New release: FIFA World Cup 2014

[Jeff-20]

Anyone watching World Cup this year? It's summer, and I have time to make games again! We don't have enough sports on this computer, so this is a simple (kid friendly) update to my soccer game. If you're not a soccer fan, I made a hockey version too.



- unexpanded VIC-20 (keyboard controlled)
- all 33 participating national teams (64 total teams)
- one player elimination mode ("knockout rounds")
- two player vs mode
- adjustable skill levels
- removed vuvuzela from 2010 edition

Controls: ZXC (player one) ,./ (player two)

I would love feedback. As many of you know, I may need help with the colors. I'm also open to adjusting my subjective team strength assessments.

DOWNLOAD

[orion70]

Thank you for this Jeff! You really should lower Italy's strength this time .

If I can post a suggestion, the match is too short, you should almost double the time - and it would be nice if there was a small break after the first half. Oh, and the flag colors are just... not right

A small and neat game Jeff! Thanks again!

[Jeff-20]

Thanks for playing! Your advice is very good. I have a few questions/comments.

The colors are based on the "kit" (national team uniform). I spent a lot of time googling because of my colorblindness, for example, this is where I found Italy kit. Do you think I should use the flag colors instead? Each team only has two colors (like you said, it is a small game). I considered three color teams, but which two colors would you have preferred?

The clock was originally 40% of the current speed. I worried the games were too long, and passive football fans would unlikely play more than one match. I made it shorter with the idea that the entire "game time" would be about four different matches. I can easily change it back. I think in play testing I got really good at the game, and the scores became unrealistic at that speed. haha

[orion70]

Oh, now I see you chose the uniform colors... Sorry, my misunderstanding: all other football games I know of have national flags, so blue-white-blue for Italy sounded strange . If you want to limit to two colors in the title screen, you should consider showing the "main" and "secondary" ones in a "binary" way, e.g. a blue-white strip for Italy (not blue-white-blue).
[SUPPORTER MODE ON]Damn, Spain is lucky enough to have the national flag colors in the uniform[SUPPORTER MODE OFF]

As for play clock, I'd suggest a slightly slower one, with a "press key" in between halves - and changing field sides after it, if possible . It's always good to take a breath and say "I'm losing the match 2-0, but I'll recover in the second half!".

[Jeff-20]

Great suggestion. I like the idea of a half time! The two player mode may interfere. When switching sides, would the controller positions still be ok?

The clock is also a tough problem. It only moves when waiting for a key press. Two player games with quick players would feel too long. One player games with new players may feel too short. Maybe the clock should advance only when the ball is in motion. I don't know.

This is one of the few times I feel very limited by memory. The team abbreviations take too much space. I need to figure out a better way to store them.


Sent from my iPhone 6 Beta using Tapatalk

[Victragic]

Nice game, and yes I'm watching the games whenever I get the chance. We're there to make up the numbers.

As for memory, you seem to have about 110 bytes spare at the end of screen memory due to the reduced screen size. That would fit the team name data nicely.

+ free memory under 1k, eg cassette buffer
+ 512 nibbles in Color RAM

Plus, the printing of the screen seems to take a fair whack of memory. Guess you could load the screen directly into screen memory.. but tbh I prefer a 'solid state' game to a multi-load.

..And I know you are already aware of all of this!

[Victragic]

..oh, and Australia should be green and yellow, not blue and yellow. The blue and yellow is the alternate strip.

Fun game, though I've yet to be beaten by the computer.

[Mike]

This is one of the few times I feel very limited by memory. The team abbreviations take too much space. I need to figure out a better way to store them.

Use a +3K RAM expander?

You construct the string by concatenation of two string literals. That results in a copy of the string in the string heap. If there is only one assignment of one string literal (with no '+' involved anywhere), BASIC V2 directs the pointer of the string descriptor into the program itself, i.e. in that case the string just takes the memory of the variable entry, 7 bytes. As the string is 96 bytes long, you'd need to do this by constructing an over-length line with that single assignment, like I did by editing lines 21 and 22.

However, the main issue with the game is, that you store a lot of cruft behind the main program until the real variable start! First of all, I moved the pointer initialisation from line 18 into line 1. I stored away the character definitions into an extra file. Then I did a NEW followed by OLD and then corrected the POKEs to addresses 45 and 46 in line 1. That frees up ~1K.

I've put the re-linked version (with *s between BASIC program code and characters - my god, it's full of stars!) here for download: FIFA 2014.PRG.

