*ALL PHYSICAL COPIES ARE SOLD OUT*: REALMS OF QUEST V (Digital version is available)

[Ghislain]

I still can't wait to see what you do with the dungeons.

Yea, I'm looking forward to creating some dungeons and the 3D dungeon travel module.

A horror literature themed city?

I'm a huge fan of classic horror literature and movies. I've read every single word written by Edgar Allan Poe. I even visited the Poe Cottage in New York City -- that's where he lived in the final years of his life.

And I've binge watched practically every single Vincent Price/Hammer/Mario Bava/1957-1974 Gothic horror movie in existence.

[Ghislain]

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. Instead of a full overhead view that shows everything, you can only see what is visible around you (like in the early Ultima games).

This makes a lot of sense if I don't want the player to see what is past a hidden door and the like.

Adamantyr's retro RPG developer blog was in indispensable resource that helped me program this feature:

http://crpg.adamantyr.com/article_04.htm

[adamantyr]

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. Instead of a full overhead view that shows everything, you can only see what is visible around you (like in the early Ultima games).

realms5.jpg

This makes a lot of sense if I don't want the player to see what is past a hidden door and the like.

Adamantyr's retro RPG developer blog was in indispensable resource that helped me program this feature:

http://crpg.adamantyr.com/article_04.htm

I'm glad it was useful!

[R'zo]

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. Instead of a full overhead view that shows everything, you can only see what is visible around you (like in the early Ultima games).

Love this! It is one of my favorite features of the old ultima games.

[Ghislain]

I'm glad it was useful!

My worthy adversary here is not only putting in line of sight in his own game as well, but a line of sight based on elevation!

Love this! It is one of my favorite features of the old ultima games.

Thank you.

It's not one of those features that is absolutely necessary for playability, but line of sight certainly adds a little something extra while you play the game.

Today, I implemented line of sight for the main overland map. Even though the player will have a physical printed map in the game packaging, I like that the effect is applied in this module of the game.

[Kweepa]

The overland map looks amazing!
Also, the icons.
<3

[Ghislain]

The overland map looks amazing!
Also, the icons.
<3

Thank you. I really like the icons as well - they're used to show spell effects. In Realms IV, I only used single letters but I figured that if a portrait is not being displayed while moving around, why not just show some big detailed icons for spell effects? Ultimately, the game occupies 650KB of disk memory (either on an SD card or spanning 4 disk sides) so it's no big deal to put in enhancements like these that increase the enjoyment of the game.

I think I have much more fun programming the game than producing content for it -- I find myself mentally drained at times even after only spending 30 minutes to write some dialogue. Taking a break from this for now to just do some programming odds and ends will allow me to mentally reset myself so that I can resume working on the cities and dialogue again (I'm about 75% of the way through that part of the game).

For example, I really liked solving the problem with the line of sight algorithm, I didn't use adamantyr's analysis of the 6502 code for Ultima IV that did this, I created it from scratch based on his description of how it works. I also tried to cram as much as possible into as little memory as possible. If there are 8 directions for the line of sight, why use up a whole byte when it can be stored into half of a byte? This is how I stored the line of sight into lookup tables:

Using a spreadsheet for working on computer RPG games is also very useful. If there's an error in the tables, I just simply change the value on the spreadsheeet and then copy-paste the generated code.

[Ghislain]

I was also thinking of how this game might take advantage of memory expansion beyond 32KB.

I do intend to put disk speedup features into the additional 3K of memory if you have 35KB memory expansion.

I'm not too knowledgeable about how memory expansion like ULTIMEM works -- I presume one banks the memory with a few registers. Since the game is effectively 650 KB of virtual memory in size (portions of the game are loaded from disk or SD card on an on-needed basis), it should be simple enough to swap in parts of the game that are no longer needed at the time only to be swapped back when that game element is needed again. So the longer that you play, the more the game takes advantage of the large memory expansion by storing the game elements there which reduces disk loading times in the long run. Since the game uses $A000 to store the game's content that it's using at that moment (like the overland map, map of a city, map of a dungeon, etc.), it should be simple enough to swap in/swap out this data. As for the monster images and data, it might be trickier since these game elements only use 1KB of memory.

This is not something that is absolutely necessary, just something that would be nice to have. I don't even have ULTIMEM. And do all of the various large RAM expansion units work similarly or too differently?

