Realms Of Quest V - tell your progress in-game!

[Falkon215]

Real simple here tell me who on this forum is Playing Realms Of Quest V and how Far are you in the game?

[R'zo]

I got about 10 hours of gameplay in then my daughters tv blew out and she is currently using my crt that I was using for my Vic. Emulation just isn't the same for a game this big and I'm to lazy to move my Vic to the living room every time I want to play.

[ral-clan]

I am about half-way or more through the game. I've found all the shards on land (villages, towns, hidden outside) except I need the Book of Nikademus (sp?) to get one remaining one from a town leader.

I've just started the dungeons and have so far completed only one dungeon, the Tomb of Horror.

* a moderator should probably move this discussion into the GAMES section *

(mod: move done ... and topic name fixed, so people can tell it from the original RoQ5 development thread ...)

[JavaJack]

Visited most towns, except for some in the far north. The only dungeon I've started is Tomb of Horrors and I've done about half of its first level.

[Ghislain]

I already solved the game once, and now I have 106 out of 121 shards of the Tablet Of Uthar in my second playthrough

I've decided to display the Tablet in multiple colors so that it is easier to cross reference the parts that you've found based on what is shown on page 34 of the manual. This feature will be available in version 1.5

[ral-clan]

I've finished the game (as of August 30th, 2020)!
Played on a real VIC-20. Started out with actual floppies, then about 1/4 of the way in switched over the an SD card with uIEC.
Thanks for making the game, Ghislain, my VIC-20 has never gotten such a work out.

Probably will play "Two Days to the Races" and "The Queen's Footsteps" next.

[Ghislain]

I've finished the game (as of August 30th, 2020)!
Played on a real VIC-20. Started out with actual floppies, then about 1/4 of the way in switched over the an SD card with uIEC.
Thanks for making the game, Ghislain, my VIC-20 has never gotten such a work out.

Probably will play "Two Days to the Races" and "The Queen's Footsteps" next.

Congratulations! You are only the second person that I know of who has completed the game.

When I was creating this game, I had envisioned it as being primarily an SD card-based game with the intent of eventually supporting the floppy disk format. So that meant that I had to be mindful of respecting the latter's limits--170 KB per disk side as well as making sure that one side did not exceed 144 files. Side 3, which had all of the monster data and graphic images was limited to 133 in number as a result. And I also wanted it to all fit on a D81 disk image—and I had to do some tricks to make the number of total files to be 288 or less.

Limiting myself to 4 disk sides was a good thing in the sense that it gave my game a structure to work with from the outset. It is like poetry--being required to fit a poem within a set number of stanzas and syllables as well as having to rhyme or have some requirement for wordplay is liberating for the creator. I gave myself a hard limit and creating a 600 KB game and it still took me a number of years to finally complete it. And I was still doing minor changes and updates this past summer. Hopefully my putting out revision 1.5 on October 1 (tentative date) will be the final and definitive update. Art is never completed, but merely abandoned--so I will learn to live with something that I am 95% satisfied with.

I'm just wondering: that you had played the first 1/4 of the game while using the actual floppy disks--how was that experience like for you? Did you find it slow and cumbersome? Ultima IV (for the Apple II, C64) also had four floppy disk sides as well and so Realms V is a nod to the 8-bit computer role playing game experience of the 1980s.

[ral-clan]

Well, I played at first with real floppies because I wanted the real experience - just like how I sometimes use the datasette to remember the complete experience of using old Commodore 8-bits.

I was actually not *too* bad. I changed eventually because every monster encounter meant swapping disks, which was frequently. If I had merely added a second disk drive it would have been much better. If I had had jiffydos or something, plus the two drives, I might even have been able to get through the whole game without switching over the SD.

Essentially, I switched over because I felt satisfied I had experienced enough of the "original" way of playing, not out of strong frustration with disk swapping.

[Ghislain]

Well, I played at first with real floppies because I wanted the real experience - just like how I sometimes use the datasette to remember the complete experience of using old Commodore 8-bits.

I was actually not *too* bad. I changed eventually because every monster encounter meant swapping disks, which was frequently. If I had merely added a second disk drive it would have been much better. If I had had jiffydos or something, plus the two drives, I might even have been able to get through the whole game without switching over the SD.

Essentially, I switched over because I felt satisfied I had experienced enough of the "original" way of playing, not out of strong frustration with disk swapping.

The game is designed so that if you switch to side 3 for a battle and then the battle ends, the game will be able to resume gameplay while you stay on side 3 (that disk also has the land map and dungeon module engines). So you could continue to explore the world map and the dungeon floor that you’re on while still having side 3 in your disk drive. The only time that you’d need to switch, is if you traveled up or down some dungeon stairs or if you visited a city or village.

But yeah—I wanted the game to be authentic in that it supported the Commodore disk drive. There was no such thing as uIEC readers back in the day.

As for JiffyDOS or fastloaders, I did try to use COMPUTE! Gazette's TURBODISK and a PAL-based fastloader but it would just cause the game to crash. I could have probably included SoftJiffy as a configurable option (allow it to load at $0400 for those who have Jiffy-enabled disk drives or a uIEC reader, as well as a 35K expander), but I decided to leave it up to the user to setup their own disk speeders.

[JavaJack]

Real simple here tell me who on this forum is Playing Realms Of Quest V and how Far are you in the game?

I was really hot on this game when it first came out, but I found the insta-kill squares in the dungeon so annoying that I haven't picked it up in a while. Yeah, there's a spell that helps, but it's all too easy to not notice it has timed out.

[Ghislain]

I was really hot on this game when it first came out, but I found the insta-kill squares in the dungeon so annoying that I haven't picked it up in a while. Yeah, there's a spell that helps, but it's all too easy to not notice it has timed out.

I'm sorry that you feel that way. The game is largely a puzzle, and there are also other things that you can do to overcome the insta-kill squares, other than trying to see them in advance. As for getting notified when a travelling spell has run out, I think I can fit such a feature--I can make the screen flash briefly like this when it happens:

I had been thinking for sometime to implement something like this, because I've not noticed when such spells have run out as well. I can put in this feature in version 1.5 when I release it on October 1. If you haven't done so already, you can PM me your email address and I can put you on my email list so that you can be notified when it comes out.