhaps you need to add a "CUR LEFT"-sign before the dot.

There's a "ESCAPE FAILED !" instead of "ESCAPE FAILED!" and "YOU DID IT !" instead of "YOU DID IT!"

When rolling a dice you get the resulting numbers reversed and there's one space before the numbers, the numbers and no space after. To me it would look better to have a space after as well since the choices are designed that way.

I also fought a few foes and after I had killed the last one I got the "THIS ESCAPE LOWERS YOUR CARISMA"-screen - what escape?

Finally, I don't know about the others here but a play-screen that matches the pictures would perhaps be nice. Black border and blue-ish colors? Perhaps poke36879,232 ? You would have to change the green "press any key"-message though as that looks awful on that background.

Waiting for the pictures to load is a bit boring, perhaps a "show while loading"-routine would be nice - the picture appearing on piece at the time while loading?

[orion70]

OK, here we are with TGA_v5.

Original
To Gain Their Amity You have to charm them.
[...]
New
To Gain their friendship you have to charm them.

Done.

roll a 20-sided die,
get less than
your luck ("fr")!

No need to complicate things

Done, for all dice rolled.

There also seems to be space here "WEEK 1 ." instead of "WEEK 1." in the first screen where WEEK is displayed, but that period could perhaps be omitted (I saved you a byte).

No dot and no additional space for WEEK # recurrences.

There's a "ESCAPE FAILED !" instead of "ESCAPE FAILED!" and "YOU DID IT !" instead of "YOU DID IT!"

Done.

When rolling a dice you get the resulting numbers reversed and there's one space before the numbers, the numbers and no space after. To me it would look better to have a space after as well since the choices are designed that way.

Done REV ON - SPACE - NUMBER - SPACE - REV OFF for all dice rolled.

I also fought a few foes and after I had killed the last one I got the "THIS ESCAPE LOWERS YOUR CARISMA"-screen - what escape?

Bad FU variable set. Corrected.

Finally, I don't know about the others here but a play-screen that matches the pictures would perhaps be nice. Black border and blue-ish colors? Perhaps poke36879,232 ? You would have to change the green "press any key"-message though as that looks awful on that background.

I originally thought about that, but every time graphics load the screen resets to VIC's default colours. Now in v5, the screen POKE is issued after each graphic loads. I did prefer POKE 36879,104, i.e. blue screen with black border and white text for better readability. Also, the map's border is now black.

Waiting for the pictures to load is a bit boring, perhaps a "show while loading"-routine would be nice - the picture appearing on piece at the time while loading?

I'm sorry, I don't get this. You mean, something on the screen to entertain you while waiting? Or the pic slowly appearing on the screen while loading? I'm afraid it's a little too much for my knowledge, and we're short of RAM anyhow...
BTW, only 1035 bytes left at the very beginning of the game, rapidly decreasing to about 400 after a while, even if i DIMensioned the OS$ variable to a max. of 30... will it be enough? There are a lot of GOSUB statements, is it true that some garbage remains in the stack after each subroutine is called? In this case, we will have to optimize the code...

[Mike]

Waiting for the pictures to load is a bit boring, perhaps a "show while loading"-routine would be nice - the picture appearing on piece at the time while loading?

I'm sorry, I don't get this. You mean, something on the screen to entertain you while waiting? Or the pic slowly appearing on the screen while loading? I'm afraid it's a little too much for my knowledge, and we're short of RAM anyhow...

In MINIGRAFIK, @LOAD automatically switches to hires mode after the pic has been loaded. The effect e5frog describes can easily be had by prefacing the @LOAD commands with @ON and @CLR, so hires mode is already activated and the screen cleared before loading the picture.

However, the colour information is just updated once the picture file has been completely read into memory, i.e. commonly the picture is displayed in false colours while loading - unless a preceding pic on display happens to share the same colours.

There are a lot of GOSUB statements, is it true that some garbage remains in the stack after each subroutine is called?

No, there isn't such a leakage of memory, as long as you always properly exit the sub-routine with RETURN.

In this case, we will have to optimize the code...

The entire OS$() array could go. After all, the inventory can easily be subsumed by keeping counts on the four different items, instead of recalculating them on each round at the lines 505'ish ...

And string arrays don't only need space for the length of every string, also for each element, a 3-byte string descriptor (pointer to and length of the string) needs to be stored ...

[e5frog]

Don't bother about the loading time of pictures, if it was an easy fix to have it drawn as it was loaded one piece at the time it could perhaps be a nice effect instead of a "wait for the picture to load"-message.

I thought of another thing though, I looked at the map and accidentally closed it and wanted to look at it again - then the whole file seemed to be loaded one more time. Isn't the graphics still present somewhere so a recently loaded picture could be shown again without loading it again?

I'm sorry if it's a stupid question, I really have no idea how this is done nor what MINIGRAFIK is.
I was wondering about the @LOAD in the listing though and assumed it was some custom fastloader or something.

The white text on blue background gives very good visibility and more calm to the eyes than blue text on white.

The lower half of the screen is now filled with garbage while waiting to load the pictures. I can't seem to remember that happening before - what happened?
If you change the text color to the same color as background these will at least not be visible.



I'm thinking, if there's lack of memory, perhaps it's possible to reuse the text lines that appear more than one time.
Perhaps you can have more subroutines and save on memory by replacing three occurrences of the same text with GOSUB and RETURNs?

I'm guessing it needs to be of a certain length to save space as the GOSUB and RETURN race also grabs memory.

If it was feasible all words used could be put in some sort of list and printing text would just be a series of calls to those positions. I don't know how to actually do it, it was just a thought. I've used that method in the Multi-Cart menu for a Fairchild Channel F Multi-Cart, but that was in assembler - perhaps not a good method in BASIC.


Found a bug, I almost reacted to it the first time but didn't catch it until the second time it appeared.
It says I need to get MORE than my intellect to escape an ambush but if I roll less I manage to escape and if I get more I don't escape.






Bug 2:
When getting to Babbakesh and visiting the alchemist the game seemed to lock up with a blue/black screen and no text. After doing a RUN/STOP (break in line 6350), changing the cursor color to white I could backtrace and see that there's text - but it's blue. Using POKE36879,232 you would not have to set the text color, blue would work fine.

[Mike]

I'm sorry if it's a stupid question, I really have no idea how this is done nor what MINIGRAFIK is.

MINIGRAFIK is an extension for CBM BASIC I wrote some time ago, which provides a 160x192 pixels graphics mode, and some extra commands and functions.

I did not only write the extension, there's already quite some programs around using the extension. You might check out VICtoria Gold, MINIPAINT, LIFE, VIC BIBLE etc. in the Software Releases threads of 2008 to 2010.

[...] the whole file seemed to be loaded one more time. Isn't the graphics still present somewhere so a recently loaded picture could be shown again without loading it again? [...] The lower half of the screen is now filled with garbage while waiting to load the pictures. I can't seem to remember that happening before - what happened?

The graphics mode uses part of the address range normally occupied by the text screen for the bitmap. As the program returns to text mode, that part of the graphics is overwritten, so it's easier to re-load the picture.

When the picture is loaded while text mode is still on, the bottom half of the text screen is written with the first bytes of the picture bitmap. This data was not visible on white background before, because the VIC-20 kernal initialises Colour RAM always with white colour (and not the cursor colour!) on a screen clear.