I actually find that the game loads pretty fast with an SD card and SOFTJIFFY enabled on the MEGA CART of my VIC-20 already.

[orion70]

It'd be a good idea to implement something *optional* in the additional 3k of RAM. Disk speedup routines are OK, but please, keep the game fully playable for those who have a "mere" 32k expansion!
And of course, congrats on the recent introduction of the line-of-sight feature. It adds a lot to the atmosphere and sense of wonder as you disover new stuff.

[R'zo]

Once the memory expansion is switched on the ultimem works like a regular 35k expansion.

[plbyrd]

I'm working on ultimem libs that will make knowledge of the ultimem irrelevant

[rubygolem]

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. Instead of a full overhead view that shows everything, you can only see what is visible around you (like in the early Ultima games).

realms5.jpg

This makes a lot of sense if I don't want the player to see what is past a hidden door and the like.

Adamantyr's retro RPG developer blog was in indispensable resource that helped me program this feature:

http://crpg.adamantyr.com/article_04.htm

I'm glad it was useful!

This is great! Ghislain's, + Adamantyr's + Nox Archiaist games seem to all be coming along fantastically!

I just saw this video below. Super cool!
Adamantyr - A conversation in town

[Ghislain]

It'd be a good idea to implement something *optional* in the additional 3k of RAM. Disk speedup routines are OK, but please, keep the game fully playable for those who have a "mere" 32k expansion!
And of course, congrats on the recent introduction of the line-of-sight feature. It adds a lot to the atmosphere and sense of wonder as you disover new stuff.

32KB is definitely the baseline that the game will support. Though I have to admit, that extra 3KB does seem tempting for me to use at times. But ultimately, if I want more space I just have to look for ways to make my code more efficient or I just don't put in as many features.

What really uses up a lot of memory is the feature where every player in the party can have one ally. The previous game Realms IV did not really fully implement a feature like this, I simply cheated by adding some combat bonuses for the player when they invoked a summoning spell.

This is great! Ghislain's, + Adamantyr's + Nox Archiaist games seem to all be coming along fantastically!

I just saw this video below. Super cool!
Adamantyr - A conversation in town

I think we retro CRPG developers bring various aspects and points of view of what constitutes a good CRPG game. Nox Archaix really puts a lot of emphasis on graphics and animation, and I definitely cannot compete in that area. Adamantyr is a near-genius when it comes to world building that can be explored. I'm definitely not as strong a programmer as these two, but I think my game stands out in terms of game mechanics--like Wizardry, I'm trying to create a virtual simulation of the D&D rulebook.

As an aside, I always found a certain peculiarity in the differences between the North American and European Commodore enthusiast communities. IN Europe, the demo scene is comprised of people trying to outdo each other in terms of what can be done with the video hardware, always constantly chasing the raster beam. Whereas North American Commodore enthusiasts liked to program things like card or strategy games. Loadstar is a testament to this. I'm generalizing, and there are exceptions of course.

I read a funny anecdote where Epyx had rented a booth at a computer trade show. The founder of the company that had programmed Temple of Apshai was proudly showcasing his creation while the business manager of the company kept turning off the computer and would load JUMPMAN (which Epyx had received from a freelancer to publish) and the vast majority of the people passing by much preferred to play a fun video game like JUMPMAN than an RPG that did not grab your attention in terms of graphics and sound.

[Ghislain]

I removed the "Map" feature from the game in favor of having the ability to view the party's summoned/allied/controlled NPC members on the main screen.

I think the ability to see these all at once will make it more convenient instead of having to view each player individually to see which NPC is attached to it.

[Ghislain]

I've started to do work on the graphics for the dungeon. I'm using ULTRAFONT for the C64. There are 12 types of "walls":

Far Facing Wall
Far Facing Wall + Door
Near Facing Wall
Near Facing Wall + Door
Far Left Wall
Far Left Wall + Door
Near Left Wall
Near Left Wall + Door
Far Right Wall
Far Right Wall + Door
Near Right Wall
Near Right Wall + Door

There's a lot of repetition here and I'll be able to condense all of these down to 45 unique custom characters. I had thought about "bitmapping" the entire 11*11 graphic view area to provide more detail (kind of like kweepa's Doom for the VIC-20), but because I dedicate so much graphics memory to the spell effect tiles, I really have no other choice but to just use custom characters and re-use them as much as possible.