[Jeff-20]

Use a +3K RAM expander?

Almost got me.

1. You construct the string by concatenation of two string literals. ... As the string is 96 bytes long, you'd need to do this by constructing an over-length line with that single assignment, like I did by editing lines 21 and 22.

How did you do this? I've "crunched" a few of the lines with basic token abbreviations, but I couldn't think of a solution for the long string. How did you get all of the info into the line editor limits?

Is there a way to just keep the variable in memory the same way I did with the character data?

However, the main issue with the game is, that you store a lot of cruft behind the main program until the real variable start!

The character set?

First of all, I moved the pointer initialisation from line 18 into line 1. I stored away the character definitions into an extra file. Then I did a NEW followed by OLD and then corrected the POKEs to addresses 45 and 46 in line 1. That frees up ~1K.

I'm not sure I understand. I also poked the characters into memory. Are you saying my previous pointers were not pointing to the end of the BASIC program?? How did that happen?

EDIT: Oh, I understand now. Disregard all of the above questions. I just had to think about it. I screwed up the pointers with a math error and wasted a lot of memory. I'll be posting an updated version tonight making use of the extra space.

[RobertBe]

I'll be posting an updated version tonight making use of the extra space.

Oh, we could try it out at our next FCUG and SCCAN meetings in July.

Writing from Utrecht, the Netherlands,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network
http://www.sccaners.org
July 26-27 Commodore Vegas Expo v10 -
http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

[Mike]

EDIT: Oh, I understand now. Disregard all of the above questions. I just had to think about it. I screwed up the pointers with a math error and wasted a lot of memory. I'll be posting an updated version tonight making use of the extra space.

As I wrote, you can always use an OLD command to reestablish the correct values for 45/46. Really no need to do math. I've put one on my MINIGRAFIK disk. Just load it with LOAD"OLD*",8,1 and start it with SYS320.

And about your question about the over-length line: I simply loaded the BASIC part into a C128 (resp. for that matter, into x128). Here, the maximum line length in the editor is 160 characters.

You just have to make sure, that the tokenizer of BASIC V7 doesn't inadvertently turn certain letter combinations into tokens (because of the expanded command/function set), which wouldn't be tokenized by BASIC V2.

For even longer lines, a cross-editor like BasEdit.net is a good choice. There you can easily write the assignment of a 192 byte long string literal into a single line. As strings are limited to 255 bytes length, and BASIC also limits the line length to 255 tokenized characters (including link pointer, line number and terminating null byte) you can't do strings of 384 bytes length.

[Jeff-20]

Ok, here's an updated draft. I still have a lot of free memory from Mike's discovery of wasted bytes, and I managed to employ most suggestions.

http://www.sleepingelephant.com/denial/fifav3.prg

NEW:

1. Expanded to 64 national teams. I used Mike's strategy and just poked some over-length lines into memory, so you can't edit teams now.
2. Added tricolor banners per orion70's suggestion. Can someone see if the colors are correct this time?
3. Eliminated default uniform colors and difficulty for Victragic. You can now separately select uniform color and difficulty.
4. Switched to real-progressing clock and added half time intermission per orion70's suggestion. Each game is just over a minute total.
5. Added more on screen text for RobertBe. Press P to play. But I now feel the title screen is too cluttered.


IN PROGRESS:

- I started working on cross shot/penalty kick screen. You'll notice some shots switch to a close up screen of the goal. I had planned for each player to press a key (left or right) to attack/defend that side of the net. It's unfinished because it would be little more than a coin toss. Not sure if it would add to the fun.

- I decided not to make side changes because it seemed too confusing in practice. I found it easy to forget which goal was mine.

Any suggestions? It seems the basic play mechanic could be too thin (I wanted a Flappy-Bird-simple game). The keyboard control may be too limited to allow two player movement of the characters.

[RobertBe]

5. Added more on screen text for RobertBe. Press P to play. But I now feel the title screen is too cluttered.

Thanks! I won't get to see it until I get back to the U.S.A. in July.

Writing from Crawley, England,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
July 26-27 Commodore Vegas Expo v10 -
http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

[Vic20-Ian]

I believe there may be a critical inaccuracy in the modelling of the simulation in FIFA 2014....

When England are selected, it is possible to win

[orion70]

Very good and funny, thanks so much Jeff for having implemented all the suggestions
The flags are perfect, and so is the possibility to choose the team color.